A Language older than Words Read online

  "Everyone here knows industrial civilization isn't sustainable. We all know that any technology that relies on the use of nonrenewables is by definition not sustainable. We also know that by definition, any technology or activity that damages any other community—human or nonhuman—isn't sustainable. Finally, everyone here knows that there's no way within the next twenty years we'll make a transition to a technologically sustainable culture. The best we can hope for is that we begin to throttle down our overblown technology, to bring ourselves to a soft landing instead of a full crash."

  Everyone seemed to agree, and it came clear to me that while these thoughts had probably occurred to nearly everyone in the room, no one else had been willing to speak until someone broke the ice. Poof.

  When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

  There are times the lies get to me, times I weary of battering myself against the obstacles of denial, hatred, fear-induced stupidity, and greed, times I want to curl up and fall into the problem, let it sweep me away as it so obviously sweeps away so many others. I remember a spring day a few years ago, a spring day much like this one, only a little more sun, and warmer. I sat on this same couch and looked out this same window at the same ponderosa pine.

  I was frightened, and lonely. Frightened of a future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species, and lonely because for every person actively trying to shut down the timber industry, stop abuse, or otherwise bring about a sustainable and sane way of living, there are thousands who are helping along this not-so-slow train to oblivion. I began to cry.

  The tears stopped soon enough. I realized we are not so outnumbered. We are not outnumbered at all. I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I've known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life— every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale—and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. All humans, too, are struggling to be sane, struggling to live in harmony with our surroundings, but its really hard to let go. And so we lie, destroy, rape, murder, experiment, and extirpate, all to control this wildly uncontrollable symphony, and failing that, to destroy it.

  Claims to Virtue

  "Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness....In order to sustain our amazing images of ourselves as God’s gift to the vast majority of the starving human species, we have to interiorize our violence upon ourselves and our children, and to employ the rhetoric of morality to describe this process.” R.D.Laing

  FOR YEARS I’VE BEEN haunted by a fantasy involving someone like Jesus. This person—woman or man, it doesn't matter—comes into a community and talks about love. She, or he, tells people they should treat each other with respect, and that this respect must extend to humans and nonhumans alike. A crowd gathers as this person says they should do unto others as they'd have others do unto them, and they begin to murmur quietly as they hear that they should share with each other everything they own. The discomfort of especially the crowd's children grows more noticeable as this stranger tells them they should love each other, love the land. (He or she says nothing about loving the enemy.) The children hide giggles behind their hands, and now even the adults bite the insides of their cheeks. Finally, after much hesitation, one of the community members responds, "Friend, we respect what you have to say, and thank you for telling us, but can't you tell us something we don't already know?" The stranger looks closely, and seeing the obvious well-being of the people, realizes that her (or his) words are redundant. The stranger merges into the community, and all continue with the dailiness of their lives.

  The reality of our Judeo-Christian culture is of course far different. A primary purpose of Judeo-Christianity has not been to move us toward a community where the teachings of someone like Jesus—simple and necessary suggestions for how to get along with each other—are made manifest in all aspects of life, but instead to provide a theological framework for a system of exploitation. Easy as this is to say, not many people say it (at least in public). It is more convenient for exploiter and exploited alike to pretend their parasitic relationship is Natural, ordained by God. It is easier to believe in a logic that leads directly from original sin to totalitarianism—Because human beings are selfish, evil creatures, they must be controlled; therefore might, guided by an all-seeing God as interpreted by an elite priesthood, makes right—

  than it is to take responsibility for one's own actions, and to fight for egalitarianism. It is easier to listen to the voice of God than it is to listen to the voice of one's conscience, suffering, and outrage. And it is easier to follow the well-worn yet faulty logic leading once again from original sin this time to apocalypse— Because human beings are evil, and have sinned, they must die. All beings on earth die. Therefore, all beings on Earth must be evil, and must have sinned. Death is the flower of sin. To avoid death requires the annihilation of evil: therefore, all things on Earth must be annihilated—far easier than it is to accept one's death as natural. It is all so easy, so sanctimonious, to shift responsibility for your own choices and their consequences onto the divine plan of some invisible God.

  If you feel like raping a woman, don't just do it; have your God decree that under some circumstances such behavior is not only acceptable, but righteous, your God-given right: "And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her . . . then thou shalt bring her home to thine house. ... If thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go wither she will; but thou shall not sell her for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her."

  Rape alone is problematic as a method of social domination, in that it only temporarily provides the rapist control; to extend this over time, to permanently "make merchandise of her," you must have your God issue a series of decrees hemming women in, binding them to you as your property. Have your God say (while hoping no one notices your own lips moving) that because Eve listened to the serpent—remember, my father never beat anyone who didn't have it coming—every woman "shall welcome [her] husband's affections, and he shall be [her] master." Have your God say any woman who has sexual intercourse freely will be put to death (her body not being her own). Any man, too, who has sex with another man's wife shall die, because he has diddled with another man's property, although no punishment shall be meted out on the man who has intercourse with an unmarried woman (but we'll put her to death for good measure). Small wonder that one of the daily Orthodox prayers reads: "I thank thee, O Lord, that thou has not created me a woman.

  .....

  "The deal is off with the coyotes. They're back, they're eating chickens, and they'd better watch out. If it's war they want, well, it's war they'll get.

  It lasted two years, and they kept their end of the bargain far better than I kept mine. I probably only killed six or seven birds the whole time. But I don't care, damn it. They're my birds, to kill or not, and the coyotes are eating them. I talked to a friend, the guy who used to kill bears in Alaska.

  "New coyotes, new deal."

  The next day I awoke early from a dream, walked to the window to look out on a cold February dawn. I saw a coyote trotting away, empty-handed, as it were, and I opened the window. I shouted, as I had two years before,
"Please don't eat the chickens, and I'll give you the head, feet, and guts when I kill them."

  It didn't work. The coyotes came back with a vengeance. Week after week. A chicken. A duck. I'd dream of chickens, and another bird would be gone.

  I pictured this new batch of coyotes, tough young dogs wrecking the neighborhood. If they were people, they'd lean against buildings, smoke cigarettes, and make rude comments to passersby. Or maybe these were the pups of the ones I'd made the deal with, ungrateful wretches no longer satisfied with crumbs from my table but determined—damn them—to take everything I owned. Worse yet, these might be the original coyotes, sick of my promises—Next weekend. I'll kill one and give you the guts. I swear. I mean it. Maybe they just came to take what they thought was their due.

  Sometimes I'd see them, and wish I was holding a gun. I would've shot them where they stood. Or at least that's what I told myself; had the gun been in my hand instead of safely stowed in the closet, I don't know if I would have followed through.

  Over the years I've known many people with no such hesitation about coyotes; ranchers, for example—those who shoot first, and rarely ask questions later. I didn't want that; I just wanted them to stop taking chickens.

  Finally I called a friend and asked her to help me put up a fence. It took us the better part of two weeks to get around to it, in which time the coyotes took a couple more chickens. Because I didn't want to confine the birds, the completed fence ran around only half my property, cutting off easy access from the woods to the east and forcing the coyotes to cover a long stretch of open ground if they wanted a clean shot at a meal. I figured, rightly enough, that the dogs could (and would be happy to) patrol the open area. The only birds who got it after that were the ones who squeezed through the fence to forage in the woods. I figured they were asking for it.

  The return of the coyotes caused me to reevaluate all I had experienced. I wondered again if I had been projecting, if other interpretations better described the two-year respite from their raids. That didn't seem likely. It seemed more to the point to reevaluate what defines a conversation. I'm aware that at least some of the conversations so far—the original one with the coyotes, many of the conversations with the dogs, and the conversations of death with birds—have been one-sided, by which I mean I have simply made requests to which they have acceded: the coyotes quit eating chickens, the dogs quit eating eggs, and the birds gave me their lives and flesh. What have I given in return? Knowing the one-sidedness of these earlier interactions, can I even say that the ending of the "deal" with the coyotes was the end of the conversation? That would certainly imply a perverse definition of conversation, the word being reduced to do as I say. Where does mutuality fit in, the simple pleasures of neighborliness?

  I remembered a brief conversation I'd had with Jeannette after the coyotes came for the rooster Amaru had singled out the day before. I asked her if Amaru was trying to tell me which animal to kill. She was silent for a long while, and finally she said, "I think there might be other lessons to learn."

  We've all read about the agricultural revolution about ten thousand years ago—when large groups of people in the Near and Middle East shifted permanently from hunter-gatherers to husbandry. Many anthropologists and historians, as well as religious scholars, suggest that this transition was the felix culpa, or fall from grace, which led to the life of toil described in Genesis. Everything I've read suggests that members of hunter-gatherer cultures—even those alive today, who've been driven to the least hospitable regions of the planet such as deserts and dense jungles—work far less to support themselves than people living any other lifestyle. They work three to five hours a day. I've also read they feel closer to the rest of the world than we do, that they usually don't see the world as a dangerous place of eternally warring opposites: me against you, man against woman, man against nature, God against all.

  Instead hunter-gatherers see the world, and I realize I'm grossly generalizing, as a ribbon of cooperation: you and I cooperate, and that process of cooperation helps define our community; men and women cooperate; humans and nonhumans cooperate to allow the world to continue; the gods cooperate with all.

  I used to understand all that in my head. Now I understand it in my body; I've gained a visceral understanding of how this transition caused us to view the world as a competitive place.

  Take a quail. I see coveys of them nearly every day. If I were a hunter-gatherer, or merely hungry, I would probably eat some. But I do not own them, and even if I killed one to eat, it would not be mine. The thought of ownership does not occur to me. The quail are simply my neighbors, and I say hello to them just as I do to the deer I see occasionally, or the hawk that often floats above the house, the trees outside the windows, and the magpies that have for years made great mounding nests in the trees' lower branches. In each of these cases, after we say our brief hellos, we continue with our days, just as happens when I nod and smile to the retired doctor (not the neighbor who drew the cartoon of genocidal Colonel Wright, but another one) who lives across the way. If a coyote eats a quail, as I suspect happens often, or one of the marmots who live among the rocks, I am simultaneously sorry for the end of a life and glad for the coyote. Its not personal. In fact it can and will be me some day. That's life.

  The chickens are different. They're mine. I raise them from eggs I collect and put into an incubator, or I buy them at Aslin Finch Feed Store for ninety-seven cents each. I rear them in my bathtub until the weather turns warm enough to let them outside. I dig through dumpsters to find food for them. I sell the eggs. I eat the meat. These chickens belong to me—they do not belong either to the coyotes or to themselves. A coyote who kills a hen is costing me six eggs a week at a dollar fifty a dozen, and when she kills a rooster she's taking meat I could have put into a stew. If I perceive chickens as my private property, it makes sense that I would build a fence around them to prevent coyotes from stealing them. I see now the line of thought and experience that leads ineluctably from this perception of private ownership— the word private coming from the latin privare, to deprive, because wealthy Romans fenced off gardens to deprive others of their use—to the protection of this perceived ownership at first through fences, then through the creation of a theology and politics to justify my perceptions, and finally through a whole system of police, prisons, and the military to enforce my rights when others are so stupid or blind as to not acknowledge my ownership.

  I see also a parallel and complementary line of thought that doesn't merely protect my belongings, but proactively and permanently prevents others from stealing them. Instead of building a fence, why don't I, as I mentioned before, just kill the coyotes? It would be easier, and would eliminate the worry. I'd be in chicken heaven, or at least chicken-owner heaven. Of course coyotes are sneaky, so unless I kill them all I'll eventually be forced to invent better ways to kill them. Others, too, may steal the birds. There are hawks, snakes, skunks, raccoons, and rumor has it, a mother bear and cubs can be found. Now that I think about it, even though my retired-doctor neighbor and his family seem very nice, they do sometimes look enviously at the big black hen. I've got to stop them all. Today I own chickens, tomorrow I eradicate coyotes, and the day after I knock off the retired doctor and his family. And it's not only the chickens. I need gasoline to run my truck—I can't dumpster dig without a truck—and gas has to come from somewhere. I heard that Saddam Hussein wanted to cut off access to United States' oil in the Persian Gulf. The dirty bastard. We've got to stop him, too.

  Shit. I don't have money to build a nuclear bomb, and there's no room in my refrigerator for that economy-size canister of anthrax. As for the latter, I'll have to get a bigger refrigerator. I'll have to start saving for the warhead. The tree outside my window is awfully big, and I just realized I own it, too. I wonder how much I could get for it.

  It's not unheard of for old trees—big pines, firs, and cedars a thousand years old—to scream audibly when they're cut down. I've heard from loggers that
the screams are disturbing at first, but as with anything else, you get used to it.

  We've had a long time to get used to the screams. Just as our civilizations expansion is marked by a widening circle of genocide, so too forests and all of their inhabitants precede us. Deserts dog our heels.

  The need to deforest started in what used to be the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, Mesopotamia. The land was fecund, as land so often is before we get our hands on it. Cedar forests stretched so far that no one knew their true size, and sunlight never penetrated far enough to touch the humus that has long since baked, crumbled, and blown away. Forty-seven hundred years ago Gilgamish, ruler of Uruk, a city near the Euphrates River, decided to make a name for himself by building a great city. Armed with "mighty adzes," and more importantly with a justification—the promise of "a name that endures"—that would allow him and his cronies to deafen themselves to "the sad song of the cedars" as they cut them down, Gilgamish entered the forest, briefly reflected on its beauty, vanquished its protector, and took what he needed.

  There goes the neighborhood! It's not unlike the times my father found fault with one of us—he was right, end of conversation. So too the transformation of wild nature to usable resource marked the end of our conversation with wild nature. The rest has been a steady journey to an all-too-familiar destination, one devoid of life.

  The story of this journey is as monotonous in its own terrible way as the story of our cultures genocidal practices, which is not surprising, considering, as we shall eventually see, that they spring from the same hollow impulses. Soon after Gilgamish was history (i.e., dead), the ruler Gudea of the nearby city of Lagash took up the mantle, and built his own city, cutting trees to build temples, and once again, to build a name. Name after name rulers are recorded, building up like silt in streams from the eroded hillsides they left in their paths. And nations, too, rise with the fall of forests and fall when they are gone. Troy, Greece, Lebanon, Rome, Sicily, the trees were cut for the greater good, for ships, for commerce, for this reason or that. Always a reason, always deforestation. France, Germany, Britain, the United States, a sandy thread of dead and dying forests that leads to South America, Siberia, Southeast Asia, and now back to my own home, where the last of the American forests fall.