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By Root 2245 0

in this particular crucible of violence, sometimes, like victims of childhood abuse, fail to adequately and accurately assign responsibility for the violence we suffer or witness, instead transforming raw impulses to assign responsibility—“You have taken our land and made us outcasts, so I hate you”—into friendly, courteous speech: some environmentalists even give training in “verbal nonviolence” so activists will be certain to not say “Fuck you” to police putting them, in copspeak, into “pain compliance holds,” that is, torturing them. Abused children��and I know this from experience—generally are unable to face the fact that they have almost no power to stop the violence done to them and to those they love. As a consequence of this—and this dovetails nicely, or more accurately horrifically, with abusers blaming others for their own problems as well as abusers monopolizing victims’ perceptions—victims often internalize too much responsibility, which in this case means any responsibility at all, for the violence they suffer or see. I must have done something wrong, or my father would not hit me. I must be a slut or a temptress, and I must want him to do this to me—I know this because he tells me all of this—or he would not visit me at night. This allows these children to pretend they have at least some power to halt or slow violence done to them, however illusory all evidence shows this power to be. That illusion can in fact be crucial to emotional survival. Of course when they’re no longer children, the illusion becomes absurd and harmful.

Similarly, many of us trying to stop the destructiveness of this culture—and I know this not only from my own experience but from having worked with and talked to hundreds or even thousands of other activists—are routinely struck by the near-complete ineffectiveness of our work on any but the most symbolic levels. By almost any measure, our work especially as environmental activists is an appalling failure. Just today I spoke with a friend who for the past ten months has been sitting in an ancient redwood in Humboldt County, just south of here, in an attempt to keep the tree and the forest of which it is a part from being cut. Pacific Lumber is deforesting that watershed, as it is deforesting much of the state, and will eventually get to the tree in which she now lives. Previous cutting by this corporation has caused such severe flooding that local residents’ homes have been destroyed. Some have put their homes on stilts. Once-pristine water supplies now resemble chocolate milk garnished with sticks, spiked with herbicides and diesel fuel. Years ago, in response to citizen outrage, the state’s North Coast Region Water Quality Control Board—appointed by the governor, who is deeply beholden to big timber corporations—put together a scientific panel to study the problem, which is nearly always a good way to delay action while allowing primary destruction to continue. But the panel surprised the Board by unanimously declaring that cutting needs to be drastically reduced now, not only to protect local human residents, but for critically imperiled coho salmon and many other species. The Board’s decision? You guessed it: ignore the citizens it purports to serve, ignore the scientific team it assembled, ignore everything but the “needs” of this grossly destructive corporation. This is democracy in action. This is the severing of reality from politics (or really, there’s nothing to sever, since they’ve always been separated). This is the dismemberment of the planet. This is breathtakingly and obscenely routine.

The best and most courageous and most sincere of our efforts are never sufficient to the task of stopping those who would destroy.

Years ago, I wrote, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” I wrote this because no matter how hard activists work, no matter how hard I work, no matter how much scientists study, none of it really seems to help. Politicians and businesspeople lie, delay, and simply continue their destructive behavior, backed by