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By Root 2335 0

day. The mergansers ate some (rough-skinned newts are one of the most poisonous creatures around, but mergansers don’t seem to mind). This year I haven’t seen so many newts. Is that because of the mergansers, because of me, or because of something else entirely that I would only understand if I lived here long enough to start to know the place? I panicked two years ago because there weren’t as many tadpoles as there had been the year before. Was the population collapsing? Well, the next year the frogs were quieter because there were fewer returning yearlings, and I was even more worried. But these new males must have been especially virile, the females especially fertile, because there were once again lots of fat babies. Many of these tadpoles, however, were eaten by roving packs of backstriders, far more than were eaten in the prior two years. Should I worry? The point is that I have no idea, and I can have no idea till I’ve been here enough years, even generations, to begin to know what is normal, expected, desirable. In the meantime, I’m a fool if I do something grossly destructive.

Were we not abusive to the land, to each other, to ourselves, we would sit back and see what the landscape gives willingly, what it wants us to have, what it wants from us, what it needs from us. That’s what you do in relationships, if you’re not abusive.

But we are abusive, so in the blink of a mountain’s eye we have forced this continent (and the world) into an abusive relationship. The good news is that the planet seems to be in the process of getting rid of the relationship.

Dependency. One of the advantages of not having to import resources is that you need depend on neither the resources’ owners nor on the violence necessary to eradicate these owners and take what’s theirs. One of the advantages of not owning slaves is that you need not depend on them for either your “comforts or elegancies” or even the necessaries of life. We have at this point become dependent on oil, on dammed rivers, on this exploitative way of being (or, once again, non-being). Without it many of us would die, most all of us would lose our identities.

Of course everyone is dependent. One of the great conceits of this way of life is to pretend we’re independent of our landbases, and indeed of our bodies: that clean streams (or clean breastmilk) and intact forests are luxuries. We pretend we can destroy the world and live on it. We can poison our bodies and live in them. This is insane. The Tolowa were dependent on the salmon, huckleberries, deer, clams, and so on who surrounded them. But these others, too, were dependent on the Tolowa and on each other, as happens in any long-term relationship.

I’ve spent a few days trying to figure out the differences between these forms of dependency: the parasitic dependency between master and slave, between addict and addiction on one hand, and the very real dependency on which all life is based on the other. Sure, in some cases the difference is obvious: the dependence is one-way. The natural world gets nothing out of our enslavement of it, or at least nothing that helps it (dioxin doesn’t count). While chattel slaves generally receive food, clothing, and shelter, chances are good they could derive these without literally slaving away their lives. But in other cases the differences become more subtle. My students at the prison by all means gained something from drugs, else they would not have voluntarily taken them. Adults in abusive relationships obviously gain something from the relationships—or at least perceive they gain something from them—else they would walk away. But what? The backgrounds of many of my students are not exactly filled with love but rather the sort of extreme abuse that makes even my father seem a delight. Many were raised under conditions also of race and class oppression. For them perhaps these drugs neutralize, as they say, oppressive reality. But it goes even deeper: I know that many indigenous peoples the world over ritually (and for the most part very infrequently) use mind-altering practices