TAKING IT PERSONALLY

The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. How far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape, low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky is not safe from scath—blurred and blackened whole summers together with the smoke of fires that devour the woods.

—JOHN MUIR

 

 

 

IT IS LONG BEFORE DAWN, the morning after the trial. I awaken from a dream. In this dream I’m on the edge of a cliff, and think I might fall off. Then I climb away from the cliff, and see that there is a building on the top of the mountain. I go inside, where a bunch of people are about to play a poker tournament. The person who runs the apartment says it will cost twenty dollars to enter. I get out my wallet and see that I have a few hundred dollars. Everybody else sees that too. I give him twenty. I see a table with chocolates. I eat a piece, and sit down to play poker. I have a hard time figuring out their chip system: they have lots of weird chips that don’t make any sense to me. They’re terrible players, and are playing really slow. We play three hands. I blink a couple of times, then say, “Can we play faster? This is going to take forever.”

They all look at me, and one says, “You’re out of the tournament. You lost all your chips on the last hand.”

“I didn’t even play the last hand.”

“Yes, you did. You played a terrible hand, and we took all your chips.”

“I don’t play terrible hands. I only play hands where I’ve got a good shot at winning.”

“You lost.”

I pick up a telephone, and call some sort of hotline. I tell them what happened. They say this place is known for that. The people who run this place had drugged my chocolate, then when I was unconscious they’d taken my chips. I look in my wallet. It’s empty. Everyone in the room is looking at me intently, and I know that if I confront them they’ll kill me.

I shake my head and walk out of the room.

This is how I feel about the legal system.

It just doesn’t fucking stop. We settled Friday afternoon. Saturday morning before nine Sawyer was trespassing on one neighbor’s property, outside her (please note the feminine personal pronoun) door inside her fence, preparing to widen the road (explicitly excluded from the agreement). She confronted him, told him to leave. He refused. When our attorney complained in writing, Sawyer responded that he was within his rights, and strongly (and falsely) implied that the neighbor is an alcoholic.

Because part of the agreement is that they only work on weekdays, and another part is that they not widen the road, it took them less than eighteen hours to violate the settlement.

Of course none of this is unique. This is how this culture works. This happens all over.

I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

I don’t know how much more of this the world can take.

I’m talking to my sister about my work.

She asks how I keep from getting angry.

I tell her I don’t think anger is a bad thing.

She asks how I keep anger and sorrow from consuming me.

I tell her my standard answer, which is that I feel it, and I aim it, and I don’t take it personally.

This is all true.

But this particular assault is killing me, more than much bigger atrocities elsewhere, more than much bigger atrocities I’ve dealt with, more than when the system has destroyed equally beautiful and much larger wild places I’ve worked to defend. And it’s because this time I’m taking it personally.

This is all precisely what anyone who opposes this culture deals with every day.

Maybe part of the problem is that too often we don’t take it personally. Maybe I should have taken it personally when my grandfather died of cancer. Maybe I should have taken it personally when a developer destroyed a prairie dog village near where I grew up. Maybe I should have taken it personally when the Forest Service destroyed tens of thousands of acres of old growth I was working to protect. Maybe I should take it personally that Dick Cheney stole water from the Klamath River to give to farmers because he wanted their votes, and the Klamath River salmon suffered a monumental fish kill. Maybe I should take it personally that islands of plastic trash suffocate oceans. Maybe I should take global warming personally, not only because it will inundate this land I love but because it is killing the planet. Maybe I should take the toxification of the total environment personally.

If I did that, if I took all of this personally, how would that affect my actions?

If you took this personally, how would it affect your actions?

Maybe it would hurt more, but maybe we would do more about it.

Maybe we would fight back.

It’s a week later. I return to the land. It is well after working hours. I am trespassing. The attorney has told me that if I am caught trespassing, it will harm our case in future trials. We are both aware that the other side is allowed to violate laws with impunity. If we are caught violating laws once, our credibility is lost forever.

But right now that’s not as important to me as the fact that someone needs to ascertain whether Sawyer and his crew are violating the terms of the agreement. I know CDF won’t do it. They won’t even return our telephone calls.

I’m not sure what I will do when I discover violations. Sawyer’s lies haven’t cost him before. Why should they now?

But I need to know.

So I walk in. The cliché I’m supposed to invoke is that what’s left of the forest looks like a battlefield. But it doesn’t, because I only see casualties from one side. It looks more like a massacre. I walk over and among the dead and dying bodies of trees. I say only two things, and I say them over and over: “Fuck,” and “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I walk to where I saw the slender salamanders. The area, like so many others here, like so many others all over the planet, is devastated. I cannot see how the salamanders could have been anything other than crushed.

I notice, of course, that the trees have been cut in clusters, creating clearings. I notice as well that these clearings are conveniently centered around the perc test holes. But I’m sure that must be a coincidence, since time and again Smith and his allies have told us they aren’t going to put in a development. And we have no reason to disbelieve them, do we?

Of course I see THP violations left and right. To choose just one egregious yet not atypical example, they’ve allowed—or caused, actually, since were they not there this would not have happened—mounds of dirt to fall into the stream. The THP stated explicitly that they would not allow—cause—even a speck.

But none of this will make CDF or the courts or the county government or Fish and Wildlife stop the slaughter, for the simple reason that an essential function of CDF and the courts and the county government and Fish and Wildlife is precisely to facilitate, rationalize, and protect these destructive activities.

I walk among the downed trees. I look at their still-green needles. “Fuck,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

It’s getting dark. I walk home. I hate the people who did this, and I hate the system that serves them and those like them. And I am ashamed of myself and those like me for not standing strong enough, for not holding those who would destroy accountable, for not stopping them from destroying the places we love, and for not following the Declaration of Independence and abolishing these institutions that are so destructive of Life.

I am ashamed that we are not stopping this culture from killing the planet.

I am tired of saying, “I am so sorry.”

To say we are sorry is not good enough.

It is time to stop these destructive activities.