APOCALYPSE
When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight it is called honorable,
but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called
murder. When a white army battles Indians and wins it is called
a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre and
bigger armies are raised. If the Indian flees before the advance
of such armies, when he tries to return he finds that white men
are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off such armies,
he is killed and the land is taken anyway. When an Indian is killed,
it is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and a sorrow
in our heart; when a white is killed three or four others step
up to take his place and there is no end to it. The white man
seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it
wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving
the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole
white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats
is land.
Chiksika
As a longtime grassroots environmental activist, and as a creature living in
the thrashing endgame of civilization, I am intimately acquainted
with the landscape of loss, and have grown accustomed to carrying
the daily weight of despair. I have walked clearcuts that wrap
around mountains, drop into valleys, then climb ridges to fragment
watershed after watershed, and I’ve sat silent near empty
streams that two generations ago were “lashed into whiteness”
by uncountable salmon coming home to spawn and die.
A few years ago I began to feel pretty apocalyptic. But I hesitated to use that
word, in part because of those drawings I’ve seen of crazy
penitents carrying “The End is Near” signs, and in
part because of the power of the word itself. Apocalypse. I didn’t
want to use it lightly.
But then a friend and fellow activist said, “What will it take for you
to finally call it an apocalypse? The death of the salmon? Global
warming? The ozone hole? The reduction of krill populations off
Antarctica by 90 percent, the turning of the sea off San Diego
into a dead zone, the same for the Gulf of Mexico? How about the
end of the great coral reefs? The extirpation of two hundred species
per day? Four hundred? Six hundred? Give me a specific threshold,
Derrick, a specific point at which you’ll finally use that
word.”
* * *
Do you believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a
sane and sustainable way of living?
For the last several years I’ve taken to asking people this question, at
talks and rallies, in libraries, on buses, in airplanes, at the
grocery store, the hardware store. Everywhere. The answers range
from emphatic nos to laughter. No one answers in the affirmative.
One fellow at one talk did raise his hand, and when everyone looked
at him, he dropped his hand, then said, sheepishly, “Oh,
voluntary? No, of course not.” My next question: how will
this understanding—that this culture will not voluntarily
stop destroying the natural world, eliminating indigenous cultures,
exploiting the poor, and killing those who resist—shift
our strategy and tactics? The answer? Nobody knows, because we
never talk about it: we’re too busy pretending the culture
will undergo a magical transformation.
This book is about that shift in strategy, and in tactics.
* * *
I just got home from talking to a new friend, another longtime activist. She
told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try
to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from
spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the
forests of Oregon. Whenever activists learned a hillside was going
to be sprayed, they assembled there, hoping their presence would
stop the poisoning. But each time, like clockwork, helicopters
appeared, and each time, like clockwork, helicopters dumped loads
of Agent Orange onto the hillside and onto protesting activists.
The campaign did not succeed.
“But,” she said to me, “I’ll tell you what did. A bunch
of Vietnam vets lived in those hills, and they sent messages to
the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascade,
and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the names
of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses.’”
I waited for her to finish.
“You know what happened next?” she asked.
“I think I do,” I responded.
“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying stopped.”
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