Endgame Vol.1 (39 page)

If you identify more closely with the local economy than the local landbase, it may make sense to you to support an economy that damages this landbase, your own habitat.

If, on the other hand, you identify more strongly with your landbase than with the economy, it may make sense to you to protect your landbase, your habitat. And since the industrial economy is poisoning us all, the same would be true for those who identify more closely with their own bodies and their own survival (and the survival of those they purport to love) than they do the industrial economy.

Who benefits from the removal of dams?

If you identify more closely with the Klamath River and its salmon, steelhead, lamprey, and other residents than you do with the agricorporations which primarily benefit from taking the river’s water, it may make sense to you to help the river return to running free, to liberate it from its concrete cage, or rather, to help it liberate itself. The same would be true for the Columbia, Colorado, Mississippi, Missouri, Sacramento, Nile, and all other rivers who would be better off without dams.

With what/whom do you most closely identify? Where is your primary allegiance? Where does your sense of skin extend, and what does it encompass? Does it include ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Microsoft? Do you give them fealty? Do you give them time, money? Do you serve them? Does it include the U.S. government? Do you pledge it allegiance? Do you serve it? Does it include the land where you live? Do you act in its best interests?

I still haven’t really gotten to the difference between liberating rivers and blowing up dams. It’s one of focus and intent. I’ve written elsewhere that if I were once again a child faced only with the options of a child (i.e., no running away), but having the understanding I do now of the intractability of my father’s violence, I would have killed him. But the point would not have been to kill him. The point would have been to liberate me and my family from the rapes and beatings, to stop the horrors.

Similarly, I don’t have a thing for explosives. If I took out a dam, it wouldn’t be so I could get off on the big kaboom. I’m not even sure it would be to help the salmon (although yesterday I saw seven baby coho in the stream behind my home, and fell in love with them all over again). It would be to help the river, which in turn would help the salmon. It would be to stop the horrors.

WHYCIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE THREE
. British scientists have at last discovered that fish do indeed feel pain.

Whether they admit it or not, everyone who has ever gone fishing knows this is the case. But for years an intense (and intensely stupid) debate has been carried on in all seriousness in scientific and fishing circles. In order to end the debate once and for all, scientists jabbed fish in the face with hot probes, and provided “mechanical” and “chemical stimuli” to the fish’s faces as well. Sure enough, the fish “seemed” to feel pain.

Just to be certain, the scientists then injected bee venom or acetic acid into fish’s lips. In the words of one researcher, “Anomalous behaviours were exhibited by trout subjected to bee venom and acetic acid.” As a former beekeeper, I can attest to how much it hurts to have bee venom injected into one’s lip, and how directly that leads to “anomalous behavior,” in my case jumping up and down and cursing.

But evidently the (intensely stupid) debate isn’t over. Dr Bruno Broughton, fisheries biologist for the United Kingdom’s National Angling Alliance, fired a scientific salvo back, dismissing this research by saying one cannot “draw conclusions about the ability of fish to feel pain, a psychological experience for which they literally do not have the brains.”
¹⁹¹

This is of course a repetition of a line we’ve heard too many times, the equivalent of the National Science Foundation spokesman saying there’s no causal connection between firing airguns at 240 db and whales beaching themselves, the equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences saying that salmon don’t need water.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

From birth on we the civilized are systematically lied to, until in time we systematically lie to ourselves. We insulate ourselves from the pain of others (and from our own pain). We pretend it does not exist. Factory farmed chickens (and carrots) feel no pain. Dammed rivers feel no pain, no claustrophobia. Children made weak and stupid by pesticides feel no pain, no loss. Children with grotesque birth defects from depleted uranium feel no pain. But oh, I forgot, there has been no causal connection shown between the activities of those in power and any of these.

Nor has there been a causal connection shown between the systematic elimination of all wild creatures and the pain, terror, and despair these creatures must feel. But oh, I forgot, these creatures do not have the brains to feel any of these things: only humans feel these things. Only humans in power feel any of these things. Only humans highest on the hierarchy feel these things. Only humans highest on the hierarchy really exist.

And so it goes.

This is what science teaches us (
You will pull the vacuum-packed frog from its plastic shroud, or alternatively, you will scramble the brains of this live frog, make it as insensate as I am making you, as insensate as my elders made me
). It’s what economics teaches us (
Money has value. Nonhuman life does not, except insofar as it can be somehow converted to cash. Among humans, because the rich have more money than the poor, and thus the capacity to make more money than the poor, the lives of the rich have more value than those of the poor.
)

This is what the military puts in place and the police enforce.

This is what is killing the world.

I have seen tadpoles struggle when caught by backswimmers, and frogs flip frantically when held by the curved pincers of giant water bugs. I’ve reeled in fish fighting for their lives with hooks in their lips or throats or in the roofs of their mouths. I know these creatures feel pain. I do not need to burn or inject them with venom to know this.

Creatures eat each other. They cause pain to each other. That is part of life. That is part of death. That is part of eating. This causing of pain, this killing, happens whether or not we are vegetarians. It happens whether or not we choose to believe that others feels pain. I prefer to not cause pain, and must be reminded by my vegetarian friends when I accidentally step on a beetle or slug that I am a large mammal, and large mammals accidentally step on smaller creatures. But when I do cause pain, whether by accidentally squashing a sow bug, intentionally killing a fish or potato to eat, or pulling invasive scotch broom, I attempt to at least be honest about it.

March 6.

That’s why.

March 6, 1857, the United States Supreme Court rules in
Scott v. Sanford
that because blacks are “so far inferior” to whites, “they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Fast forward.

March 6, 1974, Ayn Rand addresses West Point cadets, something she considered the greatest honor of her life. When someone has the impertinence to “express an unpopular view” and ask her about the United States’ basis on the dispossession and genocide of Indians, she responds, “They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal [and how else would she expect an animal—which is what we are—to live?], or a few caves above it. Any
white
person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.”
¹⁹²

Some things don’t change.

WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE FIVE.
In 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, who later won a Pulitzer Prize, and was much later included favorably in John F. Kennedy’s immensely popular and influential
Profiles in Courage
, put forward his best arguments in favor of the United States invading—oh, sorry, liberating—the Philippines. I quote his argument at length because he articulates so perfectly and so guilelessly what is wrong with civilization, and because with a few minor changes his words could just as easily have been spoken two thousand years earlier or a hundred years later: “Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, ‘territory belonging to the United States,’ as the Constitution calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.