Derrick Jensen, "No, We Can't Have It All"

“No, We Can’t Have It All”
by Derrick Jensen

“We all face choices. We can have ice caps and polar bears, or we can
have automobiles. We can have dams or we can have salmon. We can have
irrigated wine from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, or we can have the
Russian and Eel Rivers. We can have oil from beneath the oceans, or we
can have whales. We can have cardboard boxes or we can have living
forests. We can have computers and cancer clusters from the manufacture
of those computers, or we can have neither. We can have electricity and a
world devastated by mining, or we can have neither (and don’t give me
any nonsense about solar: you’ll need copper for wiring, silicon for
photovoltaics, metals and plastics for appliances, which need to be
manufactured and then transported to your home, and so on. Even solar
electrical energy can never be sustainable because electricity and all
its accoutrements require an industrial infrastructure).

We can have fruits, vegetables, and coffee brought to the U.S. from
Latin America, or we can have at least somewhat intact human and
nonhuman communities throughout that region. (I don’t think I need to
remind readers that, to take one not atypical example among far too
many, the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was
overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now
Chiquita, leading to thirty years of U.S.-backed dictatorships and
death squads. Also, a few years ago I asked a member of the
revolutionary tupacamaristas what they wanted for the people of Peru,
and he said something that cuts to the heart of the current discussion
[and to the heart of every struggle that has ever taken place against
civilization]: “We need to produce and distribute our own food. We
already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.”) We
can have international trade, inevitably and by definition as well as
by function dominated by distant and huge economic/governmental entities
which do not (and cannot) act in the best interest of communities, or
we can have local control of local economies, which cannot happen so
long as cities require the importation (read: theft) of resources from
ever-greater distances. We can have civilization – too often called the
highest form of social organization – that spreads (I would say
metastasizes) to all parts of the globe, or we can have a multiplicity
of autonomous cultures each uniquely adapted to the land from which it
springs. We can have cities and all they imply, or we can have a livable
planet. We can have “progress” and history, or we can have
sustainability. We can have civilization, or we can have at least the
possibility of a way of life not based on the violent theft of
resources.

This is in no way abstract. It is physical. In a finite world, the
forced and routine importation of resources is unsustainable. Duh. Show
me how car culture can coexist with wild nature, and more specifically,
show me how anthropogenic global warming can coexist with ice caps and
polar bears. And any fixes such as solar electric cars would present
problems at least equally severe. For example, the electricity still
needs to be generated, batteries are extraordinarily toxic, and in any
case, driving is not the main way a car pollutes: far more pollution is
emitted through its manufacture than through its exhaust pipe. We can
perform the same exercise for any product of industrial civilization.

We can’t have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that
has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as
having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we
can have it all – to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world
and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than
arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives
willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth,much
less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of
converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects
(industrial production, at core, is the conversion of the living – trees
or mountains – into the dead – two-by-fours and beer cans) – is
grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent
disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifests in the pretension
that neither limits nor justice exist. To pretend that civilization can
exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures
of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology,
thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. And it is to have paid
absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years.

One of the reasons we fail to perceive all of this is that we – the
civilized – have been inculcated to believe that belongings are more
important than belonging, and that relationships are based on dominance -
violence and exploitation. Having come to believe that, and having come
to believe the acquisition of material possessions is good (or even
more abstractly, that the accumulation of money is good) and in fact the
primary goal of life, we then have come to perceive ourselves as the
primary beneficiaries of all of this insanity and injustice.

Right now I’m sitting in front of a space heater, and all other things
being equal, I’d rather my toes were toasty than otherwise. But all
other things aren’t equal, and destroying runs of salmon by constructing
dams for hydropower is a really stupid (and immoral) way to warm my
feet. It’s an extraordinarily bad trade. And it’s not just space
heaters. No amount of comforts or elegancies, what that
nineteenth-century slave owner called the characteristics of
civilization, are worth killing the planet. What’s more, even if we do
perceive it in our best interest to take these comforts or elegancies at
the expense of the enslavement, impoverishment, or murder of others and
their landbases, we have no right to do so. And no amount of
rationalization nor overwhelming force – not even “full-spectrum
domination” – will suffice to give us that right.

Yet we have been systematically taught to ignore these trade-offs, to
pretend if we don’t see them (even when they’re right in front of our
faces) they do not exist. Yesterday, I received this email: “We all face
the future unsure if our own grandchildren will know what a tree is or
ever taste salmon or even know what a clean glass of water tastes like.
It is crucial, especially for those of us who see the world as a living
being, to remember. I’ve realized that outside of radical activist
circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely
forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon
so abundant you could fish with baskets. I’ve met many people who think
if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we’ll be
left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of
people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on
a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left
standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still
be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole
forests teeming with life? 

 

I think you and I agree that as long as this
culture continues with its preferred methods of perception, then it
would not be widely known to the majority. I used to think environmental
activists would at least get to say, ‘I told you so’ to everyone else
once civilization finally succeeded in creating a wasteland, but now I’m
not convinced that anyone will even remember. Perhaps the worst
nightmare visions of activists a few hundred years ago match exactly the
world we have outside our windows today, yet nobody is saying, ‘I told
you so.’”

I think he’s right. I’ve long had a nightmare/fantasy of standing on a
desolate plain with a CEO or politician or capitalist journalist,
shaking him by the shoulders and shouting, “Don’t you see? Don’t you see
it was all a waste?” But after ruminating on this fellow’s email, the
nightmare has gotten even worse. Now I no longer have even the
extraordinarily hollow satisfaction of seeing recognition of a massive
mistake on this other’s face. Now he merely looks at me, his eyes
flashing a combination of arrogance, hatred, and willful
incomprehension, and says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
And he isn’t even entirely lying. Except of course to himself.”

- http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/23-4