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By Root 2243 0

indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I’ve met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we’ll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life? I think you and I agree that as long as this culture continues with its preferred methods of perception, then it would not be widely known to the majority. I used to think environmental activists would at least get to say, ‘I told you so’ to everyone else once civilization finally succeeded in creating a wasteland, but now I’m not convinced that anyone will even remember. Perhaps the worst nightmare visions of activists a few hundred years ago match exactly the world we have outside our windows today, yet nobody is saying, ‘I told you so.’”155

I think he’s right. I’ve long had a nightmare/fantasy of standing on a desolate plain with a CEO or politician or capitalist journalist, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting, “Don’t you see? Don’t you see it was all a waste?” But after ruminating on this fellow’s email, the nightmare has gotten even worse. Now I no longer have even the extraordinarily hollow satisfaction of seeing recognition of a massive mistake on this other’s face. Now he merely looks at me, his eyes flashing a combination of arrogance, hatred, and willful incomprehension, and says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And he isn’t even entirely lying.

Except of course to himself.

Sometimes lying awake at night in bed, I fantasize. I imagine how fun it would be to wrestle with the problems we face if only we weren’t insane, if only the problems really were just technical, if only we could cling even to any remotely feasible, remotely forgivable hope of a soft landing rather than a hard crash, if only our culture were not driven to destroy all life on the planet, if only there were even the slightest chance our culture would undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.

By now there can be few who do not understand that without massive public subsidies (far larger than total profits) the entire corporate economy would collapse overnight. People pay to deforest the planet, decapitate mountains, decimate oceans, destroy rivers.

Were we to suddenly find ourselves sane in this insane situation, we could easily and immediately shift subsidies. So long as we care neither about justice nor accountability, but merely want to stop the damage, we could subsidize the same corporations to repair damage they’ve already caused. Instead, for example, of the public paying Weyerhaeuser to deforest, as is currently the case, we could pay it to reforest. Not to make tree farms—virtual forests of genetically identical Douglas firs—but to use the inventiveness we talk so much about but rarely seem to use to life-serving ends in order to make life better for the forests and its other members with whom we share our home.

Of course this is a fantasy, as absurd as Fuller’s notion of converting weaponry to livingry. Indeed, it’s essentially the same fantasy. And not only is it an impossible fantasy for the reasons already discussed—a) weaponry (as well as massive public subsidies) being absolutely necessary to the unceasing flow of resources toward the center of empire, and b) Fuller’s notion ignores violence to the natural world—but we face an even greater challenge to the possibility of ever living sanely, peacefully, or, saying much the same thing, sustainably. This impediment forms the tenth premise of this book, which I’ve described in previous books and which I’ll explore more later on: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven