IDENTIFICATION
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
The earth has Fates all her own. The earth has purpose. And we can only partially know what that purpose is. So I want to reverse our understanding and usage of that word, just like we need to reverse the notion of who is doing environmental work, or any of the other work on this planet. We think we’re doing it all. But the animals are doing the real work of holding it all together, and keeping us on our path. As are the plants. It’s as if we think the stars and sun and moon and the earth itself aren’t doing any work. It’s as if we think that all of nature is unintelligent except for us. Well, the earth has intelligence and purpose and fates all her own. And those are really the primary fates.
This calls upon us to have tremendous responsibility: it is our responsibility to participate in those Fates. We’re part of the earth. It is up to us to be in alignment with those purposes, not to go against them, nor to sit back and pretend. You have to give back. You have to participate in those fates, because they are your Fates as well.
THE OTHER NIGHT I DREAMT I GOT OFF AN AIRPLANE AND WALKED through one terminal to another, carrying a metal suitcase. My first flight had been delayed, and now I was late for the next. I arrived at the gate. The person behind the counter asked for my ID. I pulled out my wallet and handed her my driver’s license. For some reason she didn’t like the numbers on it and so wouldn’t accept it. No problem, I thought, and pulled out another driver’s license. I evidently had about ten. Unfortunately she didn’t like any of them. Me and my metal suitcase were going to have to find another way to get where we were going.
That dream has me thinking about identity. Who am I?
The whole question of identifying myself as a consumer, or as a voter, or as a writer, or as a revolutionary has me thinking again about definitions. Just as it seems clear to me that the only level of technology that is sustainable is the Stone Age, for reasons I hope I’ve made clear, it also seems clear to me that only a certain sense of self is sustainable, too.
The eighteenth premise of this book is that this culture’s current sense of self is no more sustainable than its current use of energy or technology.
If you perceive yourself as a consumer, consume you will. If you perceive yourself as a “new and thoroughly superior predator” you will act like one.
42 If you perceive yourself as a member of a species that can act no other way than to destroy your landbase, that is what you will do. If you perceive yourself as the “apex” of evolution, you will try to climb to the top of something that has no top, and you will crush those you perceive as being beneath you. If you believe you are separate from your landbase, you may believe you can destroy your landbase and survive, and you may very well destroy it. If you perceive yourself as entitled to exploit those around you, you will do so.
Not one of those self-perceptions is sustainable. If you perceive yourself in any of those ways, you and those who perceive the world like you will not survive long into the future. I don’t really care about that: if that’s how you perceive the world, then good riddance to you. The problem is that before you go down you will cause a lot of unnecessary misery, and you will take down a lot of others with you.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWENTY-ONE. ORVs. Off-road vehicles. Whenever I begin to feel even the slightest bit optimistic about our future, all it takes to bring me down is these three little letters: ORV.
Here’s a headline from a recent
San Francisco Chronicle (page B-1, above the fold, full picture): “Curbing off-road recreation: Asbestos, rare plants threaten freewheeling bikers in the Clear Creek Management Area.” The article begins: “If there is a Garden of Eden for off-road enthusiasts, it might be the Clear Creek Management Area, about 50,000 miles of dirt-bike bliss 55 miles south of Hollister. . . . But as in Eden, it appears that new information could bring an end to, or at least lead to limits on, the freewheeling good times at Clear Creek.” The “new information” is that off-road vehicle use destroys soils and kills plants,
43 in this case the rare San Benito evening primrose, among others.
44Remember that the first rule of propaganda is that if you can slide your premises by people, you’ve got them. Remember also that abusers must always position themselves as the real victims. Here, it is not the drivers of off-road vehicles who threaten (or rather kill) plants, but instead the rare plants who “threaten freewheeling bikers.”
45If riding ORVs is explicitly conflated with bliss (dictionary definition: “complete happiness”) and being in the Garden of Eden (dictionary definition: “paradise”), if irresponsible and inherently destructive behavior is redefined as (or considered to be) “freewheeling good times,” there is no realistic chance this culture will stop killing the planet.
I think about this a lot. If we must fight as hard as we do to stop destructive activities that are purely and merely recreational, and if we so often lose those fights anyway, even with the continued existence of species themselves at stake, there is no realistic chance that by using current strategies and tactics we will be able to stop destructive activities that serve utilitarian functions. This is not to say that utility or production is more important than recreation or leisure, but to point out that ORVs are peripheral to the system, and if we cannot halt destructive activities that are entirely expendable to the system’s functioning, we will not be able to stop activities on which the system relies. If we cannot by accepted means stop ORVs, we will never by accepted means stop logging, mining, or oil extraction. If we are still fighting over rodeos or the wearing of fur,
46 to use different examples, we will never stop vivisection, factory farming, or factory fishing.
47 If we cannot by accepted means stop that which is both ridiculous and nonessential to the system, we will never by accepted means stop that which, while still ridiculous, is fundamental to the system’s continuation.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWENTY-TWO. ORVs. No, I’m not including them again just because they’re so pointlessly destructive.
48 Instead I’m including them because of the U.S. Supreme Court. Yesterday the Supremes unanimously ruled that citizens do not have the right to sue federal agencies that fail to enforce environmental laws. Yes, you read that correctly. The case concerned ORVs. Here’s the story. Citizens had filed suit against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
49 in Utah for failing to keep ORV users out of two million acres of potential wilderness (note that if ORV users or other despoilers can punch roads into these wilderness areas, even illegally, the areas can then be precluded from wilderness protection). The BLM is required by law to protect these lands from ORV users (or, as someone from the
Chronicle might write, is required to expel them from paradise), but as Supreme Court Justice [
sic] Antonin Scalia put it, any land-use plan requiring that the BLM protect a certain area is merely a “statement of priorities” and not a legally binding commitment. The essence of the Supreme Court ruling is that citizens
can sue to force federal agencies to take some legally required action, but
cannot sue to force them to act with haste or effectiveness. Thus if the BLM is required to protect a piece of ground from ORV users, it seems that so long as the BLM comes up with some plan—any plan, no matter how ludicrous—citizens have no recourse through the judicial system.
We stand by our vital commitment to protecting these grounds, the BLM could say,
and will spend exactly three dollars per year on enforcement. We will be sure to stop all destructive ORV use on these lands by 2050, or when the last drop of oil has been used, whichever comes last. And there’s nothing you could do to stop them.
Or rather there is nothing you could do using the courts.
Here’s the real story. You and I both know that the primary purpose of regulatory agencies is to provide buffers between citizen outrage and those who destroy their landbases and their lives,
50 to provide “statements of priorities” without providing legally binding commitments. Anyone who has ever attempted to protect a piece of ground from the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management has run into this:
every time someone finds a way to use the agencies’ own rules to stop the destruction, the agencies change the rules.
Scalia was being disingenuous when he talked about the BLM making a “statement of priorities.” Priorities are evident in action (or inaction). Any statement made by the BLM or by anyone else that is not backed up by action is merely a smokescreen, something to create the distractions Lundy Bancroft said are characteristic of abusers: “In one important way, an abusive man works like a magician. His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. . . . His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.”
51The same is true here. The BLM states that protecting wild places is a priority but does not do so. The Supreme Court pretends we live in a place where citizens can act to protect their landbases, but tries to prevent them from doing so. The list goes on.
This Supreme Court ruling reminds me of the famous line by John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” I would modify that to apply to our landbases: “Those who make peaceful protection of our landbases impossible make violent defense of our landbases inevitable.”
In related news, Humboldt county, one county south of here, has the second highest per capita rate of rape in California. Last year sixty-one rapes were reported to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, which arrested precisely two rapists. The department arrested at least eight times that many tree-sitters, who were attempting to stop Pacific Lumber from illegally deforesting the county.
52 In just one not-atypical example, twenty-nine sheriffs, three trainees, and four California Highway Patrol provided the on-ground muscle for the PL contractors who pulled down the tree-sitters. Just as with the BLM, a primary purpose of the Sheriff’s Department is to provide the illusion of protection while enforcing, as always, Premise Four of this book. Priorities are evident in action.
I don’t think there are many here among us who would object in this case to me modifying Kennedy’s statement again, and applying it to rapists: Those who make peaceful protection of our bodies impossible make violent defense of our bodies inevitable.
Let’s bring this back now to the toxification of our total landscape and of our bodies by chemical corporations and those who run them. Those who make peaceful protection of our bodies impossible make violent defense of our bodies inevitable.
What is done to the earth is done to ourselves. It really is that simple. We cannot live without the earth. The earth can live without us. It is an open question at this point whether it can live with us. It certainly cannot live with us as we are now.
Because of civilization, almost 1,400 square miles of land per year are converted to desert, more than twice the rate from thirty years ago (and essentially infinitely more than the rate before civilization). In about twenty years, two-thirds of the arable land in Africa will be gone, as well as one-third in Asia and one-fifth in South America. Even the capitalist press acknowledges, “Technology can make the problem worse. In parts of Australia, irrigation systems are pumping up salty water and slowly poisoning farms. In Saudi Arabia, herdsmen can use water trucks instead of taking their animals from oasis to oasis—but by staying in one place, the herds are getting bigger and eating all the grass. In Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, coastal resorts are swallowing up water that once moistened the wilderness. Many farmers in those countries still flood their fields instead of using more miserly ‘drip irrigation,’ and the resulting shortages are slowly baking the life out of the land.” The corporate press further acknowledges that prior to civilization even some of what are now the most inhospitable deserts were habitable, saying that “much of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa were once green. The Sahara itself was a savanna, and rock paintings show giraffes, elephants and cows once lived there.”
53As industrial civilization kills the land, so too it kills the oceans. Each summer a dead zone covers 8,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico. Another blankets Chesapeake Bay. Another the Baltic Sea. Altogether, there are almost 150 dead zones, places where the water contains too little oxygen to sustain life. This number has doubled each decade since the 1960s. The cause? Industrial agriculture.
54And of course dead zones are not even the greatest threat to the oceans. Far greater is deep-sea trawling. Damage is severe enough to cause the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to report, “Every year, the giant nets that trawler ships pull across the bottom of the sea devastate an area of the global seabed twice the size of the United States, scraping up everything from coral to sharks.”
55Industrial civilization is killing the land. It is killing the water.
It would be a mistake to think this culture clearcuts only forests. It clearcuts our psyches as well. It would be a mistake to think it dams only rivers. We ourselves are dammed (and damned) by it as well. It would be a mistake to think it creates dead zones only in the ocean. It creates dead zones in our hearts and minds. It would be a mistake to think it fragments only habitat. We, too, are fragmented, split off, shredded, rent, torn.
Just last night I saw a television commercial put out by BP, the corporation formerly known as British Petroleum. The corporation now claims that BP stands for Beyond Petroleum, and runs public relations campaigns extolling its renewable energy research. For example, BP has made a lot of noise about the fact that in 1999 it paid $45 million to buy Solarex, a corporation specializing in renewable energy. This may seem like a lot of money until we realize that BP paid $26.5 billion to buy Arco in order to expand its petroleum production base, and until we realize further that BP will spend $5 billion over five years to explore for oil just in Alaska, and until we realize even further that BP spent more in 2000 on a new “eco-friendly” logo than on renewable energy.
56 As Cait Murphy wrote in
Fortune, “Here’s a novel advertising strategy—pitch your least important product and ignore your most important one. . . . If the world’s second-largest oil company is beyond petroleum,
Fortune is beyond words.” BP’s regional president Bob Murphy acknowledges that BP is “decades away” from moving beyond petroleum, which means that the whole Beyond Petroleum name change is meaningless: by that time we’ll
all be beyond petroleum, since the accessible oil will all be gone. Further exemplifying the meaninglessness of the name change, a resolution calling for BP to do more to slow global warming was opposed by the board and defeated. BP’s chair Peter Sutherland told shareholders that “there have been calls for BP to phase out the sale of fossil fuels. We cannot accept this, and there’s no point pretending we can.”
57In other words, BP’s name change is a “statement of priorities” and not a legally binding commitment. Or more to the point, it’s another one of those smokescreens.
This particular type of smokescreen has been most fully developed by a public relations consultant with the appropriately named Peter Sandman. He has been nicknamed the High Priest of Outrage because corporations hire him to dissipate public anger, to put people back to sleep. Sandman has explicitly stated his self-perceived role: “I get hired to help a company to ‘explain to these confused people that the refinery isn’t going to blow up, so they will leave us alone.’”
58He developed a five point program for corporations to disable public rage. First, convince the public that they are participating in the destructive processes themselves, that the risks are not externally imposed.
You asked for it by wearing those clothes, says the rapist.
You drive a car, too, says the PR guru. Second, convince them that the benefits of the processes outweigh the harm.
You could never support yourself without me, says the abuser.
How would you survive without fossil fuels?” repeats the PR guru. Third, undercut the fear by making the risk feel familiar. Explain your response and people will relax (whether or not your response is meaningful or effective).
Don’t you worry about it, I’ll take care of everything. Things will change, you’ll see, says the abuser.
We are moving beyond petroleum and toward sustainability, says the PR guru. Fourth, emphasize again that the public has control over the risk (whether or not they do).
You could leave anytime you want, but I know you won’t, says the abuser.
If we all just pull together, we’ll find our way through, says the PR guru. Fifth, acknowledge your mistakes, and say (even if untrue) that you are trying to do better.
I promise I will never hit you again, the abuser repeats.
It is time to stop living in the past, and move together into the future, drones the PR guru.
59Speaking to a group of mining executives, Sandman, who also consults for BP, stated, “There is a growing sense that you screw up a lot, and as a net result it becomes harder to get permission to mine.” His solution is not actually to change how the industry works, of course, but instead to find an appropriate “persona” for the industry. “Reformed sinner,” he says, “works quite well if you can sell it. . . . ‘Reformed sinner,’ by the way, is what John Brown of BP has successfully done for his organization. It is arguably what Shell has done with respect to Brent Spar. Those are two huge oil companies that have done a very good job of saying to themselves, ‘Everyone thinks we are bad guys. . . . We can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realised we were bad guys and we are going to be better.’ . . . It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys after you have spent awhile in purgatory.”
60In the ad I saw last night, an off-camera interviewer asks a woman, “What would you rather have: a car or a cleaner environment?”
The woman pauses, seemingly thoughtfully, before at last saying, “I can’t imagine me without my car. Of course I’d rather have a clean environment, but I think that that compromise is very hard to make where we are.”
61The ad ends with a voiceover saying what BP is doing to make the world a better place.
Look what just happened here. What are the premises of this advertisement? The first is that the advertisement is presented in the form of an interview, and it can be easy to forget that it’s a paid advertisement. A BP website devoted to the ads stresses that the ads were culled from hundreds of interviews with “random strangers.” I’m sure they did interview hundreds: that gave them a larger sample from which to draw the responses that most closely fit their needs. Consider, had the directors of the advertisement happened to ask me this question, I doubt they would have wasted film on my answer, and certainly they would not have paid to put it on television. Instead the “interviews” the director decided to use were chosen precisely because they brilliantly and succinctly put in place Sandman’s five points: we participate willingly, the benefits outweigh the harm, the risk is somehow familiar, we have control over the risk, and BP is working to solve the problems.
But there is more going on here. First, the ad pretends that the “environment” is something “out there” that is separate from ourselves. Consider if the “interviewer” had asked, “Given that our own well-being is inextricably linked to the health of our landbase, would you rather have a healthy landbase or an entire culture based on the ‘comforts and elegancies’ that come from destroying this landbase?” And then consider if he would have followed up by asking, “If you choose the latter, what does it say about you as a person?” Or what if instead the “interviewer” had commented that just in the United States about 30,000 people die each year from respiratory illnesses caused by auto-related airborne toxins, and that 65 percent of all carbon monoxide emitted into the environment is from road vehicles, then asked, “What would you rather have, car culture or your life?”
Second, what are the implications of the “interviewer” using the adjective cleaner to describe “the environment” this woman would allegedly gain were she to stop driving. This presumes that “the environment” is already clean, and that the current situation is the default. How would the ad run if we change the question to, “What would you rather have: a planet that is not being made filthy and in fact destroyed by automobiles and other effects of civilization, or your car?”
A deeper, more invisible unstated premise of this ad is that a non-clean planet is her fault (and by extension ours, insofar as the director of the ad is able to get us to identify with this woman). “What would you rather have: a car or a cleaner environment?” It’s her choice. It’s her car. If only she would sell her old Honda Civic, the implication goes, everything would be okay. But she can’t do that. As she says, “I can’t imagine me without my car.” She, and once again by extension each of us, is supposed to identify more with the artifacts of civilization, with machines, than with a landbase. This is what we are trained to do. We are also trained to lack imagination. If our imaginations had not already been clearcut we could not—would not—live the way we do. And further, we are also trained to be narcissistic enough to believe that if we personally cannot imagine something that it must not be possible.
This identification with the artifacts of civilization is precisely what each of us must break. If she cannot imagine herself without her car, I wish her luck in imagining herself without her planet.
And another premise. She states, “Of course I’d rather have a clean environment, but I think that that compromise is very hard to make where we are.”
This “compromise” would only be difficult for those who have already had their sanity effectively destroyed. The world does not need us or our cars. We need the world.
These corporations just never stop. I saw another ad by BP. The “interviewer” asks a man, “So what would you say to an oil company?”
The man responds, “I’d say: Your products are a necessary evil, but we all use it, we all partake in it, we all enjoy it. Let’s figure out ways together to make it a little more environmentally safe.”
62You can parse this one. Go ahead, tear it apart. It’s fun. And once you’re done tearing apart their discourse, we can proceed to tear apart something else.
BP is not alone. There are other corporations just as bad. Many of them.
For example, one corporation, ExxonMobil, has by itself released 5 percent of this culture’s carbon emissions. According to a recent study, “From 1882 to 2002, emissions of carbon dioxide from Exxon and its predecessor companies, through its operations and the burning of its products, totaled an estimated 20.3 billion metric tons. . . . That represents 4.7 percent to 5.3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions during that time.”
It is not surprising, then, that Exxon has, to quote the same report, “been active in undermining climate science and policy making for years, in particular in lobbying against the Kyoto Protocol, the main international agreement to tackle climate change.”
It is probably also not surprising that last year after shareholders voted down by a margin of four to one a resolution calling for the corporation to switch to renewable energy sources, CEO and Chair Lee Raymond stated, “We don’t invest to make social statements at the expense of shareholder return.”
63
