Editor’s Note: the following was originally posted as a comment on a recent article we shared entitled “Civilization Reduces Quality of Life.” We thought it was an insightful discussion of indigenous horticulture, and have received permission to republish it here. Image: Wild Rice by Hellebardius, CC BY NC SA 2.0.
By George Price
Ever since about the time of the advent of Daniel Quinn’s novel, “Ishmael” (back in the `90s), indigenous cultivators of food crops, such as myself, have had to contend with the allegation that the cultivation of food crops, no matter how sustainably practiced, was the beginning of the grand decline and fall of our species. I realize that not every fan of Quinn’s work or every anti-civilization activist thinks that way, but the problem occurs when people fail to adequately define “agriculture” and distinguish that from sustainable traditional indigenous cultivation practices.
I define “agriculture” as the cultivation of food crops for a market economy, or for money, which is coupled with the commodification of and disrespect for the natural world. That practice, along with the invention of money itself and the failure of some early societies to maintain population levels that were consistent with the carrying capacities of their homelands were the real culprits. Traditional first peoples would avoid over-population by several methods, including the prayerful dividing and relocation of bands within tribes in ways that would adjust for that, along with other population-regulating practices. Agriculture and money were the roots of empire and colonialism, and both were the result of unsustainable, disrespectful relationships with homeland, leading to dependence on trade and/or “conquest.”
Indigenous Horticulture
The traditional ways of indigenous cultivation more properly fit the definitions of the terms “horticulture,” “permaculture,” and “polyculture.” What those ways of cultivation have in common is that they were done for personal and community subsistence, only as needed, and in combination with sustainable practices of foraging. Whether foraging wild foods or cultivating foods that were originally found in the wild, those activities were/are done in a spiritual attitude of respect and thanksgiving toward the natural world (visible and invisible), and with a commitment to preserve natural ecological systems.
Our traditional practices involve working in sync with the natural world, helping to spread more of the wild-gathered foods into more of their traditional habitats. One example of that would be the Anishinabe practice of planting rice in new wetland areas created by beaver or, my people, the Wampanoags of Massachusetts, doing something very similar with wild cranberries. Corn was originally grown by many first peoples in habitats where corn’s wild grain cousins also occurred naturally. It should also be noted that many so-called “sedentary” or village-making tribes, should more accurately be defined as semi-sedentary, due to seasonal, cyclical movement of the people for the continuation of foraging practices
Other than the omission of those distinctions, I am in general agreement with your analysis of the plague called “civilization.” I am also very pleased to see somebody else cite and quote Richard Lee, Marshall Sahlins and Walter Ong.
About the author
George Price was born in 1951 and is descended from indigenous peoples of America (Wampanoag, Massachuset, and Choctaw), Africa (tribes unknown), Scotland, England, and France. He began organic gardening and learning about natural wild foods and medicines in 1970. He lives on five acres on the Flathead Indian Reservation, north of Missoula, Montana, and works as a teacher and historian.
Call me crazy, but I spent the last evening sitting in my garden and telling the first toad I met this year what I do and why. I told her about Deep Green Resistance, about the destruction of the natural world by our culture, and I asked her to tell me how she and her kind perceive all this.
I don’t know if I understood her correctly, but what I heard was: “Well, too many of us are dying. We know that some of you are trying to help us. That’s not enough. It has to stop.“
It doesn‘t matter if I‘m projecting or not. The toad is right.
She wasn’t shy, she sat quietly right next to me, moved a little bit every now and then and looked at me with beautiful red, serious eyes.
I do this regularly, I go to the wildest places that still exist here and listen to nature. I see different kinds of insects, wild bees, bumblebees, mosquitos, beetles, a few dragonflies. I see – mostly hear – birds, but I can only distinguish about five or six species. I love the call of the codger when it gets dark.
I know that the stag beetles come out of the ground at the beginning of June, where they have lived for three years as increasingly fattening grubs, to fly with a huge hum into the summer forest, where they will live exclusively from the sap of the rare old oaks their females prepare, since the males cannot bite the bark because of their huge antlers. Every June, I wait in my garden to welcome them. Towards the end of the summer they carry out their ecstatic fights and mating rituals, until after spending only three months as Europe‘s most giant beetles, they die and serve hungry birds as autumn delicacy.
I see squirrels, bats, toads, grass frogs and spotted salamanders. Sometimes I meet bigger animals: Wild boars, badgers, foxes, deer, but these are still scared of me and usually flee quickly.
The European bison, or wisent, that used to inhabit this forest, I only know from the zoo. But even the ones that are forced to live in captivity are gigantic, beautiful, trusting and kind. They look at me with loving eyes, each of them asking the same question:
Why?
Twice in my life I‘ve seen a snake. The first encounter was a European adder, many years ago in a village in the Odenwald (the forest where I live), when I was a school kid. The second one was a giant garter snake in my garden a few months ago. She (or he) was enjoying the sun, lying on a large oak tree that recently had been killed by a storm.
After this encounter, I wanted to learn more about them. I read that garter snakes used to be treated as house snakes and were considered holy animals that bring happiness and blessing. The garter snake was worshipped by numerous European peoples until the late Middle Ages, and appears in many myths. People fed garter snakes milk, just as the Indian villagers do in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book with their holy village cobra.
Today, you are very lucky if you see a garter snake once in your life.
It’s getting dark. I look at the stars and the full moon. I speak to them and all the animals, plants and living beings that surround me. I tell them what I do and why, and I say prayers. I declare my loyalty. I tell them that I am one of them, and that I will do everything in my power to help them. They’re my relatives.
I’m asking them to tell me the most important things I can do for them. I tell them that I love them.
The toad is still sitting next to me. She (or he) looks at me, lets me take a foto and politely waits until I’m done talking to her. Then she slowly trots towards the pond I have build for her kind to inhabit.
Like thousands of times before, I walk the way from my garden to my small apartment in the city. Like thousands of times before, I look down over the Neckar River to see Babylon. I fear Babylon. I’m terrified of Babylon.
The Neckar River once was called Germany’s wildest river, but it has been raped for at least 2000 years, since the Roman invaders drained parts of it to build the old bridge that is still in place today. Nowadays, the River essentially serves as a road for the many freighters that are desperately trying to satisfy the insatiable hunger of Babylon. Like the Rhine, it had been full of salmon in the past, but this was so long ago that no human people can remember. I’m sure the trees still know.
During the last two years beavers return, after being absent for about 150 years. There are supposed to be about three thousand of them again in Baden-Württemberg. The state government is considering to kill about half of them because they are allegedly damaging trees.
The natural world is full of wisdom. So often I‘ve sat here or there, listening, speaking, praying. The river, the forest and all the creatures who still live here spreak different languages and have different messages. They have taught me a lot, and I have a lot more to learn. But in one thing they all agree:
I love being at home, in Wayanad, when the south-west monsoon arrives. This hilly district of northern Kerala is still full of tall trees and myriad creatures, and drenched in rain for several months in a year. From my window, I see Banasuramala, a beautiful mountain 2,000 metres high, gracing the southern horizon, and canopied hills to the west. Small farms make scruffy patchworks on the other sides. To the north-east are the shola grasslands of the Brahmagiris. All around, streams born of millions of seeps gifted by trees gather to flow to the Kabini and then to the Kaveri.
I work at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, where a small team of dedicated ecosystem gardeners, skilled in various aspects of horticulture, plant conservation and Western Ghat ecology, grow native plants of this mountain ecosystem, or biome, through techniques honed over four decades of experimentation and practice. We cultivate plants that are highly endangered in the wild, some 2,000 species in all, accounting for 40% of the Western Ghat flora. We deploy a range of methods, from intensive-care nurseries to outdoor habitats rich with herbs, tubers, succulents, shrubs, trees, creepers, climbers, epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants) and lithophytes (plants that grow on rocks). These species have been initially brought from different parts of the Western Ghats, mostly from areas that have already been deforested. Much of our work is a search-and-rescue mission, and we refer to these plants as refugees, similar to human refugees suffering the depredations of war, displacement, climate change and general toxification of the environment. We also speak of species being rehabilitated when they form mixed-species communities that eventually become quite independent of our care.
Local stream, headwater of Kaveri
Surrounding these “refugee camps” we also have once-denuded patches, adding up to an area of more than 60 acres, which are recovering to forest through natural processes of succession under our vigilance. Since we are on the edge of a reserve forest, still rich and diverse despite its small size of about 100 square km, reforestation happens easily if the land is simply protected—because insects, birds and mammals transfer spores and seeds. Beyond all this, we educate students and visitors about the centrality of the natural world, first of all to itself and then to human lives, including the economy, something most urban people seem to deny, to our collective peril.
Over time, this botanical sanctuary has become a zoological sanctuary. We have noted 220 species of birds, including Malabar trogons, flycatchers, frogmouths and laughing thrushes. Many unusual mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects abound, and several are endemic to the Western Ghats, such as the iridescent shield-tail snake, the Nilgiri marten, a nimble and ferocious small mammal, and many species of bush frogs.
The sanctuary has become a river-maker too. I’ve seen how moss-laden trees condense mist, how droplets of water gather on downy grasses, how cool it is inside the infant forest we have grown, and how water trickles out of the toes of trees to form tiny rivulets, which flow into neighbours’ fields. By leaving large areas of the land to natural succession, and not deliberately planting trees, as practised by other agencies, and giving time, a slowly restoring area acquires many important properties of a healthy ecosystem. These include species diversity, a thick layer of leaf litter decomposing to humus, a robust water cycle, layered and dense vegetation, and different climates from the canopy all the way down to the shady interior.
Monsoon clouds over Gurukula
As gardeners and habitat-restorers we, of course, are dependent wholly on the timing and duration of the monsoon, on its intensity and quantity—because our wards, namely the land and the plant species we conserve, are. On an average we require 500 cm of rainfall a year, and most of it in the south-west monsoon. The weather features regularly in our speech. Much of our work hinges on the fine sensibilities of land-based peoples: common-sense knowledge to do with life-cycles in the forest and our own intuitive understanding of weather patterns, instead of measurements and forecasts alone.
Changing Monsoon
Most Indians believe that the monsoon is unassailable: a wind system 18 million years old, which has breathed life into the subcontinent since the rise of the Himalayas, whose formidable heights block it from travelling to Central Asia, condensing it instead into long hard rain. Its intensity varies from year to year, but we believe it will blow. But ever since I have been here, about 24 years now, I have heard people talking about how the monsoon has gone awry, that it is no longer what it used to be. We also know this from scientific data, but crucially for us, we know this from the behaviour of the plants and animals in our sanctuary.
Stream in our valley
We depend on both monsoons, together called the double monsoon, but the south-west matters more, as it brings more than 90% of what we need annually. The north-east monsoon, however, makes this a rainforest, along with locally generated thundershowers between the two monsoons, by extending the wet period to cover more than eight months of the year. Typical rainforests have rain or mist throughout the year, as we do here. Luc Lambs, an eco-hydrologist at the University of Toulouse in France, studies the double monsoon system in South India—its variation over time, the role of the forests in water–vapour recycling and what meteorologists call the “gatekeeper” effect of the Western Ghats range. He says the south-west monsoon has weakened considerably over the past three decades, while the north-east monsoon is getting stronger. He also affirms that forests are necessary to condense rain as are the icy heights of mountains.
Impatiens flowers under cultivation
Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the monsoon is changing in fundamental ways. The monsoon was much colder when she was a little girl in this valley, says Laly Joseph, my colleague, recalling how it poured from June to October, with a brief break during Onam, which usually falls in September. For the past decade, however, it has rarely arrived on time, often disappearing after setting in, sometimes drying up in August only to rain very heavily in winter.
The garden is open to the public
Plants Confused
All this fluctuation spells trouble for monsoon-dependent plants. Laly propagates 100 species of endangered native balsams, which belong to the genus Impatiens, all endemic to the Western Ghats, with succulent stems and brightly-coloured flowers, considered by many naturalists to be a flagship group of the range. She says that many species are struggling because they are confused by changing environmental cues: plant hormones are, after all, finely attuned to tiny changes in seasonal patterns of moisture and temperature. For example, species rescued from higher elevations are not doing well at the sanctuary’s 750-metre elevation any more because it is becoming too warm and the rain is often interspersed with long dry spells, which, if too long, can signal the end of the monsoon to these species. Laly is growing these delicate plants in the nursery because their natural habitats have been eroded.The sanctuary’s plant conservation programme envisages that at least a few can be given a toe-hold chance for survival by our tribe of ecosystem gardeners, if lost in the wild, because of rapid alterations to global climate conditions. Also, rising temperatures bring new diseases and many species are succumbing to these.
Upstream from GBS
For the past three years, Impatiens stocksii, a small plant with white flowers that is endemic to Coorg and Wayanad, has been sprouting two weeks later each consecutive year, says Abhishek Jain, our plant scout at large, who travels through the mountains documenting species in the wild. They are thus a month late this year, and haven’t sprouted yet in early June. Both Laly and he say that pre-monsoon convectional showers that lead up to the main monsoon are critical to the dormant tubers setting out their annual leaves and shoots. The pre-monsoon allows for the dormant tubers to start growing underground, and once the main monsoon starts, the plants quickly put out leaf shoots as if assured that a long period of growth lies ahead. The tubers gain in size from the starch made by the photosynthesising leaves. Flowering and seed formation can happen once enough energy is accumulated, usually towards the middle or latter half of the monsoon. Shockingly, this year we had no pre-monsoon rain, and Impatiens stocksii is even more delayed.
I have been keeping a diary to note when trees flower, fruit, produce seeds, drop leaves and flush. There’s a marked difference in these timings between last year and now. Jackfruit, for instance, has fully ripened and fallen in end-May instead of in late June or early July. Mala-elengi (Chionanthusmala-elengii) has flowered and fruited a full six weeks ahead of last year. The southern rudraksh (Elaeocarpus tuberculatus) flowered copiously in early February this year instead of the usual March. I am concerned that some of the trees are masting this year, a term used for synchronised and exceptional production of flowers, fruits and seeds. I’ve heard that this can happen sometimes in anticipation of death by drought. It takes consecutive years of drought to kill mature trees, but when they reach survival’s edge they put their final energy into the next generation by producing copious quantities of seeds.
The Monsoon’s Needs
So we know that the forest needs the monsoon. But we don’t give as much thought to how much the monsoon also needs forests, although most of us have an inkling that plants cool the land and that forests are intimately connected to rain and rivers. Scientists used to refer to rainforests, particularly the Amazon, as the planet’s lungs. Now, some like Luc Lambs and Antonio Nobre, an earth-systems scientist in Brazil, talk about forests acting as biotic pumps, whereby trees release organic molecules into the atmosphere, thereby changing air pressure, which creates a drag effect to draw in the winds from the sea. The proponents of this theory are a pair of Russian nuclear physicists named Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, who studied the contribution of forests all over the world to the global hydrological cycle.
Yet deforestation proceeds untrammelled. A report released in the first week of June by the Indian Institute of Science shows that Kerala has lost half of its forest cover in the past four decades. It is no wonder that the quantity of rainfall has also decreased. If we could reforest more of the land and protect whatever remains of old forest, we could keep droughts and floods at bay, because vegetation has an ameliorating effect on both. Indeed, we keep saying that the monsoon is necessary for agriculture, but we hardly ever talk about what the monsoon needs. In an era when an Indian court redefines the Ganga and Yamuna as “living persons,” let me propose that we look at the monsoon as a being, with its own needs: cooler oceans and lands, glacier-bearing Himalayas, forested Western Ghats, a vegetated India. Further afield, it needs the Siberian permafrost to not melt. It needs the Antarctic to remain icy.
Sights and Sounds
Lately, I have been falling asleep to the songs of different bush-frogs and crickets. Tonight, they outdo every other sound—thunder, passing vehicles and barking dogs. Last week, birds such as nightjars, frogmouths and owls were clearly audible and now they’re drowned out by the insect–amphibian choir.My ears hurt. This raucous medley is a sure sign that the monsoon is here or about to arrive very soon.The trails are full of jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) and smashed, partly-eaten remains of its relative, the ainili (Artocarpus hirsutus), which sports smaller orange fruits with a spiny skin enclosing lobes of sweet flesh and large seeds. Wild jamuns and mangoes, rose apples, guavas and sweet limes, and dozens of forest tree species are also fruiting. Bonnet macaques, Nilgiri langurs, Malabar grey hornbills and giant squirrels are gorging in the canopy. Someone reported seeing a troop of lion-tailed macaques with babies. It is feasting time for everybody in this valley: wild boar, humans and cattle included. Elephants come by at night, attracted from afar by the smell of overripe jackfruit—to them, a delicacy.
Local forest
Herbaceous plants and creepers are suddenly exuberant with the prospect of regular rain. They grow fast during the onset of the monsoon, infused by nitrogen from lightning and the perfect combination of sunshine and water. Soon, if the monsoon arrives and sustains, the trails and rock-walls will be covered in Impatiens flowers, ground orchids and ferns—a spectacular visual treat.
I fantasise sometimes about a perfect monsoon. Rain that is not too much or too little, neither lasting the whole year nor only a few days, arriving perfectly on the first of June and lasting till October. Rivers full and flowing, everyone happy and well-fed, reservoirs lasting through the summer, and fields and forests growing lush and fecund.
Immersive Programmes
I worry, though, that the monsoon, with its moods and savage powers, might altogether cease. Daily, I awaken to an inescapable prospect in the middle of paradise, this botanical sanctuary in Wayanad. Plant conservation is precious work, and it must be done. But what if the monsoon fails? What will happen if forests and drought get into a positive feedback loop? In other words, what if drought leads to forest fires, leading to less rain, and then to more forest fires and so on? What, then, of rivers and the millions of people downstream?
So I busy myself with thinking about how to conserve the monsoon. I believe it is mostly a matter of stopping toxic or destructive activities. Author Derrick Jensen writes that a single Trident nuclear submarine is capable of destroying 408 cities at once. What sort of a mind could conceive of creating such a machine? It seems to me, it is the same mind that is killing the monsoon. The US army alone can stop the murder of the monsoon. It is the single largest contributor to global warming. Why do I say murder? We know that the military–industrial complex is destroying the planet, and we know that it is happening willfully.
Whom shall we serve? The machines or the monsoon?
Suprabha Seshan (suprabha.seshan@gmail.com) lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad, Kerala. She is the sanctuary’s managing trustee and is an Ashoka Fellow. On behalf of the sanctuary’s ecosystem gardeners, she received United Kingdom’s Whitley Award in 2006.
The United States is not a democracy. It is more accurate to say we live in a plutocracy — a government of, by, and for the wealthy — or more accurate still, a kleptocracy — a government that has as its primary organizing principle theft, from the poor, from the land, from the future. Yet somehow we still often publicly speak and act as though we do live in a democracy.
But there exists a deeper problem than us not living in a democracy, an even deeper problem than our inability to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, which is that there’s a very real way in which we do live in a democracy. And the implications of this are very bad news for the planet. The reason has to do not so much with how we are governed as with what we want, and what we do. If it’s true that, as someone said long ago, by their fruits ye shall know them, it quickly becomes clear that, to use my mother’s phrase, the majority of people in this country don’t give two hoots in a rain barrel about the health of the planet. Some examples should make this clear.
Let’s start with tigers. Not real tigers, not flesh-and-blood tigers, not tigers who are being driven extinct in the wild. But rather the Louisiana State University Tigers football team, currently ranked number one in the country. Last January, when LSU played Alabama for the college football championship, more than 78,000 people attended. The median ticket price was $1,565, and some seats were reported to have gone for as much as $10,000. The region was so excited about this football game that a number of schools closed in celebration. And of course the television audience was well over 24 million people. It was the second most watched program in cable television history.
All of which leads me to conclude that more people in this country care about the Tigers football team than living, breathing tigers. Obviously, you could make the same argument about the Detroit Tigers, Miami Marlins, Carolina Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, and on and on.
Siberian tigers
Now don’t get me wrong: I like sports. But ultimately what we’re talking about here is a game. Do you think we could have gotten schools to close or 70,000 people to gather to help clean up Louisiana’s beaches from the Gulf oil spill (and do it week after week, as they do for LSU football games, for New Orleans Saints football games — as they do almost daily in every city across the country for football, baseball, basketball, and on and on)? Or hell, do you think we could get schools to close or more than 70,000 people to gather week after week to try to do something about that same region’s Cancer Alley?
Another example: For one brief night a couple of years ago the northern California county where I live — Del Norte — became a vibrant and shining example of participatory democracy in action. But it wasn’t saving the redwoods or the die-off of amphibians or dam removal that got people to turn out en masse. It was a particularly controversial domesticated plant. You probably know that through popular vote the state of California legalized cannabis for medicinal use, and now the number of allowable plants is determined county by county. So when the Del Norte County supervisors were considering dropping that number from ninety-nine to six, people flooded the public input meeting and prevented it from happening. This is how participatory democracy is supposed to work: public “representatives” are supposed to carry out the will of The People, and those who try to do otherwise get voted out of office.
The point here is not whether marijuana should be legal, any more than it is whether Alabama beats LSU. The point is that I wish people cared as much about salmon as they do about marijuana, or football. But they don’t. If people collectively had to make a choice between living rivers and electricity from dams (and recreation on reservoirs, and the value of some people’s vacation homes), we can guess what they’d choose. In fact, we know what they already chose. The answer is evident in the 2 million dams in this country; in the 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall; in the 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall; and in collapsing mollusk populations, collapsing fish populations, and dying rivers and flood plains. If people collectively had to choose between iPods and mountain gorillas, we know which they would (and do) choose. If they collectively had to choose between laptops in their laps and human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we know that answer too.
You could say I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I’m really just talking about people’s priorities in action. By their fruits ye shall know them.
But it gets worse, because most people won’t acknowledge even to themselves that they’re making these choices. Any choices made long enough over time (on personal and especially social scales) stop feeling like choices and start feeling like economic imperatives or political inevitabilities or just the way things are. Too many people argue — or rather don’t argue but just blithely assume — that we don’t have to choose between living rivers and dams, that we don’t have to choose between a living planet and the industrial economy. But I’m not talking about wishful thinking here. I’m talking about reality, where, as Bill McKibben so frequently and eloquently points out, you can’t argue with physics. Millions of dams and hundreds of thousands of ruined rivers and streams later, we should all know this. Just as we should know that burning carbon-based substances releases carbon into the air; and just as we should know that items that require mined materials — iPods, laptops, windmills, solar photovoltaic cells, electrical grids, and on and on — require mines, which means they destroy landbases.
The notion that we needn’t choose, that we can have the “comforts or elegancies,” as one antebellum proslavery philosopher put it, of this way of life without the consequences of it, that we can have the goodies of empire (for us) without the horrors of empire (for the victims), that we can have an industrial economy without killing the planet is completely counterfactual. This notion can only be put forward by those who are either beneficiaries of, or identify with the beneficiaries of, these choices, which is to say those who do not primarily care for or identify with victims of these choices. This notion can only be put forward by those who have made themselves — consciously or not — oblivious to the suffering and indeed the actual existence of these victims. Which brings us back to how we really do live in a democracy. This failure of imagination — this failure to care — is one of the things that keep our incredibly destructive brand of democracy functioning. Without question, most people in this culture prefer their “comforts or elegancies” to a living planet, and so theft and rape and pillage are allowed to rule the day.
Upton Sinclair famously said that it’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it. I’d say here that it’s hard to make people care about something they receive tangible benefits from not caring about. This destructive democracy we share is a democracy where most people vote — through their actions and inactions, through their enacted passions, through what they care and don’t care about — with and for entitlements. Which is why, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we should go ahead and call it a kleptocracy. It is a democracy of, by, and for those who benefit from the wholescale destruction of the planet.
Derrick Jensen is the author of more than twenty books on the dominant culture and the environmental crisis. His latest book isThe Myth of Human Supremacy.
Originally published in the May/June 2012 issue of Orion. Published online for the first time here.
I’ve always kind of hated that quote by Edward Abbey about being a half-hearted fanatic (“Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic”). Not so much because of the racism and misogyny that characterized some of his work. And not even because of the quote itself. But rather because of how that quote has been too often misused by people who put too much emphasis on the half-hearted, and not nearly enough emphasis on the fanatic.
The fundamental truth of our time is that this culture is killing the planet. We can quibble all we want — and quibble too many do — about whether it is killing the planet or merely causing one of the six or seven greatest mass extinctions in the past several billion years, but no reasonable person can argue that industrial civilization is not grievously injuring life on Earth.
Given that fact, you’d think most people would be doing everything they can to protect life on this planet — the only life, to our knowledge, in the universe. Sadly, you’d be wrong.
I think often of a line by the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, “Few books today are forgivable.” He wrote this, I believe, because we have become so very alienated from our own experience, from who we are, and this alienation is so destructive to others and to ourselves that if a book does not take this alienation as its starting point and work toward rectifying it, we’d all be better off looking at blank pieces of paper. Or better, actually experiencing something (or someone). Or even better, entering, as Martin Buber might have written, into a relationship with something or someone.
I agree with Laing that few books today are forgivable (and the same is true for films, paintings, songs, relationships, lives, and so on), and I agree for the reasons I believe he was giving. But there’s another reason I think few books (films, paintings, songs, relationships, lives, and so on) are forgivable. There’s that little nagging fact that this culture is murdering the planet. Any book (film, painting, song, relationship, life, and so on) that doesn’t begin with this basic understanding — that the culture is murdering the planet (in part because of this alienation; and of course this murder then in turn fuels further alienation) — and doesn’t work toward rectifying it is not forgivable, for an infinitude of reasons, one of which is that without a living planet there can be no books. There can be no paintings, songs, relationships, lives, and so on. There can be nothing.
The conservation biologist Reed Noss has called his field a “combat discipline”: we are in a crisis, and our attitudes and actions need to reflect this. And so I sometimes try to apply the Ed Abbey quote to the work of a firefighter. If you were trapped in a burning building, would you want the firefighters to be reluctant enthusiasts, part-time crusaders, half-hearted fanatics? Should the mother of a very sick child be reluctant or half-hearted in defense of that child?
If you were trapped in a burning building, would you want the firefighters to be reluctant enthusiasts, part-time crusaders, half-hearted fanatics?
I’m not saying we don’t need recreation. I’m not saying we don’t need amusement. Hell, I have three mystery novels in my backpack right now. I’m not saying a firefighter doesn’t need to rest — having hauled seven unconscious people out of the burning building, we could hardly blame the firefighter for grabbing a quick drink of water or sometimes taking a day off; and I’m not saying the mother doesn’t need to sleep or take some time away from the stress of caring and advocating for her child. We all need the occasional escape, or even indulgence. But we must be able to pursue those escapes and indulgences with the knowledge that others are rushing into the burning building, that others have taken over the job of advocating for whatever is necessary to heal that child.
And that, frankly, is part of the problem: there aren’t nearly enough of us working anywhere near hard enough to stop this culture from killing the planet. Obviously, or the world would be getting healthier, instead of being desecrated with ever increasing speed. If there were more of us trying to stop this culture from killing the planet, then those who are working themselves to death could afford to take a little time off and not feel as if things would fall apart while they climbed the mountains or ran the rivers.
“It is not enough to fight for the land,” Abbey continued; “it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there.” But this part of the quote might actually bother me more, in part because of its fatalism and in part because we — humans — are not the point. Yes, absolutely we should enjoy and commune with and make love with and touch and be with and absorb and be absorbed by the land. Yes, absolutely we should sit in the sun and feel it warm our bones, and we should listen to the whispering voices of trees, and we should open our ears and our hearts to the voices of frogs. But when the forests are being flattened and the frogs are being extirpated, enjoying them isn’t enough. So long as there’s still something we can do to protect them, shouldn’t protecting them be far more important than enjoying them? Because, once again, we are not the point. The trees, the frogs, do not exist for us. It is our culture that is killing them, and it is up to us to stop it.
Have you ever had anyone you love die or come to grievous harm needlessly, from some unnecessary act of stupidity or violence? I have. And in the aftermath I have never wished I had spent more time enjoying this other, but rather wishing I had acted differently such that I was able to prevent the unnecessary losses.
As my artist and writer friend Stephanie McMillan wrote in her essay “Artists: Raise Your Weapons”: “If we lived in a time of peace and harmony, then creating escapist, serotonin-boosting hits of mild amusement wouldn’t be a crime. If all was well, such art might enhance our happy existence. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure or decorative art. But in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.”
I would extend her comments beyond art: in times like these, for anyone not to devote her/his talents and energies to defending the planet is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.
The questions I keep coming back to are these: in this time, as countless multitudes of humans and nonhumans suffer for the profits and luxuries of a few, and as species go extinct at rates greater than any in the last scores of millions of years — as large-vertebrate evolution itself is being halted — what does the world need? What does the world need from me?
I want to be very clear: I don’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t love the world or each other (human or nonhuman). Or that we shouldn’t play games or have fun. I’m not saying we shouldn’t rest or go hiking or read good books (and Desert Solitaire is a great book). I’m not even saying I have a problem with Abbey’s quote as such; my main problem with the quote is the many would-be activists who use it as an excuse for inaction.
We are in a crisis, and we need to act as such. We need to rescue people from the burning building. We need everybody’s help.
George Price was born in 1951 and is descended from indigenous peoples of America (Wampanoag, Massachuset, and Choctaw), Africa (tribes unknown), Scotland, England, and France. He began organic gardening and learning about natural wild foods and medicines in 1970. He lives on five acres on the Flathead Indian Reservation, north of Missoula, Montana, and works as a teacher and historian.
