Does Civilisation Mean Insanity And Violence?
By Sukumaran C. V.
30 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org
CIVILIZED MAN SAYS: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit. —Christina M. Kennedy.
Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals. —Jack D. Forbes.
Within two years, two tigers were shot dead in Kerala. The reason: they encroached into the ‘human habitats’ and (the first one) killed cattle and (the second one) people. I travelled to the places where these hapless animals were killed and saw that it was not the ‘brutes’ which encroached into human habitats but the human-habitats have encroached and are continuously encroaching into the habitats of these animals depriving them of their home and prey.
To be able to study the (pathetic) condition of our still remaining forests and wildlife, (being a clerk in the panchayat department) I asked for a transfer to the grama panchayat office which situates in the heart of the Nelliayampathy evergreen forests and was able to see the besieged and extremely hopeless condition of our forest cover and the dwindling wildlife.
In every grama sabha I have participated as co-ordinator, people were asking for more street lights and roads and other facilities. They live inside the forest either as settlers or as the workers of tea and coffee estates. If you want to cover a tea estate, you have to travel kilometres. Thousands of acres of evergreen forests have been cleared for each estate. Those were originally dense forests and the habitats of the animals. The animals were and are hunted out. Nobody spoke in favour of the animals or the forest cover. People want electric lights everywhere to ward off animals. They want development which destroys the forests that still survive.
Often I was tempted to talk in favour of the animals and the forest cover. But I preferred my safety to the rights of the animals and the forests. It was selfishness and this same selfishness of the humans is called ‘civilization’ and this civilisation is killing the planet where we live.
As people (most of them estate labourers) could gather only after 5 pm, the grama sabhas would be over only after 9 pm. When we were returning to the office for staying at night, we saw hares and deer darting away from the light of our vehicle and I thought that we are encroaching into their freedom. We are depriving of their freedom to walk freely even at night. Those estates, those roads fragmenting the forests, those electric posts, those offices (panchayat, KSEB, PHC) should be shut down and all the people who live in the forest areas should be driven out and the animals should be given the freedom to wander through day and night without fearing the humans and their vehicles and their electric lines and their roads.
When I told my thoughts to my colleague who was with me, he advised me not to express them anywhere around there if I wanted to live or at least not to be transferred from there. His advice reminded me of what my favourite author Derrick Jensen says in his book The Culture of Make Believe:
“Pretend that you were raised to believe that blacks—niggers would be more precise in this formulation—working for whites is simply part of the day-to-day experience of living. You don’t question it any more than you question breathing, eating, or sleeping.”
“Now pretend that someone from the outside begins to tell you that what you are doing is wrong.....your slaves listen to this outsider, and because of this, your relationship with them begins to deteriorate, even to the point that you begin to loose money...Raised in those circumstances, it would have taken more courage than most of us have, I think, to admit that one’s way of life is based on exploitation, and to gracefully begin to live a different way.”
“Then how about this? Outsiders take away your computer because the process of manufacturing the hard drive killed women in Thailand. They take your coffee because its production destroys rainforests, decimates migratory songbird populations and drives African, Asian, and South and Central American subsistence farmers off their land. They take your car because of global warming, and your wedding ring because mining exploits workers and destroys landscapes and communities. They take your TV, microwave and refrigerator because, hell, they take the whole damn electrical grid because the generation of electricity is, they say, so environmentally expensive. Imagine that these outsiders actually began to succeed in taking away these parts of your life you see as so fundamental. May be you’d start to hate the outsiders and even get a little rough with them, if that was what it took to stop them from destroying your way of life.”
I want to be the outsider, but I am a 'civilised' human the human civilisation doesn't allow me to be the outsider. Mother Earth will be saved only when the entire humans metamorphose into the outsiders and get rid of their insane 'civlisation' which destroys the environment that sustains us.
See how civilisation kills the living world.
Every year Feb. 2 is celebrated as World Wetlands Day. Wetlands are the lungs of any landscape and they preserve water forever for the human and non human inhabitants. And they are the habitats of many birds like the lapwing and water hen; but they are fast vanishing due to the ‘progress and development’ of the humans. Our unsustainable method of constructing homes and flats first ruined our rivers by sand mining. Now the development projects like the metro rail and private airports and roads widening ruin the hills and hillocks in the villages with the quarrying activities. Almost all the rocky hills are being quarried to make rock sand by crushing and every hillock is being destroyed by earth movers to fill the wetlands to construct flats and homes and business malls. Creeks and rivulets and ponds are filled; hills and hillocks and mountains are razed; atmosphere is filled with dust, and cancer is spreading like wildfire. The irony is that instead of annihilating the present development mania which creates an atmosphere in which humans are plagued with ailments and illnesses; we construct super specialty hospitals augmenting the pathetic condition to which our development has driven us.
Whenever I hear about the days like Environment Day, Earth Day, Wetlands Day, Polar Bear Day, World Sparrow Day etc, a fear that the condition of all the things such days represent are made worst by the greedy human interference grips my mind. According to the WWF’s (Worldwide Fund for Nature) Living Planet Report-2014, the number of wild animals in the world has been decreased by the half during the last 40 years!
Biodiversity is the prime necessity for the continuance of Life on Earth, and the humans destroy the very thing which helps them survive on earth. In the first volume of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, there is a chapter titled ‘A History of Violence’. The third part of the chapter begins thus: “WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE SIXTEEN. Polar bears: “About half a mile upriver, I came to a very strong shoot of water, from thence I saw several white-bears fishing in the stream above. I waited for them, and in a short time, a bitch with a small cub swam close to the other shore, and landed a little below. The bitch immediately went into the woods, but the cub sat down upon a rock, when I sent a ball through it, at the distance of over a hundred and twenty yards at the least, and knocked it over…The report of my gun brought some others down, and another she bear, with a cub of eighteen months old, came swimming close under me. I shot the bitch through the head and killed her dead. The cub perceiving this and getting sight of me made at me with great ferocity; but just as the creature was about to revenge the death of his dam, I saluted him with a load of large shot in his right eye…I now perceived that two others had just landed about sixty yards above me, and were fiercely looking round them. The bears advanced a few yards to the edge of the woods, and the old one was looking sternly at me. The danger of firing at her I knew was great, as she was seconded by a cub of eighteen months; but I could not resist the temptation.”
“The author,” says Derrick Jensen, “a Captain George Cartwright, really the first person to solidly establish civilization on the shores of Newfoundland, then moved toward another part of the river. “I had not sat there long, ere my attention was diverted to an enormous bear…I drew the trigger…placed my ball in the centre of his scull, and killed him dead….Never in my life did I regret the want of ammunition so much as on this day; as I was by the failure interrupted in the finest sport that man ever had. I am certain, that I could with great ease have killed four or five brace more.”
This is what the human 'civilisation' has been doing to all the animals, birds, forests and the marine life as a whole—cold bloodedly, indiscriminately eliminating the flora and fauna that live around us. The animals do have the equal right as we the humans do to live on the earth, but we deprive them of their right to exist either by killing them directly or by destroying their habitats. Then we celebrate Days like the International Polar Bear Day (Feb. 27) World Water Day (March 22) Zero Emissions Day (Sept. 21) so on and so forth. And emissions increase uncontrollably; water is depleting alarmingly; Polar Bears are on the verge of extinction and wetlands are virtually no more. Now as the hills and hillocks are also vanishing fast, there is a possibility of having a Hills and Hillocks Day too, I presume.
To prove how insane the civilisation we are proud of is, let me quote in detail from the first volume (The Problem of Civilization) of Derrick Jensen’s masterpiece Endgame: “Does anyone have the right to enslave others? More specifically yet, does any group of people have the right to enslave others—human or non human—simply because they have the power to do so, and because they perceive it as their right (and because they have created a propaganda system consisting of intertwined religious, philosophical, scientific, educational, informational, economic, governmental, and legal systems all working to convince themselves and at least some of their human victims it is their right)?”
“Had somebody snuffed civilization in its multiple cradles, the Middle East would probably still be forested, as would Greece, Italy, and North Africa. Lions would probably still patrol southern Europe. The peoples of the region would quite possibly still live in traditional communal ways, and thus would be capable of feeding themselves in a still-fecund landscape.”
“Had someone brought down civilization before 1492, the Arawaks would probably still live peacefully in the Caribbean. Indians would live in ancient forests all along the Eastern seaboard, along with bison, marten, fisher. North, Central, and South America would be ecologically and culturally intact. The people would probably have, as always, plenty to eat.”
“Had someone brought down civilization before the slave trade took hold, 100 million Africans would not have been sacrificed on that particular altar of economic production. Native cultures might still live untraumatized on their own land all across that continent. There probably would be, as there always was, plenty to eat.”
“If someone had brought down civilization one hundred and fifty years ago, those who came after probably could still eat passenger pigeons and Eskimo curlews. They could surely eat bison and pronghorn antelope. They could undoubtedly eat salmon, cod, lobster. The people who came after would not have to worry about dioxin, radiation poisoning, organochloride carcinogens, or the extreme weather and ecological flux that characterize global warming. There probably would have been, as almost always, plenty to eat.”
“If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, “Why did they not take it down?” Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying, “If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so the rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminum smelters. God damn you. God damn you all.””
The author is a former JNU student now working as clerk in the Kerala State Government service. Email id: [email protected]
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