I was asked to speak about the state of the planet, and to do it in under five minutes. I can do it in three.
The world is being murdered, flayed alive, poisoned, gutted, dismembered.
Every biological indicator is going the wrong direction.
And it’s getting worse by the day.
Two hundred species were driven extinct today, and they were my brothers and sisters. Two hundred will go extinct tomorrow. And the day after.
There are stolid scientists who are saying the oceans could be devoid of fish in less than 35 years.
Imagine that: the murder of the oceans on this water planet.
The problems are not new. This culture has been killing the planet for 6000 to 10000 years. When we think of Iraq, is the first thing we think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reached the ground? That’s how it was, prior to this culture. The first written myth of this culture is Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to make a great city. The Arabian peninsula was heavily forested. The forests of North Africa were cut to make the Egyptian and Phoenician navies. Greece was heavily forested.
Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.
And not every culture has destroyed their landbases. The Chumash lived here for at least 13000 years, and when the Europeans arrived here, the place was an ecological paradise. Likewise where I live the Tolowa lived there for at least 12500 years, and likewise when the Europeans arrived the place was a paradise. No longer.
A dear doctor friend of mine always says that the first step toward proper treatment is diagnosis. If we refuse to diagnose the problems our actions will never resolve them.
The problems are not soluble by tweaking processes. The problems are inherent in how we perceive the world, how we interact with the world, what we value, and they are functional and inherent to this culture’s economy. What is GNP? It’s a measure of how quickly the living planet is turned into dead products. Trees into two-by-fours, living rivers into kilowatts, schools of fish into fish sticks.
This is not cognitively challenging. We would all understand this if we weren’t from early childhood inculcated into believing that the economy is more important than life, if we weren’t taught that what humans create has meaning and what the world creates does not, that humans have sentience and meaningful lives, and nonhumans and natural communities do not.
But what if this is all wrong? What if life is not a game of monopoly or risk where the point is to run the board, but rather life is a symphony, where the point is to learn your proper role, and play it at the proper time? The point is not for violin players to kill the oboe players and convert them into cash, but rather to make beautiful music together.
The only measure by which we will be judged by those humans and nonhumans who come after presuming any remain will be the health of the earth. They’re going to care about whether the earth can support life.
At this point in the murder of the planet, there is I think really only one question worth asking: is the world a better place because you were born, and because of your life and because of what you do? That is very possible to do. Think about it: how did the world get to be so glorious and beautiful and fecund in the first place? By everyone living and dying. Salmon make forests better places by living and dying. So do redwood trees and lampreys and banana slugs. That’s how life works. So, the question that the world needs for us to live is: especially given that this culture is killing the planet, how do we individually and collectively make the world a better place by our lives and deaths. By our actions. The planet, not the culture. And that is as true for any organization or corporation as it is for any of us individually. How do we make the real, physical still fecund world that is our only home, better, for hammerhead sharks, for coho salmon, for giant anteaters, for Mekong catfish, Amani flatwings, cayman islands ghost orchids, and orangutans, and the larger communities they call home.
Survival International has called on the UN expert on extrajudicial executions to condemn shoot on sight conservation policies.
In a letter to the Special Rapporteur charged with the issue, Survival stated that “shoot on sight policies directly affect tribal people who live in or adjacent to ‘protected areas’… particularly when park guards so often fail to distinguish subsistence hunters from commercial poachers.”
The letter adds that “nobody knows when wildlife officers are permitted to use lethal force against [suspected poachers], and it is impossible for dependents to hold to account officers whom they believe to have killed without good reason. Many countries have gone further, and granted wildlife officers immunity from prosecution.”
The letter cites Kaziranga National Park in India as an especially striking example of the tactic. According to a recent BBC report, an estimated 106 people have been extrajudicially executed there in the last 20 years, including one disabled tribal man who had wandered over the park boundary to retrieve cattle.
Kaziranga guards have effective legal immunity from prosecution, and have admitted that they are instructed to shoot poaching suspects on sight. This has had serious consequences for tribal peoples living around the park. In June 2016, a seven-year-old tribal boy was shot and maimed for life by guards.
Similar policies are used in other parts of the world, notably Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana, among other African countries.
Speaking about his own anti-poaching work in Africa, poaching expert Rory Young from the organization Chengeta said: ”Shoot on sight is stupid. If we had been shooting on sight during this latest sting operation we would have shot a handful of poachers and that would have been the end of it. Every single poacher is an opportunity for information to get more poachers and work your way up the chain to the ringleaders.”
Survival has asked the Special Rapporteur to clarify that shoot on sight violates fundamental rights enshrined in the UN’s Civil and Political Rights Covenant and other international conventions. It also urges the UN to enquire about the policy with the Indian government, and the government of Assam state, where Kaziranga is located.
Shoot on sight is justified on the grounds that it helps to deter poachers. However, there have been several recent cases of guards and officials at Kaziranga being arrested for involvement in the illegal wildlife trade themselves.
Survival International is leading the fight against these abuses, and calling for a new conservation model that respects tribal peoples. Targeting tribal people diverts action away from tackling the true poachers – criminals conspiring with corrupt officials. Targeting tribal people harms conservation.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “If any other industry was guilty of this level of human rights abuses, there would be an international outcry. Why the silence when conservationists are involved? Torture and extrajudical killing is never justified – the law is clear on this. Some people think that the death of innocents is justified, that ‘collateral damage’ is necessary in the fight against poaching. We ask them, where is your humanity? Of course, there’s a racist element at play here: Shoot on sight policies would be unthinkable in North America or Europe.”
This spring, if all goes as planned, the Marines will kill hundreds of Desert Tortoises in southern California.. This is not the first such tortoise kill, but it could very well set a new record-high number.
This assault was originally scheduled for last spring, in 2016 (with the full approval of the Obama administration), and was put off for a year only because of a lawsuit filed by an environmentalist organization. Now, with all chances for legal appeal passed, it is set to commence in late March or April in the Mojave Desert.
So what’s the story?
In 2013, Congress voted to expand the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California—which was already the largest Marine base in the world—by annexing 88,000 acres (about 136 square miles) from the Bureau of Land Management’s Johnson Valley Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Area, to the west of the base in the Mojave Desert.
This area is part of the ancestral home of the Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), a species that has lived there for many thousands of years, since the days when it was wetter. As the climate gradually dried out, the tortoise adapted by spending more time underground. In our contemporary age, they are in their burrows over 90% of the time! In the spring, when wildflowers brought by winter rains are flourishing, the tortoises emerge to eat and mate. They generally live 35-50 years, with reports of particular specimens reaching 80.
Though Desert Tortoises thrived at populations of up to 1000 individuals per square mile at the beginning of the 20th Century, their numbers have fallen drastically since then. Human activities are to blame including ranching, roads, agriculture, industry, military operations, off-highway recreation (“wreckreation”), urban encroachment, and in recent years, solar and wind projects. Also, with Global Warming, the climate is changing faster than the tortoise can adapt. In the last decade, the tortoise population has fallen by 50% in the western Mojave Desert, where the Twentynine Palms Marine base is located.
Desert Tortoises are listed as “threatened with extinction” by the federal government. Because of this status, it is illegal for anyone—even the military—to “harm” or “harass” them. The Marines plan to use the annex for training with tanks and live ammunition, which would certainly result in both harm and harassment, so they sought to move the tortoises somewhere else, although this too would cause harm and harassment. After a legal delay of one year forced upon them by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson, Arizona, the Marines now have the go-ahead to start “translocating” the animals, as soon as late March.
This is where the killing starts.
There is enough data from attempted tortoise translocations in the past to make estimates about how this latest effort will go. Though the rates of survival have varied from project to project, they are often no better than 50%. (See Desert Tortoise Recovery: Science and Politics Clash.) This particular translocation at the Twentynine Palms base will be the largest so far attempted, of over 1100 animals. So it would not be surprising if at least 500 deaths resulted, and perhaps far more.
This number includes about 900 adult animals (of 180mm in size or larger) who were tagged with radio-transmitters as they were found over the last three years. An additional 235 were too small for transmitters and were moved to the base where the Marines have been raising them. (So some tortoises have already been disturbed.)
How are the tortoises found in the first place and what’s it look like to round them up? For an answer to this question, I contacted Laura Cunningham, a biologist who works with Basin & Range Watch and who has participated in tortoise translocation projects herself. She also detailed how other animals are affected when tortoises are removed. It is worth quoting her at length:
“Here is the basic mechanics of tortoise translocation: after placing tortoise exclusion fencing around a project, biologists do a ‘Clearance Survey’ which entails dozens of biologists walking in straight lines criss-crossing the project area, all carefully walking a certain length apart and following GPS coordinates. Any tortoise found above ground is radio-transmittered [if it hasn’t been already] and carefully moved into transport boxes and readied for translocation (which is going to be partly by helicopter for 29 Palms Marine Base). Each biologist carries a shovel. All burrows encountered are dug out to locate any tortoise underground. These tortoises are also carefully removed. Two or three sweeps are needed usually to find all the adults. Even then sometimes a few are missed and found later. Many of the tiny juvenile tortoises are missed, those the size of a silver dollar—they are crushed in machinery later or buried alive or impacted later during tank maneuvers.
“Digging out burrows of this keystone species, the tortoise, is difficult because it ripples across the desert ecosystem: so many other species depend on the digging abilities of the tortoise with its long front claws. Burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, lizards, tarantulas, and other species utilize the burrows. They must be dealt with as well. Rattlesnakes are left in the desert to fend for themselves. Burrowing owls are being given increasingly careful attention, if their sign is found at a burrow, the owls are watched to see when they fly out and the burrow is closed up so they cannot return. The idea is to try to get the owls to move away to another location outside the area. But I am not sure anyone has a good idea how many burrowing owls die when they are flushed from their burrow and become homeless. There are new agency guidelines to try to limit impacts to this species, which also may need federal listing under the ESA [Endangered Species Act] as it too is declining.
“Desert kit foxes dig their own burrows, but biologists must dig out those burrows to in case a tortoise is living there. So kit foxes are also displaced, and guidelines are followed to try to make this enforced homelessness have the least impacts as possible. But again, little studied. A canine distemper outbreak happened on the Genesis Solar Energy Project in the Chuckwalla Valley, killing some. Coyotes and badgers are also displaced. In parts of southern Nevada and eastern California deserts, rare Gila monsters are displaced from burrows as well.”
Additionally, the areas into which the tortoises are to be moved seem less than ideal as they already host tortoise populations that are in decline. According to Ileene https://sub.media/video/endciv-3/Anderson, a biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity whom I contacted for this story, the reasons for this decline are not entirely known but include elements that can be controlled such as grazing, off-road recreation and predation and others that are more difficult to control such as drought and disease. “Until the controllable ones are controlled,” Anderson said, “it does not bode well for the translocated or resident tortoises since they will now be competing for resources.”
Two animals that are commonly predators of tortoises are coyotes and ravens, who are both native to the Mojave Desert too. According to the Press Enterprise, the Marines have already announced that if coyotes are a problem, they will shoot them. According to the LA Times, some have already been “removed” by state wildlife authorities.
As I was finishing this story, I got word through Basin & Range Watch that the Marines at the Twentynine Palms base are hosting Coyote hunts on March 25th and 26th. The Marines’ announcement stated: “The purpose of the depredation program is to reduce the numbers of coyotes that are unnaturally inflated in the local area due to human subsidies. Elevated coyote numbers prove a safety risk to residents, and are a significant factor in the mortality of the desert tortoise.” The response to this news by Basin & Range Watch reads, in part: “The so-called mitigation of killing coyotes is a false action that will not help recover the tortoise, and will only disrupt desert ecosystems more. Coyotes are a native, natural species that belong to the Mojave Desert. Tanks, Humvees, bombing, live-fire exercises, and military maneuvers do not belong to the desert. The military has enough land to carry out tests and training, they do not need to keep expanding.”
The ravens might be luckier as they are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, though some have already been killed by “wildlife authorities.” The LA Times ran a story about how the Marines plan to use non-harmful lasers to scare the ravens away. The article also said that “the anti-raven arsenal” “includes ‘techno-tortoises’: highly realistic replicas of baby tortoises that, when pecked or bitten, emit irritants derived from grape juice concentrate, a chemical compound already used to keep birds from congregating on agricultural fields and commercial centers.” However, as John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington and expert on raven behavior who was quoted in the same Times article said: “My concerns are that we don’t really know how long these forms of aversion therapy will last among raven populations, which are very clever at responding to challenges.” And then what? More killing?
Not all of the tortoises will be subject to translocation. Some will be subject to staying, to face the tanks and live ammunition. Any tortoises that show signs of communicable disease will be left behind, so as not to infect healthy tortoises in the new area. Anderson estimates these would number 100 or less. She thinks that the Marines “might” monitor these animals to see if they survive.
Summing up the desert tortoise’s plight, Ileene Anderson said that “this species is continuing to decline throughout its range, and continually decreasing its habitat—whether that be through military expansions or other types of development—will only be detrimental to recovery efforts, because the tortoise needs habitat in order to survive, just like every other species on the planet.”
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Militarism is problematic, to say the very very least, for many many reasons. We might first mourn the human casualties, of course; those killed, maimed or made homeless or stateless. We might also think of the cities turned to rubble, with their art and history buried or burned. We might consider, too, the immense monetary cost of all of it, and how every bomb is, in a very real way, stealing food out of someone’s mouth or a roof from over their heads. But rarely do we consider the affected ecosystems and their inhabitants. (One exception is this excellent article by Joshua Frank: Afghanistan: Bombing the Land of the Snow Leopard.)
Unfortunately, the military is seeking to expand into other desert areas (such as in Nevada). In protesting or attempting to curtail these expansions, I would hope to see some collaboration between activists who oppose war and those who support animal rights.
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How the Media Whitewashes Stories Like This
An AP story about the planned translocation from Twentynine Palms ends with the sentence, “Critics say the move will devastate the threatened species.” Considering the facts, this way of putting it is pretty flip and really only just short of dismissive. Which is why I titled this piece, “Headlines should read, ‘Marines to Kill Tortoises’.” Because it’s a fact that they will and somebody ought to just say it.
When we speak of the bias of the corporate media, we are referring to multiple aspects. In general, there is bias in favor of the wealthy, the conventional and the institutional and against the poor, unconventional and the individual. For example, anyone who has ever attended a boisterous protest and then watched the TV coverage of it afterwards will have noticed the corporate media bias against protesters and in favor of the police. If the police attacked the protesters, this will almost assuredly be described as, “protesters clashed with police.”
There is also a bias in the media in favor of stressing stated intent and brushing aside likely consequences when the consequences will be negative. This one is subtle but universal. As far as the media’s point of view is concerned, it’s not that tortoises are sure to die, it’s only that the Marines plan to move them, and, it is implied, move them safely. But it is sure that tortoises will die. Just as it is sure that civilians will be killed when cities are bombed, even if the intent is “humanitarian” and the targets “terrorists.”
“Collateral” is the word typically used by the media to describe the deaths of civilians in warfare, and it would be their style to apply it to tortoises killed by translocation. Wiktionary defines this sense of that adjective as “being aside from the main subject, target, or goal; tangential, subordinate, ancillary.” But if such death is inevitable, how can it be separated from the “main subject”? How can it be considered “tangential”?
There is a fundamental dishonesty in every news story that presents stories in this fashion. It’s called “white-washing.” Because all our information is spoon-fed to us in this same sanitized way, we first of all never think about it and secondly, have little collective knowledge (and hence concern) about what’s going on in the world, and how the US and its policies affect other people, living things, and the planet at large.
It is a measure of our misbegotten privilege that we can live in such a state of denial at all, in a bubble. And it is violence that empowers that privilege in the first place. It is upon the graves of Indians and the whipped backs of slaves that the US gained its power and it is through the military and economic subjugation of much of the world at large that it is now sustained. There’s nothing “collateral” about any of the suffering and damage that results from this system.
What do the poor tortoises have to do with any of it? Nothing, obviously, but this is the way of empire, that they must suffer too.
For nearly a decade, Panama’s Barro Blanco dam has met with strong opposition from indigenous Ngäbe communities. It has also generated violent suppression from government forces, and attracted criticism from international organizations.
An agreement on the dam’s completion, reached by the government and the community’s now-ousted leader, was voted down by the Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress in September 2016. The dam’s surprise deregistration from the UN Clean Development Mechanism in October 2016 did nothing to stop the project.
Now, the General Administrator of Panama’s National Authority for Public Services has declared that the Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress never presented a formal rejection document to the government, meaning dam operations can begin.
Panama’s Supreme Court has ruled against the last two legal actions by indigenous communities impacted by Barro Blanco. The Supreme Court decisions cannot be appealed, so the communities have now exhausted all legal avenues within the country, leaving only international processes.
The contentious Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam is set to begin operations within the next few weeks, defying both the relentless opposition by affected communities and the rejection last September by local indigenous authorities of a government proposed project completion agreement.
According to Roberto Meana, General Administrator of Panama’s National Authority for Public Services (ASEP), the 28-megawatt gravity dam in western Panama could begin operation within days once necessary tests are finalized. The reservoir’s waters have been rising since August of last year, gradually flooding Ngäbe communities and land.
“It can be in five days, or it can be two weeks, but the project is very close to entering its commercial operation,” Meana told Mongabay last Friday.
Controversy from the start
The hydroelectric project, partly funded by two European development banks, has been at the epicenter of a complex environmental and human rights battle that has raged on for nearly a decade between a handful of indigenous Ngäbe communities and successive Panamanian administrations.
In the last few months alone, the project was removed from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (UNCDM), a positive result for the indigenous communities; but has also had two pending legal pleas rejected by Panama’s Supreme Court in favor of the government — potentially opening the door for the forceful expulsion of the affected indigenous people from their lands.
The structurally complete dam on the Tabasará River is set to create a 258-hectare (1 square mile) reservoir within the province of Chiriqui. It will flood 6.7 hectares (16.5 acres) belonging to the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca — a semi-autonomous region located a few miles upstream of the dam.
The Barro Blanco Dam in the Province of Chiriqui, western Panama. The dam is complete and will begin operation within weeks, according to the government. The Ngäbe-Bugle have been opposed to the project since its inception. Photo by Camilo Mejia Giraldo
The imminent operational status of the project now raises serious questions over the future of the local riverside Ngäbe communities, which have continuously called for the dam’s cancellation since it was given the go ahead in 2007.
“If the government is going to start generating [electricity], then they are confirming the violation of our rights as an affected community,” Weny Bagama, a Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress delegate and a leader of the outspoken M10 (Movimiento 10 de Abril) group opposing the dam, told Mongabay.
“They are doing this even though [the Ngäbe-Bugle General] Congress rejected the past agreement,” she said referring to a now defunct accord to allow the dam’s full operation which was reached by the government and the Cacica (negotiators) of the Ngäbe-Bugle community in August 2016. That deal was in turn rejected by the community in September when the Cacica negotiators were ousted by the Ngäbe-Buglé General Congress, the comarca’s key decision-making body.
“The [General] Congress’ decision is the internal decision of the comarca, and if they don’t respect that, then evidently the government just does what it likes and does not respect the jurisdiction established by comarca law,” Bagama said.
According to Meana, however, the Ngäbe-Buglé General Congress’ decision to reject the agreement was not followed by submission of the proper paperwork to the government — a formal document outlining the community’s decision and the reasons for the dam’s rejection.
“To date, there is no document in which this agreement is rejected. The [Ngäbe-Bugle] Congress sent it to be revised. If the Congress had rejected it, they wouldn’t have set up a commission to review it,” Meana said referring to a commission created by the indigenous General Congress to formally analyze the conflict.
These conclusions were strongly opposed by Bagama, who stated that although the congress had not filed a legal rejection document, the congress and the special commission had yet to finalize their response.
“The commission was not named to revise the document but to analyze the conflict in its entirety,” she said. “They didn’t give us a time limit or date to present the [legal rejection] document, but the decision of the Congress needs to be free of pressure or conditions, because the comarca has its own procedures and according to our law we have to follow certain procedures.”
The Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress meets on September 15, 2016 to debate the Barro Blanco agreement. Photo Courtesy of Weny Bagama
The vote by the indigenous body last September appeared to place a cloud of uncertainty over the project, as it was thought by both parties that they would renew negotiations to reach a final agreement.
But even before the indigenous Congress’ rejection, the government allowed the dam’s construction company Generadora del Istmo S.A. (GENISA) to begin test flooding the dam’s reservoir in August, 2016 — a move opposed by the Ngäbe communities that have since lost homes and some of their most fertile land to the rising waters.
“As a community we feel that we are prisoners within our own homes, we can’t move around as we used to, the water levels have dropped slightly [due to the dry season], but all the surrounding land has just turned into mud,” Bagama explained.
“We live in a situation of constant threat because of this reservoir, with what the government has been doing and their economic interests, which are above our livelihoods as indigenous people,” she added.
I remember when I was first struck by the question: If prostitution is against the law in the US, why isn’t porn?
A friend of mine was telling me about an undercover sting operation at the massage parlour down the street from her apartment in New York, wherein police arrested some of the Asian women who “worked” there. This story made me wonder what kind of men would go to a “massage parlour” and exploit a woman’s desperation and marginalization as an immigrant in the US. Just the men should be thrown in jail for doing that, not those women, I thought.
I recalled the disgustingly racist way I have seen so many white men fetishize Asian women, imagining them to be extra-submissive. I thought about how there were probably hundreds of thousands of porn films promoting this view online, featuring Asian women “servicing” white men — many of which were probably even set in a massage parlour. Then it hit me: Why was it illegal at the place down the street from my friend’s apartment, but when the same thing is done with a camera, it’s considered totally legitimate?
It’s been years since this incongruity occurred to me, but I still don’t have an answer to that question… Because there isn’t one.
Last week, a panel held during the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York addressed this bizarre disconnect between pornography and prostitution in law, activism, and consciousness. Moderated by Clara Berglund, Secretary General of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, the panel featured pornography expert Gail Dines, writer Julie Bindel, prostitution survivor and abolitionist Cherie Jimenez, and Sweden’s Ambassador at Large for Combatting Trafficking in Persons, Per-Anders Sunesson. All panelists advocate for the Nordic Model (a legal model which decriminalizes those who are prostituted and instead targets the demand side of the sex trade, by criminalizing pimps, brothel owners, and johns). The panel was preceded by a screening of Gail Dines’ documentary, Pornland: How the Porn Industry Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.
“When I first saw this documentary, I did not know how bad pornography had gotten,” Jimenez said, referring to the extreme acts of degradation and physical violence (slapping, gagging, choking, prolapsed anuses) that have come to dominate online porn. As a survivor of prostitution who now does frontline work with women trying to exit the sex trade, Jimenez has noticed a parallel between the increase in the brutality of porn and the increasingly sadistic demands of johns experienced by prostituted women today. “It’s a whole different game now,” she said.
Through her journalistic research in Cambodia, Bindel found that the prostituted women she interviewed shared a similar experience. They told her the demands of johns had gotten much worse since gonzo porn had flooded Cambodia, becoming more accessible to men through smart phones. Men would even play this kind of porn on their phones during the encounter and make prostituted women re-create the brutal acts performed in it.
Pro-”sex work” lobbyists like to frame prostitution as something natural, that has always been present throughout history. However, the disturbing requests and acts prostituted women say are expected of them since the Internet porn revolution show otherwise. The demand for prostitution has changed, suggesting it is no more natural than modern cultural norms like the pressure on women to shave their vulvas bald as per porn standards.
“Do you think men are born johns?” asked Dines. “Do you think they just suddenly wake up one day and decide to go to a trafficked or prostituted woman? No! That takes a socialization process. And what is the biggest socializer of sexuality in the world today? Pornography.”
Dines argues that pornography is the ideological arm of what is essentially one and the same sex trade, facilitating the demand for prostitution by normalizing sexual violence, dehumanizing women, and killing empathy in johns. Nonetheless, a sharp legal distinction is made — while prostitution is illegal in many countries, porn is considered to be an above-ground industry.
Its legitimate status means that the porn industry is in a position to dump massive amounts of money into influencing politicians and legislation. Ironically, it also enables the industry to facilitate illegal actions, such as sex trafficking in minors. Dines explains:
“The porn industry has put a ton of money into fighting a law called 2257. All that law says is that, on a porn set, you have to prove with some form of ID that everyone is 18 or above. The porn industry has been fighting that for years, claiming that it inhibits their free speech.”
Although industry lobbyists claim pornography is simply “free speech,” what happens in porn happens to real women (and girls, apparently). The fact that the act is filmed does not make the prostitution disappear, but effectively ensures the trauma is captured for eternity.
After exiting prostitution, Jimenez says she struggled “for a long time trying to feel whole again.” Dines extended this to the experiences of women in pornography, citing research by Melissa Farley which found that prostituted women who had pornography made of them experienced even higher rates of PTSD.
According to Dines, this is most likely due to the fact that, for women in pornography, there is no way to ever truly exit the sex trade. Their exploitation is frozen in time, allowing millions of johns to re-victimize women endlessly, even after their deaths. “Think of the trauma of never again having any sense of bodily integrity or privacy,” said Dines.
Bindel attended the 2015 LA Porn Awards as a journalist and learned about yet another way the industry makes it impossible for women to truly exit porn. She explained:
“The biggest category in 2015 was ‘Milf.’ And it was because when the women were retiring at the age of 35 or 36, the industry wanted to get more out of them. And someone told me something about this that left my blood cold. When the women are about to drop out of making films, for the most popular women, they make a ‘real doll’ from her. And it’s anatomically correct in every way. So men are ordering these exact replicas of these women and their orifices. They mold from her body, inside and out, which means that whatever happens to her, wherever she goes, there are men literally fucking her replica and writing about it online, etcetera. And that to me is the height of sadism.”
Considering the impact of the industry on women prostituted through porn (never mind on women and girls as a whole), Dines’ delivers an impassioned plea to the anti-trafficking movement:
“Don’t forget pornography and don’t forget the women in the industry…The less we think about it, the more we ignore the women in pornography and say, ‘You don’t count. We’re not even including you in this.’”
In her final comments, Dines called upon governments like Sweden to incorporate pornography into the legislation that already exists: “Now has come the time, after so many years of the Nordic Model, that if you’re going to fine or imprison [men] for sexual exploitation, you have to also do that for the exploitation of women in pornography.”
As the Nordic Model continues to spread across the world, this landmark legislation for women’s rights could also be a huge blow to the multi-billion dollar porn industry. It may be some time before feminists can convince states to craft and implement specific policy that includes pornography within the Nordic Model, but it is imperative we push for it. Anything less would abandon so many women and girls, arbitrarily denying them their humans rights and the justice they deserve.
It’s a familiar story. On his final journey toward Jerusalem, Jesus stops in Bethany to eat at the home of Simon, a leper. A woman enters with an alabaster jar of expensive ointment; she breaks the jar and pours the ointment on his head. Her gesture invokes the fury of some of those present. The ointment was worth a year’s wage, they grumble. It could have been sold, and the money given to the poor.
“The poor will always be with you” was Jesus’ righteous and innocent enough reply. Jesus clearly did not pretend by his remark to be shedding new light on the problem of poverty. And when we remind ourselves, as we so often do, that “the poor will always be with us” (as they always have been), we are merely borrowing a manner of stating a fact we all accept without a second thought. It was a fact as unquestioned in Jesus’ time as it is today. But it is not exactly a fact about the poor – that they always have been (and always will be) with us. It is one of those collectively held assumptions that constitute the mythology of our culture, the culture of what has become our global civilization.
It is not an idle myth, that the poor will always be with us, but a vital myth, a powerful and essential means of sustaining our culture and the business of it as usual. It is a myth that has haunted me throughout my two and a half decades of feeling and actively expressing both compassion and indignation in relation to the persistence of hunger, homelessness and poverty in our affluent nation and abroad. Most of this time I have spent working in a soup kitchen and homeless shelter, trying, I suppose, to escape my own affluence and privilege as well as meet basic human needs and challenge the political powers.
The cultural ‘purpose’ of the myth is as clearly straightforward as it is debilitating to the caring activist: there’s no sense in trying to end poverty, except in our dreams. The dreams are reflected in our rhetoric, but under the surface we realize that the prize we can reasonably strive for is amelioration.
Consider, on the other hand, that poverty as we know it is not and has never been the fate of humanity, but instead is largely a product of civilization, as we know it. Columbus and other European explorers and colonists, for example, did not discover poverty here in the Americas; they created it. Defined in terms of security, control and access to life-sustaining resources, poverty and affluence take on a meaning apart from our conventional ‘standard of living’ measure. This reinterpretation prompted anthropologist Marshall Sahlins 50 years ago to identify tribal hunter-gatherers as the “original affluent societies”. He recognized a kind of wealth enjoyed – and enjoyed equitably – by tribal people that far surpassed in value the benefits we associate with having wealth in our culture. Perhaps because we have begun to change our own conventional measures of wealth, hunter-gatherers are beginning to be perceived by us in a more favorable light. My students do generally pause to consider if the Native Americans were ‘poor’ when encountered by European explorers, but then uniformly insist that they were not.
And although scientists discovered over a century ago that humans lived in this hunter-gatherer way for hundreds of thousands of years before the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ spawned our civilization and culture a mere 10,000 years ago, our history and our collectively held and lived mythology reduce the human experience to civilization-building. Our collective frame of reference not only omits the vast human experience prior to our history, it excludes the experience of humans flourishing in egalitarian tribes concurrent with our history. There are still today scattered pockets of tribal people who have never known the kind of poverty we take so for granted. This vast experience suggests that poverty is a function of culture, not of nature, which is relatively immutable.
So one way we perpetuate the myth of never-ending poverty is by continuing to believe, against the facts, that our history, the history of our culture, our civilization is the history of humanity itself and that anyone outside or predating this history is a poor, half-human savage. Many of us individually will nod to the facts when confronted by them. This matters little, because mythology is something a culture of people buy into together and give expression to in the way they live as a group.
In the same vein, a second and more recent source of fuel for the myth is that, in an important sense, we really don’t want poverty to go away. It is therefore convenient to believe that the poor will always be with us (as they have always been). We don’t want poverty to go away for at least two broad reasons.
The first is that our economic system necessarily generates poverty; but more specifically, our own employment increasingly depends on it. One day at Amos House, a young man was ejected from the soup kitchen for a rule infraction. On the curb outside, he shouted back at our social worker, “you know, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have a job!” I still ponder that remark 10 years later.
Automation and cheap foreign labor have challenged our economy to find new ways to sustain growth and keep people busy, and our economy has responded brilliantly. The service ‘industry’ has taken up the slack. As the Agricultural/Industrial Revolution displaced not only laborers, but also the life-sustaining role of small communities (tribes and then villages), it created tremendous neediness and marginalization, adding to the effects of automation. The demand for services to address mounting social problems provided the new raw material. Private and public service programs nicely fit the bill because they ease the pain and give the appearance of an effective response without actually solving the problem. Indeed, the kinds of short-term, palliative interventions provided by services often permit the problem to worsen long term. Additionally, this neat economic solution has inspired the cultural fabrication of more frivolous needs and wants to which an infinite number of new services can be introduced to stoke the furnace.
A second reason why we cling to the continuation of poverty, and also to marginalization more broadly, is that many of us, at least, need a place to actively express our care and compassion. We need people – beyond our immediate family members – to care for in the absence of the tribal context within which we once freely shared our care with other members in a mutual support network. I’m like my dog, Pearl, who without the opportunity to hunt instinctively, finds herself playing out the hunt in our house or backyard (sometimes in absurdly comical ways). I can’t say that humans are instinctively compassionate or that we were meant by God or anything else to live in tribes. But there is clearly a compassionate streak in us, expressed more in some people than in others, and humans have lived tribally for 99% of our time on earth. Tribalism is a way of life that has tested out, notwithstanding its relatively recent setback in the face of our own civilizational expansion (Despite how the balance of this competition appears to us, it is too early to call the match.)
Mutual care, generated more by survival needs and self interest than by altruism, is the basis of support in the tribe. In our world, this support has been supplanted by services, mainly professional services working within a service system. Service, in fact, is simply the attempt to meet needs outside the context of community. Just as we do not use the word ‘service’ to label the care we provide within our families, likewise there is no equivalent concept of ‘service’ among tribal people. For individuals with an especially caring disposition, the service system provides the only available outlet, other than the care provider’s own family. The weakening nuclear family, however, like the extended family, clan, village and tribe before it, has increasingly surrendered its support function to professional services. Following this trend, we could all soon find ourselves supported by service providers alone.
John McKnight makes a compelling case that the professional service system is a poor substitute for the kind of support system only a genuine community can provide. It is inferior on many counts, not the least of which is that it frustrates the caring service provider who enters the field of teaching, health care or social work in order to give care only to face one systemic obstacle after another. McKnight insists that the professional service system and its network of private and public institutions and agencies are not geared to providing care, only professional services. To give and receive care, there is no substitute for community. I consider the tribe to be the archetype of community in this sense.
So far I have identified our collectively held assumption that “the poor will always be with us” as a tragic, self-fulfilling prophecy based on mistaken assumptions. I have also named four factors contributing to the perpetuation of the myth and the consequent perpetuation of poverty:
We collectively believe that human poverty is an inevitable part of the natural order in general and of the nature of humans in particular.
We understand that, in fact, the poor have always been with us.
An increasing number of jobs and institutions (and the economy itself) depend on the continuation or worsening of poverty and marginalization.
The marginalized provide caregivers somewhere to direct their compassion.
A revised understanding of the inevitability of poverty lends itself to at least two general change strategies. Although activists like myself tend to favor more action-sounding suggestions, the first and perhaps most radical thing we can do is help surface our cultural mythology and replace it with principles of living that will work better for us – and possibly lead to the elimination of poverty. For “the poor will always be with us” we might substitute something like: “The universe consists of cycles of creation and destruction, birth and death, but within this framework, the earth will provide.” Our planet and its abundant and richly diverse community of life offer an adequate and acceptable support system for us, as they do for all other species. No one should languish in the kind of marginal destitution we commonly call ‘poverty’. This strategy is one of learning and relearning.
The second avenue is building community – finding small and more ambitious ways of reintegrating ourselves into small-scale economies of support founded on trusting relationships. In My Ishmael, Author Daniel Quinn distinguishes between a tribal economy founded on the exchange of human energy:
and our economy that is founded on the exchange of products, including service products:
To the extent that we can transfer our faith and reliance from the products system to the communal support system, we contribute to the atrophy (and eventual elimination) of the products system, its institutions and political structures and jurisdictions. The kind of poverty we are familiar with has been with us through the emergence of our civilization because it is inherent in the culture of our civilization, if not in civilization as a mode of social organization in general. Poverty can be eliminated, but it will require a fundamental break from the way we have been thinking and living.
Our current worldview, allegiances and psychological attachments strongly favor the prevailing way of life, as does the usual default assumption that the world is simply going to continue on its trajectory toward a ‘more and bigger’ version of what we have today. But like a recessive gene, our capacity to trust the earth and live by each other’s support and unique gifts lies within each of us, dormant for the most part, but ready to surface and engage after an initial adjustment process. Many disaffected youth, still partially dependent on the products system, have nevertheless chosen to live tribally simply to support their refusal to eke out a living in the usual way, preferring the freedom and vitality of life on the outside. Less dramatic experiments, ranging from intentional rural communities to urban block association activity, point in the ‘give support/get support’ direction.
By the standards of tribal wealth, even our financially well off are quite poor. In my facilitation work with the materially comfortable in churches and nonprofits, I find a surprising receptivity to this disturbing message. A million dollars, for example, is not enough to insure against having to spend the last decade of life in a nursing home. One source of hope for me – as distant as it appears – lies in the potential for defection within the middle and upper classes. As ‘winning’ the products contest rewards us with a life that is increasingly accelerated, virtual, alienating and superficial – as well as ecologically perilous – the rewards of abandoning the game we play for life with the trees and sky – and each other – will prove increasingly irresistible. The ‘simple living’ trend of the past decade may portend a shift that is deeper and more widespread; this shift could provide a catalyst for the cultural break necessary to end poverty.
It certainly lies outside the box to imagine rich people releasing their hold on product wealth and the means of creating it, but this will be a natural side effect of their shifting attention in the direction of acquiring a different kind of wealth. The marginalized poor would then have a better chance of reestablishing access to land resources. Unfortunately, the prevailing models of development in poor communities and countries are the models offered by the products system, which the poor themselves generally look to as the only way out. Alternatively, organizations committed to reducing poverty should emphasize strategies that regenerate the kind of self-reliant, give support/get support community life that can regenerate the kind of wealth we have paved over with a product-driven culture of winners and losers.
