Endgame Vol.1 (7 page)

I used to be offended by the World History classes I took in school, which seemed almost Biblical in the pretension that the world began six thousand years ago. Oh, sure, teachers and writers of books made vague allowances for the Age of the Dinosaurs, and moved quickly—literally in a sentence or two—through the tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human existence constituting “prehistory,” preferring to avert their eyes from such obviously dead subjects. These few moments were always the briefest prelude to the only human tale that has ever really mattered: Western Civilization. Similarly short shrift was always given to cultures that have existed (or for now still exist) coterminous with Western Civilization, as other civilizations such as the Aztec, Incan, Chinese, and so on were given nothing more than a cousinly nod, and ahistorical cultures were mentioned only when it was time for their members to be enslaved or exterminated. It was always clear that the real action started in the Middle East with the “rise” of civilization, shifted its locus to the Mediterranean, to northern and western Europe, sailed across the ocean blue with Christopher Columbus and the boys, and now shimmers between the two towns struck by the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and DC (and to a lesser extent, Tinseltown). Everything, everyone, and everywhere else matters only in relation to this primary story.

I was bothered not only by the obvious narcissism and arrogance of relegating all of these other stories to the periphery (I’d like to call it racism as well as arrogance, but the white-skinned indigenous of Europe were ignored in these histories as steadfastly as everyone else), and by the just-as-obvious stupidity and unsustainability of not making one’s habitat the central figure of one’s stories, but also by the language itself. History, I was told time and again, in classes and in books, began six thousand years ago. Before that, there was no history. It was
pre
history. Nothing much happened in this long dark time of people grunting in caves (never mind that extant indigenous languages are often richer, more subtle, more complex than English).

But the truth is that history
did
begin six thousand years ago. Before then there were personal histories, but there were no significant social histories of the type we’re used to thinking about, in part because the cultures were cyclical (based on cycles of nature) instead of linear (based on the changes brought about by this social group on the world surrounding them).

I have to admit that I still don’t like the word
pre
history, because it imputes to history an inaccurate inevitability. For the truth is that history didn’t have to happen. I’m not merely saying that any
particular
history isn’t inevitable,
³⁹
but instead that history itself—the existence of any social history whatsoever—was not always inevitable. It is inevitable for now, but at one point it did not exist, and at some point it will again cease to be.

History is predicated on at least two things, the first physical, the second perceptual. As always, the physical and the perceptual are intertwined. So far as the former, history is marked by change. An individual’s history can be seen as a series of welcomings and leavetakings, a growth in physical stature and abilities followed by a tailing off, a gradual exchange of these abilities for memories, experiences, and wisdom. Fragments of my history. I went to college. I was a high jumper. I remember the eerie, erotic smoothness of laying out over the bar, higher than my head. I lost my springs in my late twenties. I was still a fast runner, chopping the softball toward short and beating out the throw every time. In my thirties arthritis stole my speed, until now I run like a pitching coach, or like an extra in an Akira Kurasawa movie. Twenty years ago I was an engineer. Eighteen years ago a beekeeper. Sixteen years ago I became an environmental activist. Now I’m writing a book about the problem of civilization. I do not know what my future history will look like.

Social histories are similarly marked by change. The deforestation of the Middle East to build the first cities. The first written laws of civilization, which had to do with the ownership of human and nonhuman slaves. The fabrication of bronze, then iron, the ores mined by slaves, the metals used to conquer. The first empires. Greece and its attempts to take over the world. Rome and its attempts. The conquest of Europe. The conquest of Africa. The conquest of the Americas. The conquest of Australia, India, much of Asia. The deforestation of the planet.

Just as with my own future history, I do not know what the future history of our society will be, nor of the land that lies beneath it. I do not know when the Grand Coulee Dam will come down, nor whether there will still be salmon to reinhabit the Upper Columbia. I do not know when the Colorado will again reach the sea, nor do I know whether civilization will collapse before grizzly
bears go extinct, or prairie dogs, gorillas, tuna, great white sharks, sea turtles, chimpanzees, orangutans, spotted owls, California red-legged frogs, tiger salamanders, tigers, pandas, koalas, abalones, and so many others on the brink.

The point is that history is marked by change. No change, no history.

And some day history will come to an end. When the last bit of iron from the last skyscraper rusts into nothingness, when eventually the earth, and humans on the earth, presuming we still survive, find some sort of new dynamic equilibrium, there will no longer be any history. People will live once again in the cycles of the earth, the cycles of the sun and moon, the seasons. And longer cycles, too, of fish who slip into seas then return to rivers full of new life, of insects who sleep for years to awaken on hot summer afternoons, of martens who make massive migrations once every several human generations, of the rise and fall of populations of snowshoe hare and the lynx who eat them. And longer cycles still, the birth, growth, death, and decay of great trees, the swaying of rivers in their courses, the rise and fall of mountains. All these cycles, these circles great and small.

That’s looking at history from an ecological level. From a social or perceptual level, history started when certain groups or classes of people for whatever reason gained the ability to tell the story of what was going on. Monopolizing the story allowed them to set up a worldview to which they could then get other people to subscribe. History is
always
told by the people in control. The lower classes—and other species—may or may not subscribe to an academic or upper class description of events, but to some degree most of us do buy into it.

And buying into it carries a series of perceptual consequences, not the least of which is the inability to envision living ahistorically, which means living sustainably, because a sustainable way of living would not be marked, obviously, by changes in the larger landscape. Another way to say all of this is that to perceive history as inevitable or natural is to render impossible the belief that we can go “back” to being nonindustrialized, indeed noncivilized, and to create the notion that to do either of these isn’t, in a larger sense, backwards at all. To perceive history as inevitable is to make sustainability impossible. The opposite is true as well. To the degree that we can liberate ourselves from the historical perspective that holds us captive and fall again into the cyclical patterns that characterize the natural world—including natural human communities—we’ll find that the notions of forward and backward will likewise lose their primacy. At that point we will once again simply be living. We will learn to not make those markers on the earth that
cause
history, markers of environmental degradation, and both we and the rest of the world will at long last be able to heave a huge sigh of relief.

A few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with George Draffan. We were talking about civilization, power, history, discourse, propaganda, and how and why we all buy into the current unsustainable system. George said he really likes the social and political model called “the three faces of power.” He said, “The first face is the myth of American democracy, that everyone has equal power, and society or politics is just the give and take of different interest groups that come together and participate, with the best ideas and most active participants winning. This face says that the losers are basically lazy. The second face says it’s more complex than that, that some groups have more power than others, and actually control the agenda, so that some things, like the distribution of property, never get discussed. The third face of power is operating when we stop noticing that some things aren’t on the agenda, and start believing that unequal power and starvation and certain economic and social decisions aren’t actually decisions, they’re ‘just the way things are.’ At this point even the powerless perceive unjust social relations as the natural order.” He paused before he said something that has haunted me ever since: “Conspiracy’s unnecessary when everyone thinks the same.”

George also said, “The three faces of power were developed as conflicting descriptions of reality but I’m starting to see them as a progression over time, as the story of history.

“At some point we were all equal. The social structures of many indigenous cultures were set up to guarantee that power remained fluid. But then within some cultures as power began to be centralized, the powerful created a discourse—in religion, philosophy, science, economics—that rationalized injustice and institutionalized it into a group projection. At first the powerless might not have believed in this discourse, but by now, many thousands of years later, we’re all deluded to some extent and believe that these differentials in power are natural. Some of us may want to change the agenda a little bit, but there’s no seeing through the whole matrix. Power, like property, like land and water, has become privatized and concentrated. And it’s been that way for so long and we believe it to such an extent that we think that’s the natural order of things.”

It’s not.

Just today I came across an article in
Nature
magazine with the title “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems.” Conventional scientific thought, it seems, has generally held that ecosystems—natural communities like lakes, oceans, coral reefs, forests, deserts, and so on—respond slowly and steadily to climate change, nutrient pollution, habitat degradation, and the many other environmental impacts of industrial civilization. A new study suggests that instead, stressors like these can cause natural communities to shift almost overnight from apparently stable conditions to very different, diminished conditions. The lead author of the study, Marten Scheffer, an ecologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, said, “Models have predicted this, but only in recent years has enough evidence accumulated to tell us that resilience of many important ecosystems has become undermined to the point that even the slightest disturbance can make them collapse.”