WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN

We must all share the burden of responsibility. . . . I could never look the wives and children of the fallen in the eye if I did not do something to stop this senseless slaughter.

Count Claus von Stauffenberg, killed by the Nazis for his part in the resistance²²⁶

I THINK THAT ABOVE I UNDERSTATED THE PROBLEM. THE WORLD is being killed. It is not true that if we do not fight back we run the risk of destroying our own souls and our dignity, and we run the risk of allowing those who are exterminating the world to move ever faster. At this point, with all excuses long since exhausted, if we do not fight back we destroy our own souls and our own dignity, and far worse, we do allow those who are exterminating the world to move ever faster.²²⁷ No risk about it.

I give a talk. Afterwards four of us—myself and three women—go get something to eat. We sit at a dark pizza place—one of the few places still open at this time of night—and I marvel at how much cheaper pizzas are in the Midwest than in California.

We drink water while we wait for our food. We talk. A lull in the conversation turns into a longer silence. We can all tell that one woman is thinking, and we don’t want to interrupt her. Finally she says, “I used to know a professor where I went to college who vivisected rhesus monkeys. He’s a Jewish man whose family fled to the United States in the 1930s to get out of Nazi Germany. Throughout the 1960s he was a strong supporter of civil rights, and worked for all sorts of humanitarian causes. At the same time he was an extremely successful and respected researcher at the university. In this research he did horrible things to the monkeys. I remember him telling me, ‘A terrible enemy of mine once accused me of being the Dr. Mengele of the monkeys. How could he say such a ghastly thing?’ Even more than me remembering what he said I remember the utter disbelief on his face. He had no idea what this ‘enemy’ was talking about.”

One of the women responds, “Do you believe that?”

The first woman says immediately, “No, not for a second. He knew exactly what the other person meant. He was bullshitting me to make himself feel better.”

The second woman responds again, “Why did you say he had no idea, then?”

Just as quickly the first woman says, “I was bullshitting myself to make myself feel better for not killing him for what he did to those monkeys.”

None of us say anything.

She continues, “The more I think about it, the more I believe his disbelief was actually over the fact that this other person had the gall to compare him to Mengele out loud, not that it wasn’t the truth.”

The third woman says, “His disbelief was that someone had broken the silence.”

The second: “We’re all taught very well, aren’t we?”

The first again: “This particular researcher was always upset by the things he ‘had’ to do: the horrible surgeries, and the gross results that followed. For instance, he and his colleagues would do brain surgeries, even though they were not surgeons—they thought they were so entitled. And sometimes, he admitted out loud, the surgical instruments would slip, just a little here and there, and sometimes the monkeys would lose the use of their limbs because a portion of their brains had been destroyed.”

The second: “Someone should slice his brain, see how he likes it.”

The first: “The stories were atrocious. I hated that he told them to me, and he knew it, but he did it anyway. I don’t think he could help himself. He talked constantly, day in and day out, about what he was doing, as well as what the Jews went through, all of the atrocities, weaving the stories in and out of each other. It was amazing. He was a smart man, so surely he knew full well the glaring connection. I think what he couldn’t believe was that someone who knew him, this enemy who knew his own Jewish past, not to mention all the ‘good’ work he had done over the years, had the awesome nerve to accuse him of what was so obviously a truth he wanted others to keep silent about, even though in his own stories, he constantly exposed them. Unlike some abusers who can’t ever admit what they’ve done, I always thought he knew. His stories gave him away.”

The second woman says, “I think he was telling those stories again and again because he wanted everyone’s approval. Each time he said it and no one stopped him or even spoke to him, he received implicit permission to continue.”

We all nod. No one says anything for a moment. I take a sip of water, then say, “If this were a novel, and the monkeys he tortured were figments of some writer’s imagination, I suppose the knowledge deep in his soul of the crimes he has committed would somehow be enough punishment, but . . .”

The second woman: “No, it’s not. It’s not nearly enough.”

We all know what the others are thinking.

The first woman continues, “Here’s another thing I remember. One day he went slumping through the department muttering under his breath about how awful one of the female monkeys he’d just been ‘working with’ had been because she’d thrown her shit at him. He couldn’t understand that either.”

She pauses, and this time no one speaks.

She says, “He knew he horrified me. One day he came tromping through the halls waving a bloody lab jacket and saw me standing there. He barked at me, ‘You’ll be happy to know I’m no longer using rhesus monkeys. The program is over.’ He marched into his office and slammed the door.”

What can we say?

She says, “I’ll bet the dead monkeys were glad the ‘program’ was over, too.”

I look away.

She says, “And by the way, in the college’s old physiology/anatomy department before they built their new buildings, you could smell the burning of the research animals twice a day—at 10 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.—and that included the rhesus monkeys.”

Finally the second woman says, “That doctor has to be stopped before he begins another program. He cannot be allowed to continue.”

The third woman begins to speak quickly, “Along with every other research scientist in that department and all of the graduate research students who so desperately kiss ass and do whatever is needed to assure themselves of a good career continuing that behavior, and along with every department that’s like that in this country and any country, and all of the research corporations that do that. But instead they get rewards and money and have things named after them.”

The second woman: “For now.”

“What?” responds the third. “Oh, yes. I understand.”

The first woman says, softly, “Last I heard he had cancer. But he’s probably getting pain killers, which is more than he managed to do for his monkeys.”

When I think of resilience, I think of a stream near my home where tiny fry of coho salmon swim above a bottom clogged by sandy sediment from logging. I think of the pond outside my home where the black eggs of northern red-legged frogs—disappearing, too—hang suspended in jelly clinging to underwater branches, and I think of the tadpoles who survive UV from ozone depletion, survive pesticides, survive predators to hop, tiny as dimes, onto the shore and into the forest. I think of aromatic Port Orford cedars—disappearing like the rest—fighting against an introduced disease (and even moreso against an introduced culture, introduced timber corporations, and introduced chainsaws). And I think of American chestnuts, whose crowns once grew one hundred feet across, felled also by an introduced illness: young trees rise up, die, then sprout again from the roots. Where does that pool of strength come from—for chestnuts, for all of them? What is that rootstock of resilience from which, given a chance, these others regenerate?

When I think of resilience, I remember the determination I once saw in the eyes and in the set jaw of a child who’d vowed when he grew up he wouldn’t strike his son or daughter as his father had struck him. I think of the open tears of fright from a grown woman taken back by an innocent gesture to a time in her childhood when her father could and would have killed her had she not slipped from his grasp, and I think of how she has successfully fashioned a creative life from the wreckage of her childhood. I think of the pride with which another woman—this one beaten and raped by her father as a child—states that she has never struck nor even shouted at her sons.

When I think of resilience I wonder where all of this strength comes from, and I wonder how people so violated—stabbed in the arms and chest with a steak knife, or beaten with ropes, or starved, or forced by fist to finish plate after plate after plate of unwanted food (and these are just people I know personally) —can sometimes grow up to live lives marked by grace and compassion.

My own first experience of resilience—or rather of conditions that called it forth, then shaped it to my body and emotions, made it necessary—came early, from the physical and sexual violence my father inflicted upon us.

One of the ways I survived was by pretending nothing was happening, nothing was amiss. I had a deal with my unconscious: because I was spared the beatings, I made myself believe that if I didn’t consciously acknowledge the abuse, it wouldn’t be visited directly upon me. My father’s first visit to my bedroom didn’t abrogate the deal. It couldn’t, because without the deal I couldn’t have survived. In order to maintain the illusion of control in an uncontrollably painful situation, that is, in order to stay alive, the events in my bedroom necessarily didn’t happen. His body behind mine, his penis between my legs, these images slipped in and out of my mind as easily and quickly as he slipped into and out of my room.²²⁸

Of course it’s simply not possible to survive such trauma. The pain was too strong, the pressure too deforming, for me to bear. I repeatedly erected psychological and emotional walls to keep out this relationship too terrifying to tolerate, and just as repeatedly these walls were smashed down in the next wave of violence, only to be re-erected by a child desperate to keep some parts of himself safe, separate from the violence, and thus untainted by terror.

When I was a child, I used to climb out my bedroom window at night to lie beneath the stars. The tiny points would get bigger and bigger as they rushed closer to me, or I to them, and soon I would hear their voices. They would say to me that none of this was my fault, that none of this was right, that things were not supposed to be this way. They told me they loved me. Had they not told me all of this, I would have died.

My childhood, while dramatic, wasn’t unusual. We’ve all seen the numbers. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, just within this country a half million children are killed or seriously injured by their parents or guardians each year.²²⁹ Studies elsewhere show that nearly one in three girls and one in six boys are sexually abused by the time they’re eighteen.²³⁰

I often spent afternoons by myself in the irrigation ditch that ran behind our house. I’d catch crawdads and garter snakes, or climb up the banks to lie on my belly and watch the comings and goings of ants in their hills. I got to know and love the songs of meadowlarks and robins, and the song of the water in the ditch, its sighs and whispers and gloops as it slid around branches and across reeds. Sometimes I came with friends, sometimes with siblings. But my father never came here, nor did I bring him with me.

There are those who pass on to others the abuse they received—I know many people like this, as I’m sure you do—but there are those also who do not. Despite the seeming impossibility of survival, there are children—and adults—who do not accept, wear, and pass on this mantle given to them by those who would initiate them into this lineage of abuse. In fact it happens all the time. I’ve come to know many people who’ve survived the unsurvivable, and whose lives are now full of joy. Indeed, because many of them have had to struggle so hard to find, allow, and realize love in their lives, their appreciation of this is far more profound, layered, and textured than it might be for many who have never been forced to feel the dreadful and grinding ache of terror deep in the marrow of their bones. When and if those formed in such a crucible do achieve some form of hard-won emotional connectedness—with other humans, nonhumans, the natural world, music, art, writing, or even with every breath they take—they often find themselves then able to feel passion more acutely, and to savor those connections with a strength as unfathomable to those for whom these connections are first nature—that is, transparent—as are the original traumas themselves.

Given the near-ubiquity of abuse within our culture—and I’m talking not only about the deformations of child abuse, but of coercive schooling, the wage economy requiring people to waste lives working jobs they’d rather not do, the trauma of living in a world being destroyed before our eyes—the question becomes, what helps some people to open out after having been subject to abuse, and what causes others to shut down? In other words, what causes or allows resilience?

I often walk through the forests where I live. Walk might not be the best word, because the forests are so thick I crawl along game trails, snaking my way between branches and beneath clinging vines. The forest rewards me. Last week I saw a red-legged frog the size of a small dinner plate, and this week the biggest pile of bearshit I’ve ever seen, dark blue and signaling a diet of berries, as well as once again answering in the affirmative the age-old question of whether the bear does in fact shit in the woods. Once, I stumbled across a spot where the bear beds down, and saw tufts of black hair twining with grasses flattened outward beneath a big downed log. I was far from any roads, and lost beyond all hope. This is where she sleeps, I thought. This is her place of refuge.

All things need places where they are allowed to be who they are, places where they can—like the roots of the chestnut trees—derive sustenance and strength from their surroundings. Terror and exploitation do not engender growth, and it is especially true that those normally subject to these need refuges where they can regenerate in peace.

I knew all of this as a child. Everyone does. Thus my relationship to the stars. Thus my relationship to the creatures in the irrigation ditch. Thus—and this may seem odd, but I’d wager this is true for many others thus violated—my relationship to places within my own body that remained safe, places my father could not touch.

It is possible to look back on one’s history, no matter how horrible, and find places of relative safety, where fear was never allowed to permeate. Those places can teach us, if we let them, that as well as knowing fear we can know—as I learned from the ditch, from the stars—safety, peace. We can know what it feels like to not have our guard up, to experience a world where the strong do not exploit the weak, where dogs do not eat dogs. This allows us not only to breathe, but to learn that openness feels different from defendedness, that relationships can be pleasing and beneficial. The key, then, to resilience, is to find or remember those places of refuge, and build out from there. Because I knew that peace exists, and because I experienced the difference between peace and abuse, I was able to migrate, slowly, toward openness, at first only toward the creatures in the ditch, and toward the stars, and then toward others equally nonthreatening, and then toward other people.

Perhaps even more important than providing me a template, those places provided me with the understanding that the pain I suffered was neither natural nor inevitable, that there are other ways to be. This understanding is crucial to resilience, and in fact to the continuation of life, because if all of life consisted of abuse and exploitation, what would be the use in going on?

We are living in the time of industrial capitalism’s greatest ascendancy. One can buy a Big Mac and a Coke (“the real thing”) in nearly every nation of the world. Even more telling of our way of living’s temporary stranglehold on how humans live is the fact that the world has even been carved into nations in the first place. And even more telling than this is that we do not find this startling. All of this means that there are few places anymore (inside or out) safe from civilization’s reach. In the north, polar bear fat is contaminated with dioxin, and their fate is sealed by global warming: wild populations will probably be gone within another couple of generations. In the south, ice caps melt quickly enough to make the most stolid of scientists who study them weep. Trawlers capable of “handling” three hundred and forty-four tons of fish per day spread their nets more than a mile long, scraping the sea floor, destroying all life—fish, birds, other animals—in their paths, tossing much of it—called by-catch—back overboard, dead. Trident submarines patrol the oceans, too, first-strike weapons capable of launching twenty-four missiles simultaneously, each missile containing up to seventeen independently targeted nuclear warheads, each warhead ten times more powerful than the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki, each warhead capable of traveling 7,000 miles, meaning that just one of these subs—and the United States has twenty-two—could effectively eliminate 408 cities across an entire hemisphere. Coral reefs will soon be dead. Glaciers melt around the world. Mount Everest is littered with tons of trash. Ninety-seven percent of North America’s native forests have been cut. Human languages disappear as quickly as so many dreams, as culture after culture is consumed by civilization’s voracious way of “living.” Where is safety?

The future resides in these places of refuge, these places of freedom, small as the inside of our hearts and minds and bodies, and big as the deepest bottom of the oceans where trawlers’ nets cannot reach. Without freedom, without these places that are free of terror and exploitation where we can develop comfortable and nurturing relationships—to streams, to ponds, to pieces of ground, to stars, to human beings, to art, to pets, to music, to ourselves—there can be no resilience. For resilience is relationship, to other and to self, and grows naturally where relationships are allowed to flourish. Salmon in cold streams free of sediment grow to reinhabit other streams. Port Orford Cedars free of the disease grow as well to reinhabit their former territories. And even parts within us that we can by any means keep free of the taint of terror can provide reservoirs of resilience and help us remember what it means to be human.

To reach the middle of the ocean, those in power must have oil to run their ships and metals to build them. To deforest, they must have gasoline to power their chainsaws and metals to build the saws. No oil, and the ships have no capability to reach the center of the ocean, which means that the oceans can begin to live again. No oil, and chainsaws sputter—actually they don’t even do that—and forests must only contend with local use. If those in power have no oil, they cannot rebuild the dams we remove. Part of taking down civilization is the destruction of the oil economy.

Of course in the longer run we must remember how to live in place with what the land willingly gives, but before we can even seriously think about doing that we must remove this threat to the entire planet. To do otherwise is the equivalent of trying to decide how we shall live next summer as we ignore the upraised butcher’s knife in front of us.

The first step in taking down civilization is to realize in our own hearts and minds that the dictionaries lied to us, that civilization is not “a high stage of social and cultural development,”²³¹ or “a developed or advanced state of human society.”²³² I am not talking about convincing some hypothetical mass movement of people, which will not happen within this culture. As I said earlier, when fathers are raping daughters, when lovers are beating those they purport to love, there is no hope for the salmon. I am talking about me realizing this in my own heart, and you realizing it in yours.

The next step in taking down civilization is finding a few other people who feel the same. It is hard enough to take on this entire abusive social structure—where everything is set up to protect the abusers—without having to fight our friends as well. It can be lifesaving to have friends who will say, and mean, with courage, love, and determination glistening in their eyes, “Yes, it is unacceptable to me that salmon be exterminated from this river. I will do what it takes to save them.” I am talking about small groups of people—small enough to know and trust each other with your very lives—coming to this understanding, and beginning to act upon it.

Next, taking down civilization means understanding that we are in the midst of a war, that war was long ago declared on the natural world, including on humans, and that we must fight back. I am not speaking metaphorically.

Next, taking down civilization means understanding that very few wars are won on actual battlefields. Economic production allows governments to win wars. And the destruction of the means of economic production causes them to lose them. Recall the U.S. military analysis that determined that World War II attacks on German railroads were “the most important single cause of Germany’s ultimate economic collapse.”²³³ This is not to belittle the sacrifices of the soldiers who beat back the Nazis at Stalingrad and elsewhere, but to remind people of the truism that an army fights on its stomach. This includes an army of consumers.

Taking down civilization means acting. It means committing ourselves to defending our landbases, which means committing ourselves to removing the economic and transportation infrastructures, which means committing ourselves to hitting them, and hitting them again, and again, and again. This may be, as we shall see in a few pages, easier than it seems.

Once the economic and transportation infrastructures have been taken down, our fights over how to live sustainably in our own landbases will be local, and face to face, which means they will be human, which means they are eminently winnable, through discourse or violence or some other means.

Bringing down civilization means depriving the rich of their ability to steal from the poor, and it means depriving the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.

I feel kind of silly trying to reduce my articulation of what it means to bring down civilization to a page. It is what this entire book is about. Indeed, it is the sum (and more) of all of my books.

I said this before. It bears repeating. I have no interest in spiritual purity. I want to live in a world with wild salmon and old growth forests and oceans full of wild fish and mothers who do not have dioxin in their breast milk, and I will do whatever it takes to get there.