MORALITY

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.

—BERTRAND RUSSELL

 

 

 

WE ALL HAVE TO PAY OUR WAY. But so many members of this culture don’t pay their way. They may or may not understand—and in many ways it doesn’t matter whether or not they understand—that this debt must and will be repaid, but they don’t give a shit—literally—who pays, so long as it isn’t them.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what seems to be a fundamental guiding principle behind many—I don’t think I’d be off-base to say the overwhelming majority—of this culture’s moral, ethical, legal, economic, political, military, technological, and sexual decision-making processes, which is: if you’re not caught, it doesn’t count. (Or, if you’re rich or otherwise politically powerful, you can get caught, but so long as you’re not fined more than your marginal profits, it doesn’t count.) In other words, the morality is almost entirely external.

Many of the indigenous have commented on the contrast between this culture’s “morality,” and the morality of human cultures. I think of Black Hawk, who said, “The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. But the Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian, and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies; Indians do not steal. An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eat up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false looks, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, to ruin our wives. We told them to let us alone, and keep away from us; but they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. . . . The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse—they poison the heart; it is not pure with them.”²⁰⁰

The Powhatan-Renape-Lenape man Jack Forbes brings the issue of morality to the present. He writes, “The life of Native American peoples revolves around the concept of the sacredness, beauty, power, and related-ness of all forms of existence. In short, the ‘ethics’ or moral values of Native people are part and parcel of their cosmology or total world view. Most Native languages have no word for ‘religion’ and it may be true that a word for religion is never needed until a people no longer have ‘religion.’ As Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman) said, ‘Every act of his [the Indian’s] life is, in a very real sense, a religious act.’”

Forbes continues, “‘Religion,’ is, in reality, ‘living.’ Our ‘religion’ is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our ‘religion’ is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think—all of these things—twenty-four hours a day. One’s religion, then is one’s life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. . . . Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not ‘theistic,’ is it not ‘atheistic,’ it has little to do with what white people call ‘religion.’ It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion. If we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion.”²⁰¹

Forbes is describing an internalized morality that guides one’s behavior. One does a certain thing because it is right and good and moral, and one does not do some other thing because it is wrong or bad or immoral. These actions (or inactions) are not guided by a fear of punishment, or a concern for what others might do if they found out, or by calculations of precisely how much one can get away with.

I contrast that with this culture, where people will so often do whatever they can—and I mean whatever they can—to increase their power or the amount of money they have. I think of the words of Red Cloud: “They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they only kept but one. They promised to take our land and they took it.”²⁰² I think of the actions of businesspeople and their hirelings, who lie and cheat and steal to make a buck, and whom we expect to lie and cheat and steal to make a buck. I think of the actions of politicians, who lie and cheat and steal to support their corporate sponsors (so those who run these corporations can make a buck), and whose corruption is so brazen and ubiquitous that most of us have ceased to regard their corruption as anything other than what it is: an utterly normalized state of affairs.

I think about a developer operating close to my home who my neighborhood has been fighting for the last two years.

I’ve been hesitating to write about the developer because I hate him so much. I’ve wondered if I’m too close to that situation to write about him effectively.

While of course I do not believe in the desirability, utility, necessity, or even possibility of being “objective,” I also know that, at least in my own case, there often exists an optimum level of anger, joy, outrage, compassion, and so on, as well as an optimum closeness to or distance from a subject, that generally leads to my best writing, that is, my most precise, lyrical, compelling, persuasive, vital, honest, moving, emotionally accurate, real writing.

If I don’t feel strongly enough about some subject, or if I have too much distance, the writing is often flat, sometimes dead, nearly always forced, and always difficult and painful to write. If, on the other hand, I’m too pissed off about the subject, or too giddy about it, or too much in love with it, or too sorrowful about it, and most especially if I haven’t had time to metabolize these emotions and perhaps more importantly the events that led to them—if I haven’t had time to take them into my body and to allow my body to determine which parts of these issues, these emotions, these experiences it wants to make part of its very cells, and which parts it wants to let pass through to be excreted and left behind—then the writing sometimes ends up not communicating quite as well as I would like.

In order for my writing to be the most effective, you have to be able to trust that when I write that I hate this culture, I really do hate this culture; that I am not projecting unexamined, unconsumed, unmetabolized fears. For you as a reader to be able to trust that, I as a writer must be able to trust it first. And for me to trust it, I must have examined it, examined it again, thrown out everything I thought I knew and even everything I knew I knew, and examined it again, then again, and again.

In this case you can trust it: I do hate this culture.

Which brings us back to the developer, and to my hesitation to write about him. I hate him. No, I really hate him. I hate him enough that it’s got me wondering if I can write about him without simply ranting, much as I want to fill page after page with expletives (and you know they’re some serious expletives if even I don’t just say the swear words but demurely pass over them) and with fantasies of him and his equally destructive buddies meeting spectacularly symbolic ends.²⁰³

But I have to write about them because their actions so perfectly exemplify so many processes by which the planet is being dismembered, and I think I’ve been able to metabolize my hatred and anger toward these people sufficiently that I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to describe these pricks without letting my anger get the best of me, and without using unnecessary obscenities to describe these motherfuckering assholes. I think I can do that, don’t you?

And besides, I’m not really writing about them to write about them. I’m writing about them to illustrate a point.

And that’s the point.

The developer’s corporate name is Red Cloud. I’d never have the guts to make up such an ironic name. The owner’s name is Dale Smith. Smith hired a forester (shouldn’t they really be called deforesters, since that’s what they do?), Jim Sawyer, and a biologist, Ed Schultz.

Together, these three manifest precisely what I wrote near the beginning of A Language Older Than Words: “In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable, but merely that they be erected as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many handgrenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction.”

Even though I’ve written many books about the dysfunction and destructiveness of this culture, and even though as a longtime activist I’ve heard more than my share of lies told to buttress and expand people’s fortunes (or in the case of bureaucrats, who use those lies to keep bureaucracies functioning smoothly, in other words, to keep their jobs), part of me is still, each time, surprised at the brazenness with which these lies are so often told, and the readiness with which they are so often believed, or at least “believed” well enough for the lies to do their job.

The developer and his two hirelings have lied throughout this process with a stunning consistency. They have lied about things that matter, and they have lied about things that do not. They have lied about things that are verifiably inaccurate, and they have lied in ways that are more nebulous or harder to verify. They have lied with the eagerness of fresh-faced amateurs, and they have lied with the dogged consistency of pros. They have lied with straight faces that remind me not so much of conmen or even attorneys as of sociopaths. Their proclivity makes me think they are wasting their talent in this small town, and really should take their lies to the next level, to a national stage.

Frankly, anywhere but here.

In other words, they lie about as much as a good portion of the members of this culture, about as much as the overwhelming majority of the ruling class, about as much as many members of a culture with only an external morality, with no functioning internal morality.

In many ways the story starts with three slender salamanders who live on land Dale Smith wants to “develop”—in other words, destroy. I have seen these salamanders. Two are males and one is a female. She is gravid. I have seen the eggs through the skin of her belly.

Slender salamanders are common here, and I see them often. They’re tiny—two inches long—and they look like worms with stumpy legs you can barely see. They live under decaying logs and in duff, eating creatures who decompose the forest—who turn the dead into usable food for soil, then for plants, then for herbivores, predators, and then once again for decomposers (and then for salamanders, who in turn will be eaten by predators or decomposers, who will all in turn be eaten by the soil).

Or maybe it starts with coho salmon, who have been here far longer than time—not so long as trees, not so long as redwoods, cedar, cascara, alder, spruce, willows—but long enough, and who for as long as they have been here have given their bodies, given that most ancient gift, to trees, to soil, to those others who were here before them. The salmon have also given their bodies to those who came after, given that most ancient gift to their own children for generation after generation, for literally uncounted and uncountable generations. The salmon who today are only barely hanging on, trying to survive this wretched and exploitative culture, trying to survive until this culture collapses so they can once again simply live, as they did before. Coho salmon, whose babies I often see in Elk Creek, black marks on their sides, wide eyes, and pale pink anal fins.

Or maybe it starts with Pacific or river lampreys, who, too, have been here far longer than time, and who, too, give their bodies to the forest, to the soil, to the land; lampreys who, too, stay here in their infancy, then swim to the sea before coming back years later to make their way upstream and begin a new generation. Pacific or river lampreys, whose babies I see in Elk Creek, tiny black worms of fish who live beneath the bed in the sand and soil, receiving the gifts of the bodies of others, then growing so that one day they can pass on the gift of their own bodies to yet others, to the descendants of those whose bodies earlier they ate.

Or maybe it starts with sand, with sediment from logging begun not long after the arrival of this culture, by people probably not unlike Smith, not unlike Sawyer, not unlike Schultz, who cut the ancient redwoods, redwoods 2000 years old and 300 feet high. These people did not cut the trees as part of that ancient exchange of gifts where body would help body, one now and another later. They cut them for money. The people scalped the forests here in the same manner and for essentially the same reasons as many of these same sorts of people (and probably many of these same people) who have scalped their way through the forests of this continent, scalped their way through the nonhuman inhabitants of this continent, scalped their way through the human inhabitants of this continent. Because of the scalpers, water that once fell as rain and ran into twisting roots of trees to be carried up trunks and into limbs and leaves and needles to be transpired to rain down again and start this cycle anew (for these gifts must and always do go in cycles, in circles and spirals and large and small loops of literally unthinkable complexity, cycles and circles and spirals and loops which must never be broken, which are never broken, except by these people like Smith, like Sawyer, like Schultz, like these other scalpers, like so many members of this culture, who are unweaving the entire tapestry of life by the simple act of taking and not giving back), now lands on bare soil and runs off into streams, carrying with it the soil the forest had built—through bodies, through litter, through shit—for thousands and tens of thousands of years. Soil runs from these scalped zones and clogs streams, fills spaces between stones, spaces where small fish swim, spaces where insects and worms and mollusks live, spaces where the eggs of coho breathe. This soil covers these spaces, kills the spaces, kills the small fish and insects and worms and mollusks and eggs, kills the streams.

Or maybe the story starts with a small dam on Elk Creek. I found this dam one day years ago when I was walking the stream. I’ve walked Elk Creek many times. I know this stretch better than any other living human, which is sad, because I do not know it all that well. I know it well enough to have seen signs of aplodontia, the oldest living rodent, and to have seen baby coho and lamprey, to have seen the signs of bobcats, mountain lions, and bears. I know it well enough to have fallen in and gotten soaked many times, to have absorbed the water into my body, and for the stream to have washed my skin, to have carried away with it what it would. I know it well enough to have seen the dark tannin tea of one branch of the creek mix with the clear water of another, and to have tasted both, to have taken both into my body, as one day I hope the creek will take my body into it. But I do not know Elk Creek as well as I know the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the songs of UFO or Beethoven, the tricks of Half-Life 2, the books of Dostoyevsky or Stephen King, the peccadilloes of celebrities.

One day walking the stream I came across the remains of an old wooden dam, now reduced to a couple of rotting wood posts and a few splintered crossbeams. I later learned it had been used to move logs. The people would (will, actually, because it is still done in some places) dam a stream and create a pond, fill this pond with logs, blow the dam, and let the flash flood carry the logs (and sediment, and any creature unfortunate enough to be in the way of this commercial activity) down to a mill (did you ever wonder why so many sawmills are next to streams or rivers?). This of course scours and then suffocates the stream or river, killing everyone and everything in its path, but when profits are to be had, the health of the stream (or the river, or the world, or anyone or anything standing in the path of profits) be damned.

Or maybe the story starts with another kind of dam. A few hundred yards downstream from my home a berm rises about three feet above the bank’s normal height. If you climb this berm, then climb a little up a dead tree, to maybe twice your height, so you’ve risen above the huckleberries, salal, salmonberries, and sedges, you can see an area, perhaps thirty by sixty feet, swimming with huge skunk cabbages. They are growing, as skunk cabbages do, in muck. In the dry season it is remotely possible to push through this, if you don’t mind exhausting yourself and getting more or less nowhere. In the wet season, you may as well stay home. At the far side of the muck, flowing into it, is a stream.

This stream—unnamed by us—is supposed to flow into Elk Creek. It used to do exactly that. It doesn’t do that anymore, because of the berm. But the berm shouldn’t be there. The berm is a result of logging: logging debris packed tight with logging-induced sediment during logging-induced flooding. Someday I want to take out this berm, and let the stream channel its way through the muck and skunk cabbages, let the stream not be forced to go underground to once again merge with Elk Creek. I want to open up the stream so the coho and lamprey can find their way back up that tributary, so coho, lamprey, and stream can be together again as they were before the logging. The tributary flows perhaps a mile. That would be another mile of habitat for these imperiled fish.²⁰⁴

Or maybe the story starts with the unnamed stream itself, which is not a trickle, but is about six feet wide and eight inches deep during the dry season. This stream flows through the land that Dale Smith wants to destroy, but because the stream’s mere existence would stand in the way of Smith’s profits, Smith, Sawyer, and Schultz all simply declared that it does not exist.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.

I think the story begins, as so many horrible stories do, with asphalt.

My neighbors to the west live on a private dead-end road. The road is narrow and gently winds between tall trees. Until two years ago it was unpaved. As often happens to unpaved roads in wet climates, their road, to use an odd and oxymoronic phrase, filled with potholes. The neighbors got together and decided to pave. But before they did, they wanted to make a hundred percent sure of something they already knew, which is that the property beyond the dead end did not have legal access down their private road. The last thing they wanted was a developer showing up the day they finished paving and suddenly claiming he had access. They contacted a title company, which reassured them that they were correct: the property beyond the end of the road did not in fact have access. So they paved their road.

I’m sure you can predict what happened next. The day—the very day—they completed the paving, a developer showed up saying he had just bought the property beyond the end of the road, and, you guessed it, claimed he had access. One of the neighbors told him to get off of her driveway, and when he refused she called the sheriff. The developer returned a few days later with a note from the title company telling the neighbor that the title company was sorry, but it had made a mistake and the truth is that the developer did have access.

I think we can make a stab at the real story: the title company didn’t simply make a mistake, but rather the developer talked his buddies at the title company into interpreting the title his way. When the neighbors tried to talk the title company back into seeing it the way everyone (including the previous landowners and the county tax assessor) had seen it before, the title company was, to no one’s particular surprise, intransigent. As is so often true within this culture, there is one set of rules and interpretations for those on the inside—in this case the developer—and another for the rest of us.

I went into the real estate office where the property had been listed to see if I could ferret out more information about the developer and his intentions. A small, elderly agent—I hate to say this but he reminded me of Gollum—greeted me, took my questions. When I mentioned the land, he started to grin—leer would actually be more accurate—and to shake. His demeanor reminded me of nothing so much as an addict looking at a fix, or maybe a pedophile looking at a child. He was actually rubbing his hands together like a bad actor playing a character from a Charles Dickens novel. I could tell he was getting off as he told me how wonderful it would be to divide up this land and put in luxury or investment homes, and how much money the developer stood to make.

I left the real estate office shaking, but for an entirely different reason. I was thinking about legacies, and what we leave behind. This man was definitely on the downward slope of his life. What will he and people like this developer leave behind? Wrecked forests and ravaged streams, wild communities destroyed. And of course money.

What sort of legacy is that?

I poked around and discovered that the developer has a history of avoiding environmental and planning laws and regulations, and basically doing whatever he can to maximize his profits, with essentially no concern for (especially nonhuman but also certainly human) communities. In other words, he is a typical developer. He put in one subdivision without bothering to get the necessary septic permitting, and those who bought homes there found themselves in a nightmare of sewage and contaminated water supplies. Elsewhere he built a house in a basin, and sold it during the dry season: it presumably would have been much harder to sell during the wet season, when, well, what do you think happens when you combine a house, a basin, recently denuded coastal temperate rainforest, and five inches of rain in a couple of hours?

But hey, he made money off the deal, so it must be okay, right? That’s the only variable that seems to matter in this equation.

Smith hired his friends Sawyer and Schultz. Sawyer’s job was to come up with a plan to deforest, and Schultz’s job was to use his certification as a biologist to lend credibility to the lie that whatever Smith and Sawyer did wouldn’t harm the land.

Many people who know and care about forests hate foresters, for the reason listed before: they really are deforesters, serving large or small timber interests, perceiving trees as dollars on the stump, and causing great harm to forests. There are probably no more than a couple of dozen foresters in the world who, if faced with juries consisting of trees and other forest-dependent plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria (or those who care about them), wouldn’t cut them down faster than you can say, “This action will cause no significant harm to the forest.” Despite extremely rare exceptions like Orville Camp and others who really do practice restoration forestry, I’m guessing forests and those who love them would probably choose to clearcut the whole bunch. Given all this, it’s saying a lot that Jim Sawyer is quite possibly the most hated, corrupt, deceitful, unscrupulous (de)forester in California. His contempt for anything that stands in the way of deforestation (and making money)—living beings, laws, decency, and the desires or needs of those (humans and nonhumans) in the community he is about to destroy—is extreme enough that the state Board of Forestry²⁰⁵ suspended his license, citing that he had “committed acts of deceit, misrepresentation, material misstatement of fact, incompetence, and/or gross negligence in his practice as a Registered Professional Forester. . . . [He failed] to flag a Class II watercourse despite his certification to the contrary on the submitted exemption form, and [he failed] to discover, disclose, and protect the Great Blue Heron Rookery.” Also cited was his failure to adequately address watercourses, wet areas on three Timber Harvesting Plans, and his failure to completely disclose all past projects related to cumulative impacts analysis. Even this language isn’t strong enough, however. Sawyer knew great blue heron rookery was on the land; he had been told it was there and he had seen it was there (and you can’t miss a heron rookery because of the sight and fishy smell of heron poop), and he knew it was illegal to cut it down, and he did so anyway. When law enforcement officials confronted him about his actions, he, of course, denied any knowledge of the rookery.

Once again, I’m sure you can see why, if he were to face a jury of his victims, there would be a lot of trees willing to volunteer their sturdy branches for the rope.

He’s also the head of the local Republican Party, if that means anything.

Ed Schultz is just as bad. He is what many call a “biostitute”: a biologist who lies to serve the financial interests of those who pay him. Biostitute is not a term I generally use, in part because I don’t think it’s apt, and in part because it demeans prostitutes. This means I had to come up with a new word. First I tried biopimp since that’s pretty accurate to what they do. Bio means life, and they turn life—the sacred—into commodities and force individuals—nonhumans, in this case—into servitude for money. They pimp life. So biopimp works, but it’s not quite specific enough. They also pimp their knowledge, the ology part of biology, so maybe they should be called pimpologist. But that wouldn’t be specific enough, either, because pimpologists would include geologists who pimp the natural world to mining corporations and climatologists who work for oil companies. Then the answer came to me: biopimpologist. It covers both of those bases, and as a bonus it sounds silly, which is what this whole bloody business would be if it weren’t so deadly.

I mentioned Schultz’s name to another biologist, who responded, “I can’t understand how he sleeps at night. He causes so much damage. Why would he become a biologist if he didn’t love animals? And if he loves animals, how can he hurt them so much with his lies?” Silence, then, “I also can’t understand how he gets away with it. I’ve talked to so many biologists who hate this guy’s guts. We all know he’s lying, and he even sometimes gets called on it, but the projects he supports still always seem to go through: no matter how many times we show his statements to be lies, he somehow never loses credibility with decision makers.” I asked a local official about Schultz, and he responded a bit more crudely: “That motherfucker lies every time he opens his mouth. And he gets himself appointed to every possible committee, where he does incalculable harm. If there were any way I could get that liar off those committees or at least lessen his harm, I would do it.”

Now, pretend for a moment you are Ed Schultz. I hope that is not too painful, and I hope that you have access to a shower afterwards, to clean off the slime. Pretend at one point you did care about animals, about plants, about the wild. That’s why you went into biology. Pretend that when you finished your degree and entered “the real world”—the “world” that is more important to most people in this culture than the real real world—you found that your best chance to make some decent money was to work for a resource-extraction corporation, doing surveys for wildlife in areas where this corporation was going to log or mine. Pretend that you soon found yourself being subtly and not-so-subtly rewarded for not finding plants or animals who would impede resource-extraction, and subtly and not-so-subtly penalized for finding them. It might be a shared look between you and an older biologist when you see an endangered salamander, a look that somehow lets you know that neither of you are to report this sighting. It might be that you see who gets promoted and who does not. It might be that you see who gets “let go” and who does not. You find yourself in a social setting where resource-extraction is rewarded, and the failure to extract resources is not. So it’s no wonder that you do what is rewarded.

Sometimes you think about the love you used to have for wild creatures. You still love them, of course, and would do whatever is appropriate to protect them, but more and more you’re growing to realize that environmental regulations are far too restrictive, and that those damn selfish environmentalists have already locked up too much wilderness and that something has to be left for the men and women who work for these corporations: they’ve got to make a living; they’ve got to support their families. More and more you realize that our entire way of life is based on resource extraction, and would collapse without it; as the bumper sticker says, “If it’s not grown, it has to be mined.” How do those fucking environmentalists expect for people to live? More and more you grow disgusted at the stupidity of those so-called environmentalists who wouldn’t know a redwood from a cascara. Don’t they realize that trees grow like weeds? Hell, don’t they realize that trees are weeds? What’s the difference between a redwood and a dandelion, except that you can sell a redwood for a hell of a lot more money. And don’t they realize that if left to itself, a forest will just grow overmature and decadent? Don’t they realize that a managed forest is a healthy forest? And more and more you come to understand the wisdom of survival of the fittest: if some creature can’t survive a little logging here and there, then there really is something wrong with that creature. It’s sad, but true. You cannot stop progress. Besides, extinction is natural: all creatures eventually go extinct. So those environmentalists who say they want to protect these creatures really do hate nature: they hate extinction, which is natural, which means they must hate nature. Sometimes you can’t believe how stupid some people are.

Pretend that is your life.

Now, pretend that you decide to follow the American dream. You want to run your own business. You want to help your community. You see a need for a biologist whom people can hire to survey properties before putting in subdivisions, or before logging, or before putting in big-box stores. You start your own business. It doesn’t take you long to realize that you’re far more likely to receive referrals for more work when you tell the landowner what the landowner wants to hear. The landowner wants for there to be no wetlands on his property? Fine, there are no wetlands. The landowner wants for there to be no endangered species? Fine, there are no endangered species.

Sometimes you look back on your younger self, and you’re amazed and somewhat embarrassed at how naïve you were.

Besides, your son needs a new car, and your daughter is getting married this fall. And you have that second mortgage you have to pay off. Oh, and there’s the big screen high-definition television, and the hot tub, and that trip to Cancun next January.

Pretend that is your life.

Or maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe you—as Schultz—never cared about wildlife at all. Oh, sure, you convinced yourself you did, and you actually believed you did (and still believe you do) but your love of wildlife is the same as the love of those foresters who say they love the forest as they destroy it, the same as the love of those pornographers who say they love women as they exploit them, the same as the love of so many in this culture who do not know how to love, who do not know the difference between love and exploitation, and who have been able to talk themselves into believing that a desire to control and exploit is what love is. So pretend you can tell yourself that you love the wild as you systematically destroy it.

Or maybe we’ve still got it all wrong. Maybe we’re making this way more complicated than it really is. Maybe you—as Schultz—never even pretended to love wildlife. Maybe you chose biology as a career path, nothing more and nothing less. You like walking around outside, and math was never your strong suit, so biology seemed a better idea than accounting. And maybe the reason you lie about the presence of wetlands or endangered species is not because you’re jaded, not because you had your love worn away, and not even because you believe the false sense of love that has been handed to you by this culture, but rather because you don’t give a shit about anything but money. Maybe you have no functioning internal morality. Maybe you’re just greedy, and that’s really all there is to it.

Or maybe it’s all even simpler than this. Maybe, and this is something that those of us who care about life on this planet must learn, and soon: Schultz’s motivations and history don’t matter nearly so much as his actions. His motivations ultimately don’t matter any more than, say, Albert Speer’s, Adolf Eichmann’s, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s, or those of any other technician of atrocities.

So let’s talk about Schultz’s actions. Pretend your business is growing quickly enough that you’re able to hire assistants. In fact you have no choice. One day a new fellow moves to town. You’re swamped—Ha! This type of wetlands you like!—and so you hire him to do spotted owl surveys for a medium-size timber company that wants to log some overmature redwood (what those environmental obstructionists call “old growth”). This new guy’s credentials look good, so you send him out by himself. He comes back a day later, tells you he called the owls, and got several calls back. He’s pretty excited: his first job in this town and he found an iconic endangered species. You say, “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Sometimes barred owls can mimic other owls.”

“I know the difference. I’ve done lots of surveys elsewhere.”

“And you found spotted owls in these surveys?”

“Absolutely.”

You think, Why didn’t you tell me this before, you little prick? You say, “Could you please go and check again. My understanding is that there are no spotted owls there.”

“I heard them.”

“I said, ‘My understanding is that there are no spotted owls there.’ Go check again. Do we understand each other?”

Pretend the new hire repeats the survey. Pretend he comes back two days later. Pretend he tells you that his survey was correct, that there are in fact spotted owls out there. Pretend this will jeopardize the entire timber harvest. Pretend you cannot afford this right now. Not right now.

What happens next?

Pretend you’ve faced this situation before, and you know what works. Pretend that some people aren’t smart enough to read your subtle instructions, and for them you have to be a little more obvious. Pretend you get a little angry. Pretend you get in this newbie’s face. Pretend you tell him he must have heard something else. Pretend he doesn’t back down. Pretend you have to protect your financial interests. Pretend you fire him. Pretend you file a report saying that there are no spotted owls present.

Pretend further that you convince the United States Fish and Wildlife Service—which used to at least do a mediocre job of protecting endangered species, but now is more or less entirely captured, and so didn’t really take that much convincing—that since you’ve searched so extensively for northern spotted owls and never found any here, no more local surveys need to be done.

Pretend this makes you proud.

Pretend this makes you money.

Pretend this is what you do.

Pretend this is who you are.

Pretend this is your life.

It should come as no surprise that when Smith sent Sawyer and Schultz to this property he wanted to “develop,” they found no streams, they found no wetlands, they found no “wet spots.” They found nothing that would impede Smith’s planned “development.”

Smith went to the county planning commission to get a permit to put in roads, clear homesites, and conduct perc tests for septic tanks. To conduct a perc test, he would dig a fairly large hole, then put water in it and see how long it takes for this water to percolate into the soil. He also said he wanted to widen Dundas Road. When one of the neighbors complained that his new, improved road would run through her living room, down the middle of her sofa, he responded, “I can’t help it if your house is on my right-of-way.”

We in the neighborhood turned out en masse to this planning commission meeting. We provided photos of the nonexistent stream, the nonexistent skunk cabbages, and other nonexistent indicator plant species of nonexistent wetlands.

Faced with indisputable photographic evidence of their lies, Smith, Sawyer, and Schultz did what nearly all other developers, (de)foresters, and biopimpologists would do: they kept lying. I was there, and in the time since have played the scene again and again in my mind, but I still don’t understand not only the brazenness—What are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?—and the utter lack of both pride and shame, but even the sentences themselves. I mean, I certainly understand each of the words individually: There. Is. No. Stream. There. I even understand them if you put them in a sentence: There is no stream there. But to have that sentence said in response to being confronted with a photograph of the stream makes my brain hurt. The least they could have done is say, “Oh, shit. I screwed up.” Or even, “You caught me!” But they didn’t.

Of course.

That was not the only incomprehensible lie. They also said that they weren’t going to put in a development (which would have carried with it requirements that were at least nominally more stringent). Instead they were merely going to put in roads and do perc tests. Oh, and they would clear house sites. And then they would put in houses. But that doesn’t mean they’re putting in a development.

Even at this remove, all of that spinning makes me dizzy.

I guess such statements from members of a culture that is killing the planet that is their—our—only home, and consider making money more important than the life of the planet, shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. But each time, it surprises, appalls, horrifies, saddens, and infuriates me anew.

Faced with photographic proof of the developer’s lies, the planning commission voted 3-2 to deny his permits.

And yes, that means that for two members of the planning commission, physical reality, honesty, legality, communal desire, communal well-being, the natural world, and common sense were all less important—individually and collectively—than guaranteeing this man a profit. The dissenting members of the commission said as much: He bought the land, which means he can do what he wants with it. And besides, he’s not actually putting in a development: he’s merely putting in roads, perc tests, house sites, and. . . .

Thank goodness that for us to prevail, only three of the five commissioners needed to be capable of anything even remotely resembling cognition.

Smith appealed to the board of supervisors. This time he said that while, yes, the photographs do show a stream, that this stream only sort of kind of cuts across the tiniest bit of one corner of the property. He must have thought that story stood a better chance of convincing the supervisors than the truth, which is that the stream runs directly through the property. Of course expediency is always in this rubric infinitely more important than physical reality. Further, his argument went, the photos don’t do the stream justice: the stream is small, so small. Since Smith couldn’t argue that our photographs of skunk cabbages were misleading—skunk cabbages are huge—he instead attacked the “so-called biologist” we had hired as not having nearly as strong a reputation as Schultz (reputation for what, Smith did not say). Smith’s allies also said that the land was so degraded that it couldn’t possibly degrade it more if he put in roads, conducted perc tests, cleared house sites, put in houses. Besides, he wasn’t actually putting in a development. . . .

He lost. Or so we thought at the time. Evidently so did Ed Schultz, because on the way out of the supervisors’ chambers, he approached me, made his hand into the shape of a pistol, and verbally threatened me. Later that day he called another biologist we’d cited and yelled at him, threatening his job.

Having twice lost, the developer did the standard next move in the developers’ playbook: he found a way to circumvent the law. He got a buddy in the planning department to declare that the property was laced with pre-existing roads, and that Smith didn’t actually need to put in roads, which the planning commission and the board of supervisors had both explicitly disallowed. Rather, Smith and his buddy declared that any work he would do would merely be maintaining existing roads. And of course them declaring it makes it true, does it not? Never mind that these “roads” were old long-abandoned logging roads (one with a huge old-growth log lying smack across it), skid trails, illegal off-road vehicle (ORV) trails, and even completely overgrown game trails. And as long he was in there maintaining these roads, it would be a waste—almost a sin—not to dig some teeny, tiny holes for perc tests. His planning department friend—an employee, by the way, and not an elected official—agreed that this was only reasonable.

I asked one of the supervisors why they were allowing this employee to unilaterally overturn their ruling, something I later learned he does routinely, and, as I learned as well, with impunity. I also asked, “What’s the point of requiring permits from the planning commission or board of supervisors if somebody in planning can just wave his hand and make this activity ‘legal’?”

The supervisor responded that she wished she could stop him, but didn’t know how. Evidently she and the other supervisors had never heard the sentences, “Your ass is fired for insubordination, for assuming power you don’t have, and for violating state laws and county regulations. You have fifteen minutes to clean out your office. We’ll be watching you. Don’t steal any pens on the way out.” I spoke with supervisors from two other counties who said they would have fired him the moment they’d heard of his actions.

But I’m not sure that’s true, because similar stuff happens all the time, with no meaningful repercussions to the perpetrators.

And that’s really why I’m telling this story. The point is not and has never been Smith, Sawyer, and Schultz, no matter how sleazy they may be. Unless you are one of those slender salamanders I mentioned, or one of their neighbors, these specific events—and the lies which led to them—will probably never affect you personally. But if we change the details while maintaining the central theme—that of people who shamelessly lie to increase their fiscal wealth or power at great cost to communities, and who get away with it time after time—this story could just as easily not be about those three but instead about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their sock puppet general of the day, whether it’s Powell or Petraeus. Or it could be about former Secretary of State George Schultz, who said with a straight face that the most recent invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with oil. Or it could be about chemical and mining corporations and the toxification of the total environment. Or it could be about corporations, governments, and global warming. Or it could be about Big Timber, the Forest Service (or Bureau of Land Management), and the Fish and Wildlife Service conspiring to deforest. Or it could be British Columbia extirpating spotted owls by some biopimpologizing—if I may continue with this word fabrication—that would make Ed Schultz proud.²⁰⁶ Or it could be the mayor of Fortuna, California, former president, director, and manager of the corrupt timber corporation (are there other types?) Pacific Lumber, who since “leaving” Pacific Lumber and entering “public service” in this former timber town ravaged by PL, has received more than $800,000 from PL, with one requirement of his receipt of this money being that he never acted in any way that “materially and adversely affects the best interests of Pacific or any other member of the Affiliated Group or any person with whom Pacific or any such member has a substantial economic relationship.”²⁰⁷ Or it could be about the developer in Los Angeles whose biopimpologist told the planning commission there that, miraculously, endangered California red-legged frogs were just above where the developer wanted to put in 2000 houses, and just below where he wanted to put in 2000 houses, but I’ll be jiggered ’cuz there ain’t no frogs right where he wanted to put in 2000 houses. A member of the planning commission asked, “How stupid do you think we are?” The answer to this question ultimately became clear when the developer put in 2000 houses, frogs, laws, planning commission, and everything else be damned.

I sent what I’ve written so far to several friends. One wrote back, “I’m sorry this whole developer bullshit is so terrible, and I’m sorry I didn’t comment to you sooner. It’s probably because it hits me on such a personal level. Everything I’ve read sounds painfully familiar because my old neighborhood underwent the same processes: I often wonder if developers take a class called ‘Destroying Communities, Destroying Lives, 101.’ [Yes, by the way, they do. It’s called high school and college. It’s called advertising. It’s called the entire reward system of this culture, where nature- and community-destroying activities are rewarded, and opposing those activities is demonized. It’s called the legal system. It’s called corporations. It’s called regulatory agencies. It’s called the government. It’s called this entire culture. It is both a miracle and a testament to the resiliency of our natural heritage as living beings bound to landbases that any of us at all end up as anything other than as wretched, greedy, dishonest, and destructive as these developers.] We eventually settled and they have yet to do even one thing we agreed upon. They sold the contract to a new developer who won’t even acknowledge the agreements. Then they had the audacity to name the road to the development Conservation Drive. I don’t know one person (myself included) who has dealt with any sort of moral or sane developer. They are insatiable and I guess we’ve got to match that insatiability with an intensity of our own.”

We have to match the insatiability of all those whose legacy is the murder of the planet with an intensity of our own. And there are a lot of them. An entire culture’s worth. And they lie. And then they lie. And then they lie. And they keep pushing and pushing, until you get tired and say, “Okay, take it. Just leave me in peace.” But they never leave you in peace because they want everything, and they will keep lying, and they will keep pushing, until there is nothing left. And then if you stop them and then stop them again and then stop them again, they will keep pushing and lying until they find some tiny opening they can push through to take everything they want. They want everything. And they will take it. Like Red Cloud said, “They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they only kept but one. They promised to take our land and they took it.”²⁰⁸ The same is true today in the neighborhood I share with slender salamanders, coho salmon, lampreys, redwoods, cascara, golden chinquapin. The same is true in your neighborhood. At this point the same is true everywhere. It’s what this culture is about.

It’s what makes this culture proud.

It’s what makes this culture money.

It’s what this culture does.

It’s what this culture is.

It’s why this culture kills life.

Sawyer, the deforester, filed a Timber Harvest Plan. Of course he lied. All throughout the THP he lied. He said studies were performed that were not, and he lied about the results of the studies that were performed. He lied about Smith’s intentions, saying that Smith was no longer going to put in a development (because, as was true earlier at the planning commission, THPs leading to development have more stringent requirements) while Smith and his allies were busy telling seemingly everyone except the California Department of Forestry (CDF) that his plans had never changed. Sawyer lied about us, saying, for example, that we had spelled out threats to him with spruce cones and sticks. We were never quite sure whom he was accusing: perhaps it was the retired environmental health specialist and his wife out walking their dachshunds, or the fundamentalist Christian who doesn’t even swear, or her retired prison guard husband. He also, amusingly enough, said we were a “contentions [sic] group,” and repeated the attacks on our biologist, saying, “During the [public hearings] process the neighbors complained about everything bring in there [sic] own ‘experts.’” Yes, you read that correctly, and no, literacy is not a requirement to be head of the local Republican Party, and yes, I forgot to mention that Sawyer got himself installed as head of the local Grand Jury, and no, literacy is not a requirement for that position, either.

Yes, we are all deeply screwed.

At first CDF rejected his THP. Sawyer told CDF that the average age of the trees is about seventy years. He said this not because it’s true, but because CDF won’t allow deforesters to clearcut trees who average less than sixty years. CDF found that the average was forty-eight years. Even the most incompetent deforester should be able to tell that difference, which means that even Sawyer should have been able to tell that difference, which means that Sawyer took a shot at getting to clearcut, and it didn’t work out for him. No harm done (to him), though, because CDF imposes no penalties for lying (or incompetence). CDF just tells the deforester how to revise. The deforester then resubmits the THP, and if the deforester is smart enough to follow CDF’s lead, the THP gets accepted. Sawyer was evidently not quite smart enough to get it in one try, but given enough chances even the poorest student can eventually figure out what to do. A couple of tries later CDF said the THP was good to go.

To give an idea of how captured an agency CDF is, the forester essentially writes CDF’s final response to public concerns. Yes, you read that correctly as well. In Sawyer’s case, they cleaned up his grammar and spelling, but kept and endorsed his lies.

This isn’t unusual.

This is how the system works.

This is how the world is murdered.

So nice and legal. So fully permitted.

It’s got to stop.

We’ve got to bring accountability to these murderers.

Each and every one of us.

To each and every one of them.

I’ve been thinking again lately about the Declaration of Independence, and about how it says, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. . . .” Even if we leave off Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for right now, we only need mention that this culture is killing the planet. It is not very possible for this culture—and I’m thinking specifically of the corporations and the governments that serve them—to be more destructive of Life than it already is. If we agree that this Form of Government is destructive of Life, then what does that suggest we should do?

Throughout all of this, Sawyer spent a lot of time hanging out near some of the neighbors’ homes. It is perhaps significant that he hung out near the homes of women, most especially single women or women whose husbands were at work. The women complained. He ignored—or perhaps enjoyed—their complaints. The men in the neighborhood erected a gate, locked it. Sawyer cut off this lock and added one of his own so that the people who lived behind the gate couldn’t get out. Sheriffs were called. They refused to remove the lock or to cite Sawyer, but they did call him and tell him to open the gate. When he arrived, he told everyone there that this was not his lock, that he had not done this, that we had done this to make him look bad. After incredulous stares by sheriffs and neighbors alike, he opened the lock that was not his, that he had not put there. He then said he had no recollection of putting that lock there, and added that sometimes when he gets mad he loses control and does things that later he does not remember.

The women tried to get personal restraining orders against Sawyer.

In response, Sawyer made sure to let the women know—in writing—that he carries a gun.

We all got the message.

Both of the judges in our county recused themselves because they’re Sawyer’s buddies. One woman expressed her fears to the district attorney. The district attorney also refused to get involved, stating that he, too, is a longtime close personal friend of Sawyer’s, and that Sawyer is a very fine person, a good citizen.

Of course he’s a good citizen of this culture. He’s precisely what we would expect.

I feel the need to point out the obvious: if I took to hanging out near Sawyer’s home when he was not there, peering in his windows at his wife, and if I told her that I sometimes lose control and do things that later I do not remember, and if I sent her a letter informing her that I carry a gun, and if I went up to Schultz in the board of supervisors’ chambers and formed my hand into the shape of a pistol and threatened him, I would now be in jail.

Sawyer is not in jail. Nor is Schultz.

We sued to stop the logging and development (because the THP was so bad, not because of Sawyer’s stalking). We went to court, with a visiting judge. It was extremely clear that our case was better than the other side’s. It was also clear that our attorney—who literally wrote the book on the California Forest Practice Act,²⁰⁹ and who has argued forest defense cases before the California Supreme Court—was infinitely better than theirs, whose research skills can best be summed up by the fact that he didn’t even bother to Google the lead plaintiff, me.²¹⁰ Their response to our lawsuit cited essentially no case law, and was riddled with inconsistencies (such as stating that they’re not going to develop, and at the same time suggesting to the court that our lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to prevent them from developing), and of course the same old falsehoods, with some new ones thrown in.

So given all this, we won in court, right?

Well, to believe so—as at one point I believed would happen—would be to manifest an unforgivable naïveté and an embarrassing ignorance of how the judicial system works. It would be to believe that the judicial system is primarily about justice, or that it’s primarily about laws, or that it’s primarily about making decisions based on a preponderance of evidence, or that it’s primarily about debating positions, or that it’s primarily about physical reality, or that it’s primarily about common sense, or that it’s primarily about a search for truth. It is none of these. It is primarily about maintaining the current social order. It is primarily about property. It is primarily about profit.

But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Once we were in the courtroom I was reminded of what I already knew: in this system profit trumps law, trumps science, trumps logic, trumps truthfulness, trumps the natural world, and so on.

The judge’s first question to our attorney was: “If we presume that he is not going to develop, how does that alter your case?”

That was the moment I knew we’d lost. Smith had pushed, and lied, and pushed, until people—first the county employee, then CDF, then the judge—were eager to believe his lies.

The judge’s attitude—and I have to say that he was a very personable fellow who was not entirely unsympathetic to what we were saying, although he was completely ignorant of environmental law, and it did not seem to concern him in the slightest when the other side would reference nonexistent laws and our attorney would respond by citing (and producing hard copies of) precise case law showing how the other side’s comments were both inaccurate and misleading—perfectly manifests this culture’s attitudes toward the natural world. He looked softly toward where I sat next to our attorney, and said, “You have an interest in what happens on this land.” He then turned and looked just as softly at the developer and his attorney, and said, “And we can all see that you certainly have an interest in what happens on this land.” That’s it, right there. We can accept that people who live next to a piece of land, who love that piece of land, who love the salamanders and salal and redwoods and huckleberries and skunk cabbage and red-legged frogs who live on that land, have an interest. But someone who wishes to destroy this land to make a buck, someone who does not even live here, someone who has no interest in this land whatsoever except insofar as its destruction makes him money, we can all see that he certainly has an interest.

There you have it.

We settled the case, and so far as settling, we did well, for now. The developer will cut—kill, murder for money—the trees he has marked for death on half of the property, and will not be able to develop that for a year. The other half was also saved temporarily. If he tries to develop after that, we can (and will) of course still fight him.

There’s a sense in which we won, but even when we win these victories, the trees and salamanders and birds still lose.

And even when we win I still feel like crying.