I am currently reading a very important and disturbing book by Derrick Jensen & Aric McBay titled What We Leave Behind, published in 2009. I have just finished Part I. Its conclusion speaks eloquently (and, for many of us I am sure, harshly) of the reality of the type of lifestyle we humans have been taking for granted. It is not so much that this must not continue, but that it cannot. It is a physical impossibility. If humanity is incapable of taking corrective action, we ultimately need not worry, for the planet will do what is necessary for its survival, whether humanity continues to exist or not. Here is a lengthy excerpt from the last chapter of part I that is currently touching me.
Reciprocity is the key to survival. Reciprocity is the essence of life. It is life. It is what we do. It is what we all do.
We are told, more or less incessantly, that survival is based on being the meanest, strongest, most selfish, best able to exploit.
But those who say that are wrong. They have forgotten—or do not care to remember—that nature loves a community. This is true on every scale, from the largest to the most personal. It's simply true that nature loves a community more than nature loves you or me. Nature loves a community more than nature loves a community-destroying culture. Nature loves a community more than nature loves industrial civilization.
I'm sorry to report that it is not true that all of evolution has taken place so that humans will exist. It is not true that all of evolution has taken place so that for a short time a relatively few (fiscally) rich humans can look at computers, watch televisions, and buy (and throw away) cell phones. It is not true that all of evolution has taken place so that humans can create industrial civilization. It is not true that all of evolution has taken place so that industrial civilization can deform humans to fit the needs of industrial civilization. It is not true that all of evolution has taken place so that humans can destroy life on this planet in the service of industrial civilization.
I'm sorry to have to be the one to deliver that news.
This culture is extraordinary, but not so much for the reasons so many people like to pretend; its vast military capabilities, its art, literature, music science, philosophy, (such as it is). Instead, it is extraordinary in that it does not give back to the land, the water, the air, the nonhumans, the vast majority of humans.
This culture is even more extraordinary in that many of its members seem to think they can continue to not give back, and survive.
Or maybe they can survive, all the while keeping their jetskis and RVs, their gold and brass rings, their interstate highways and disposable diapers, their aircraft carriers and superdomes. They can keep this culture until they die.
Personally.
Only if they are already very old.
The planet is collapsing. Now. This culture is causing this collapse.
I'll say it again, since not enough people seem to be listening: this culture is killing the planet.
This culture is killing the planet.
Don't listen to me. Listen to the planet.
But a refusal to listen is part of the problem. We're taught (some explicitly, all implicitly) to become masterful at refusing to listen, and then to become just as masterful at refusing to acknowledge--to others, but most especially to ourselves--that not only are we not listening but that there is even anything to hear in the first place.
Many members of this culture--evidently an overwhelming majority, given the relatively small number of people actually doing anything to stop the destruction--simply don't care. Many of them were taught (once again, some explicitly, some implicitly) that if they ignore (in fact, foreclose) all possibility of relationship, and if they don't mind harming those around them...and if it doesn't bother them that they're destroying the land and air and water that those who come after them will need to survive, then they can take advantage of the short-term competitive advantage that not giving back gives them, and thus they can more effectively dominate, enslave, exploit, or simply kill all those who do give back (and who therefore must be inferior), and who have the misfortune to come into contact with them. Then when they reach to every part of the earth-meaning that more or less everyone has the misfortune of coming into contact with them-as this narcissistic nonreciprocal culture now does, they will kill the planet that (or rather, who) supports them. But many of these individual narcissists will die before then. And so they can say, and mean, that statement most famously said by King Louis XV's mistress Madame de Pompadour; when the king's ministers complained that her extravagance (and the extraordinarily expensive wars her advice helped cause) was going to lead to their own destruction, she laughed them off with the phrase, “Après nous le deluge,” literally translated as, “after us, the deluge,” more loosely translated as , “When we are dead the deluge may come for aught I care.” And she was right. She died in 1764, some fifteen years before the deluge of the French Revolution and nineteen years before the Reign of Terror, with its deluge of blood-both royal and otherwise-flowing from the guillotine.
Après nous le deluge.
I guarantee this statement will be far more accurate and deadly for those who say it now than for those who said it before. This time, as the entire world collapses, it is not just the French but everyone who pays. Everyone.
For those who are willing to have their view of the world, and their place in it, shook up, read this book.
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