What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #2

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As long as they get to play

Others nasties lurch toward us on their own

Old friends, new creations and recent escapees

Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and SARS

Swine Flu, Bird Flu, HIV and AIDS

The rebound of tuberculosis,

Cholera, malaria, and typhus

Prions and mad cows

Scrapie sheep and chronic wasting disease

Cancers that eat away our lungs our brains

Our breasts our testlcles and our ovaries

And new monsters peer over the horizon

Good intentions spliced to

Blind arrogance and numbing greed

Frankenfoods and Terminator seeds

Herbicide tolerant and pesticide laced crops

Patented Life

Barely tested, quietly ticking. . .

Let loose upon the land

As if their creators, having looked at the world,

Managed to learn nothing at all

The monsters howls grow frenzied

Chemicals in our land our sky our rain

Our rivers our food our bodies our babies

Rising male infertility rates and

Superfund sites and ozone depletion

Rivers dammed and salmon doomed

Topsoil loss and fertilizer run-off

Huge oceanic dead zones

And depleted fisheries

And the ghosts of silent whales

Scraping over the corpses of coral reefs

The monsters advance

And forests collapse under their feet

Leaving indigenous cultures battered,

Homeless, soul-sick, or dead

Disrupting water and oxygen cycles

And turning soll into deserts

As tigers and salmon and tree frogs and falcons

Stumble down the path toward extinction

Their heartrending voices

Lost in the chatter of chainsaws

And the coughing insults of buildozers

And all the while the climate is changing. . .

Angry summers, insistent floods,

Belligerent blizzards

Grudging droughts and plssed-off hurricanes

with poles warming and ice shelves calving

Permafrost slumping and glaciers receding

Sea levels rising and big cities sinking

As ocean currents halt and superstorms gust,

Deserts expand and rabbits run

And locusts horde and army ants march

And mosquitoes hunt and rodents overrun

The balance undone

Leaving crops destroyed and diseases vectored

And famine and rioting and looting and war

The ocean tums acld and corals

And shellfish and planktons dissolve

The disruption of food chains,

The collapsing of ecosystems

Tonight on the Weather Channel

(commentator blathering)

Watch it now, while you can

Because oil is peaking,

with no clear replacements

Production will falter

As demand keeps increasing

And the price, which is rising now,

will just keep on rising

Imagine the impact to the global economy

To the truckers and farmers

To your neighbors

Yourself

Watch the bidding war rage

From trade floors to battlefields

Watch the Pentagon plan and the patriots act

Go look out the window

Do you feel a draft?

World population is fueled by the input of oil

We could reach 7 billion by 2013

That's billions of bodies more

Than the planet can sustain without oll

We're consuming the planet and

Poisoning the soil and the air and

The water that we all need to live

We're driving a high-speed train

To the end of life

And we're taking the rest of the planet

Trillions upon trillions of living souls

Along with us

And all of this

All of this

All of this

All of this

Is wrapped tightly inside a culture of denials and

Lles and absurdities so complex

And so powerful

That we can barely see through the smog

The monsters are screeching

At the village's edge

So huge and so horrible

That we cannot bear to look at them

And we,

Bound in a cultural straightjacket

Of our own making,

Slumber on as they draw near

Working jobs we hate

Consuming products that do not fulfill

Distracting ourselves as best we can with

Television drugs food sex and entertainments

Hoping our leaders will find some answers

Awakening, finally,

In the still hours of early morning

To the shapeless realization

That they will not

(alarm clock begins to beep and grows louder...)

(click off)

Ah. . . what a nightmare. . .

Well, Johnny, you are in a pretty serious situation.

But we believe - your myther and

Mr. Benton and I - that you can

make good without being sent away.

There has always been a part of me that has

suspected that I would see the end-of-the-world-

as-we-know-it in my lifetime.

It seemed built into the situation,

a certainty of population dynamics,

the inevitable end to Mr. Malthus' musings.

At some point we would near the sun,

our wings would fall, and we would

plummet back to the earth.

"F***!"

New voices spoke of possible futures.

"Hey can i have some of those purple berries?"

Crosby, Stills and Nash

sailed the Wooden Ships.

"Sh*t, not again!"

Riddley Walker wrote his connexions.

And Charlton Heston ate Soylent Green with

The Omega Man on the Planet of the Apes.

"You maniacs!"

The world looked insane to me but nobody

else seemed to notice so I buried

my thoughts and muddled on.

Deep inside, this was tearing me to places.

I remember looking in at night on my

sleeping children, and feeling a deep

and gnawing terror for their futures.

But I locked my fears tightly in my heart, hit the

snooze button, and slept a while longer.

And then I came across Daniel Quinn and

Derrick Jensen, two writers who helped me,

with books such as Ishmael and

The Culture of Make Believe,

to recognize the stories of our culture,

the beliefs and assumptions and fables

that have shaped our lives,

the fairy-tales we have told ourselves, the

madness we have made manifest in the world.

Quinn speaks of the Nazi regime, of Adolph

Hitler and the story he told the German people.:

a story about the lost destiny of the Aryan race,

a story of oppression and defilement,

a story of victory and vengeance

and greatness regained.

And Quinn explained how the entire nation,

oppressors and oppressed alike,

Jews and Good Germans and Gypsies and

Gays, were all held captive by that story.

We who live today inside the dominant global

culture are similarly captives of stories.:

stories that surround us like the air we breathe,:

stories that we enact at our own peril,:

stories that threaten the community of life itself.

Have you heard the one about humans

being separate from "nature", different,

special, the pinnacle of creation?

Or about humans being innately flawed -

violent, selfish and greedy?

How about the one that says that the world

was made for human beings, to manage,

control, and exploit as a resource,

and that the world has

no value beyond its utility?

Or the story about there being only one

right way to live, and one right way to

understand and view the world?

Or about how unlimited growth, competition,

and production are all unquestionably good?

Or the story that tells us

that we can have and do

anything we think we want,

because there are no limits?

There were people in the world looking

squarely at our cultural stories,

and at the global predicament,

and seeing what I saw.:

our culture, in its present

configuration, could not last.

I was not alone.

But the transformation, or the

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