Endgame Vol.1 (34 page)

The answer to all of these is, not by myself.

But does that mean I—or you—could not survive without civilization?

That depends, first of all, on who you are. If you are a wild creature—although I doubt many Del Norte Salamanders will read this book, however much they may applaud (with their cute soft hands on stumpy little arms) my analysis—you could almost certainly live without civilization, and in fact almost certainly won’t live if it’s allowed to continue. I say “almost certainly” because while most nonhumans are harmed by civilization, nonhumans are by no means monolithic (part of our problem is so many of us consider “nature” to be something singular). Some—such as Norwegian rats, kudzu, and starlings—benefit mightily from civilization through the increase of their habitat and eradication of competitors and predators. Some microbes, too, benefit. Civilization has been such a boon to many microbes who feed off humans (especially overstressed humans in close quarters) that I’ve read persuasive arguments that microbes, not humans, are responsible for cities, which are in this perspective nothing more than microbe feedlots and factory farms. (These arguments always make me wonder if there are “human rights” activists among the microbes who complain about intolerable and “inmicrobane” living conditions humans are forced to endure in cities: “It’s okay to eat them,” say these viral activists, “but they should be allowed to live with dignity first!”)

Nonetheless, for blue whales, spotted owls, hammerhead sharks, and Javan rhinos to survive, civilization has to go.

Soon.

But who cares about nonhumans, right? If they can’t adapt to civilization, fuck ’em. We want to know about the only creatures who matter. Could humans survive without civilization?

Well, we have for more than 99 percent of our existence. But does that matter now? Could humans survive given current numbers? Perhaps more central to the concerns of most of the civilized, could we maintain our lifestyle (note that the question has not-so-subtly shifted from survival of living, breathing human beings to the capacity to maintain a capitalist, consumerist lifestyle where the rich buy second homes while the poor die of starvation and the world gets trashed)? Would taking down civilization cause massive deaths, massive suffering? Clearly more important to many, would we still be able to use the internet? I’ll examine these questions later in greater detail, but for now let’s break humans into quick subcategories, recognizing that humans are no more monolithic than cheetahs.

I think we—at least those of us who consider genocide a bad thing—can safely say traditional indigenous people living traditional ways would be better off if civilization disappeared tomorrow. They’d have been far better off if it had disappeared a long time ago. They could easily survive—and would survive better—without it.

The rural poor would also survive better without civilization. With no one to dispossess them, to use their land for cash crops, they could return to the subsistence farming that has supported them for a very long time. Recall the quote by the member of the tupacamaristas: “We need to be able to grow and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.” The rural poor of the world know how to keep themselves alive. They merely need to be allowed to do so.

It seems pretty clear to me also that the rural rich—including, on a global scale, most rural people in the United States—would survive pretty well, too. They’d lose a lot of luxuries, like strawberries in January and shrimp year round. But because, as I’ve said several times, access to land means access to food, clothing, and shelter, these people would probably do well. Their relative wealth in material possessions—owning a gun, for example—would at least somewhat counterbalance their ignorance of how to feed themselves.

None of this alters the fact that there are too many humans for the land to permanently support. And we haven’t yet begun to talk about cities.

The urban poor are in a much worse position than the rural poor. They obviously do not have access to land. In the long run, they would of course be far better off without civilization. The problem—and this is obviously a huge one—is that in the short run many of them would be dead: their food is funneled through the very system that immiserates them. Yet we need to remember that the continued existence of civilization and its extractive economies already
guarantees the early deaths of many of them: these extractive economies are precisely how they became urban poor in the first place. I say this not to dismiss those deaths but to point out that we—or really, they—are in a double-bind of civilization’s making: if we break down the distribution systems that feed them, many would probably die, yet those distribution systems are parts of a larger megasystem that cannot last, and that is quickly depleting the earth’s capacity to support humans, a megasystem that already does these people great damage. This reveals the stupidity—and evil—of making people dependent on a system that exploits them, cutting off their direct connection to the real support for all life: the landbase.

But who cares about the poor, right? If they can’t adapt to civilization, fuck ’em, and if they can’t survive without it, fuck ’em twice. We want to know about the only humans who matter. What about the urban rich?

Well, I’m not too worried about them: they’re the ones who got us in this mess. They can fend for themselves. And if they can’t, fuck ’em.

There are a number of reasons why my analysis of whether the urban poor could survive without civilization is bullshit. The first is that anytime anyone makes a prediction, that person should expect to be wrong. I can no more predict the outcome of such a complex set of actions as the end of civilization—whatever that means—than I could have predicted the Tampa Bay Devil Rays would lose more than a hundred games in 2002. Well, okay, I might have been able to predict the latter.

I do not know what will happen when civilization comes down, whether through ecological collapse or the efforts of those humans who resist it. Will the urban poor starve? With the removal of current power structures—which is certainly part of what I’m talking about—along with the cops who keep these power structures in place, will the poor take food from the rich? Will cops become even more violent than they already are? Will cities turn into battle-grounds? Or will the poor form collectives to take care of themselves and their neighbors, and take idle land from the rich to grow their own food? Will the poor be able to keep the food they grow? Will they be able to stay alive until their first crops come in? Will the rich hire (or convince) police to keep the poor from doing this? Will police do this simply on principle? Will police take the food for themselves? What will be the response on the part of the poor? Further, will violence against the natural world get worse? Will it shift its locus from the
colonies closer to the heart of empire? I was recently in New England, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. He took that as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards. I took it more as a sign of the increased reach of civilization: technological and social innovation have enabled these Yankees to deforest the globe—when they want wood fiber, they now come calling to someone else’s backyard. The point is that when global trade collapses—global trade is another part of civilization that needs to go—if these people want fiber, they will once again cut the trees closest to them. But they won’t be able to reach around the world. Will that inability be a good thing? I think so. But the
real
point is that I don’t know what will happen.

Here’s what I do know: the global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. The more this economy can be slowed, the less damage will be caused to the world, and the better the planet will be able to continue to support human (and nonhuman) life.

I also know that right now none of these urban poor die of starvation. They die of colonialism. As I mentioned before, while three hundred and fifty million people go hungry in India, former granaries in that country export tulips and dog food to Europe. While these same hundreds of millions starve, “their” government attempts to dump sixty million tons of grain into the ocean, because it cannot find export markets for that grain, and because it will not distribute food to those who cannot pay.

Seventy-eight percent of the countries reporting child malnutrition export food. During the much-publicized famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s, that country exported green beans to Europe. During the infamous potato famine, Ireland exported grain to England (and part of the reason the potato blight took hold in the first place was that the Irish were pushed to the poorest land).

Sure, there are too many people on the planet. Someday there will be fewer. But right now there is enough food to go around, enough, in fact, to make everyone fat: 4.3 pounds of food per person per day, around the world. This despite the exportation of non-food crops like coffee, tobacco, tulips, opium, and cocaine grown on land used for food production before the (often-forced) entry of the global economy, land that will be used again for local food production once the global economy collapses. This also despite the use of so much land for non-productive ends such as roads and parking lots. Pavement now covers over sixty thousand square miles just in the United States. That’s 2 percent of the surface area, and 10 percent of the arable land.

Here’s another reason my analysis of whether the urban poor would suffer more from civilization’s crash than its continuation is bullshit, and this forms the twelfth premise of this book:
There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

But really there are just people. None rich. None poor. Except in our minds.

And so people starve.

When I predicted the urban poor might suffer under civilization’s collapse, I may have been falling once again under the spell of the abuser who says we cannot survive without him. When civilization falls, many of those who die—or at least those who starve, which is what we’re talking about right now—will be those who continue to believe what may be the central delusion of this culture, the delusion that there are rich and there are poor, that monetary wealth—and by extension food, and land (which means food)—is held by anything other than social contract and force. If the “poor” do not fall under this spell, and they can convince enough others it’s not immoral to defend themselves from the hired guns of the (formerly) rich, there is a good chance they will survive.

My statement that ownership is merely based on shared social delusion is not entirely accurate. First, we all know that the civilized notion of ownership is in truth based on force: the acquisition and maintenance of the property of the rich is the central motivating factor impelling nearly all state violence. But there’s a deeper point to be made here, having to do with the mixing of one’s body and the soil. When I say that I’m living on Tolowa land, I don’t mean to imply that their ownership of this land is delusional, or even that it is based on social convention. Quite the contrary. They belong to the land, as the land belongs to them. It is still ownership, but not in the way that the civilized mean it. Typically when we the civilized speak of owning something, it means a person has the right to do what he wishes with it, to destroy it if he so pleases. It’s my computer, so if I
want to throw it off a cliff, nobody can stop me. But this other type of ownership has to do with responsibilities, and it has to do with the deal we spoke of earlier between predator and prey. If you live on a piece of land—if you own a piece of land—if you consume the flesh that is on that land, you are now responsible for the continuation of that land and its health. You are now responsible for the health of all the various communities who share that land with you. And because members of this community will consume your flesh, too, they will be just as responsible for the continuation and health of your community. At that point you will own the land, and it will own you.