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The Nonviolent Activist

Are We Destroying Creation?

By John Nichols

ur country is the leading proponent of a growth economy on this globe. That’s how corporate global capital works. I remember in 1989, at the fall of the Berlin wall, many of my friends waggled a finger at me, saying, “Ha ha, Nichols, socialism is dead, the Cold War is over, we won, what do you think about that?” My answer back then was that I was scared to death that the United States and other capitalist Western nations could now go berserk economically around the globe without any checks and balances. This has proved to be correct as the Cold War was replaced by globalization. Say what you will about the Soviet Union, it acted somewhat as a dampener against Western capitalist expansion.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the human species on earth has gone into overdrive on a suicidal path. The rise of capitalist globalization has coincided with great leaps forward in the greenhouse effect, ozone holes, depletion and toxification of natural resources, the lessening of biodiversity, and the collapse of human infrastructure. You think it was bad in the Soviet gulag, you should check out life in Somalia, the Sudan, Chad, Uganda, Liberia, Congo, and Lagos, Nigeria. Then check out Bombay, Dacca, Jakarta and Calcutta, maybe Haiti, Bolivia, Kosovo Chechnya, and East St. Louis, USA.

Nobody in their right mind could make a case for Stalinist oppression in the Soviet Union. But the state of human beings and natural resources, thanks to the success of our economic tyranny, has become more devastating and tragic than anything thought up by a Soviet dictatorship.

Edward Abbey once said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

The poet Gary Snyder once wrote, “If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down.”

Because of this Growth-Monster, there’s really no place on earth that isn’t locked into a terrible violence. The entire planet has become a war zone. This would probably cause apprehension in a person of nonviolent persuasion seeking a peaceful path through the slaughterhouse. The war zones I’m talking about aren’t just Iraq, the Congo and Afghanistan, they also include downtown Colorado Springs, my hometown of Taos, New Mexico, and Dollywood, Tennessee, which as you all must know is a theme park owned by the country and western singer, Dolly Parton, who had the hit “Love Is Like a Butterfly.”

Years ago in his book Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano wrote: “The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. This systematic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: Its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in food and agricultural organization statistics.”

Destructive Disdain
The heart of the problem, however, is that human enterprise treats the natural world with just as much disdain as it treats other human beings.

A thumbnail eco-portrait of the world we live in might go like this: The world’s coral reefs are dying, 80 percent of the large fish in the ocean are threatened or endangered due to overfishing, global warming is raising the ocean’s water to the extent that shorelines are disappearing and citizens will soon be removed from Tuvalu—the first South Pacific islands to be flooded entirely. Fresh water supplies are dwindling; the Aral sea is dead; the Colorado River overadjudicated; the Salton Sea is a wasteland; America’s mighty Oglala aquifer has been drained way down; same deal with aquifers around the globe, which are also polluted by fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and other toxic wastes. Lakes worldwide are dying from acid rain. Ozone holes are widening, temperatures are rising during global warming, weather is more erratic and volatile. Topsoil is being ruined around the planet, a forest the size of New York State disappears each year, the Amazon will be a desert in 20 to 40 years, species extinction is at a rate approaching 100 species a day. Songbirds and frogs and salamanders and large mammals and primates like Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus Monkey are threatened with extinction or have already become extinct. Thousands of plants and little fishes are on threatened or endangered lists. Wild elephants, rhinos, pandas and tigers will be gone in a few years. Krill shrimp, tiny bacteria, minuscule protozoa, molds and funguses and microscopic organisms that fertilize the humus of life in every square foot of dirt and living material are being eradicated by human consumption, human living needs, human creation of toxic wastes.

The renowned entymologist and sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson put it this way in his book The Diversity of Life:

“Human demographic success has brought the world to this crisis of biodiversity. Human beings ... have become a hundred times more numerous than any other land animal of comparable size in the history of life. By every conceivable measure, humanity is ecologically abnormal. Our species appropriates between 20 and 40 percent of the solar energy captured in organic material by land plants. There is no way that we can draw upon the resources of the planet to such a degree without drastically reducing the state of most other species.”

He adds, “But the long-term damage from climatic change looms in the decades ahead for most ecosystems. If even the more modest projections of global warming prove correct, the world’s fauna and flora will be trapped in a vise. On one side they are being swiftly reduced by deforestation and other forms of direct habitat destruction. On the other side they are threatened by the greenhouse effect.”

Wilson estimates that the number of species made extinct each year is 27,000, which adds up to 74 a day, or 3 species every hour. Scientists estimate that before human interference became a factor, there was about one species per million that went extinct every year. However, according to Wilson: “Human activity has increased extinction between 1000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rainforest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.”

And Wilson cries out, “Who are we to destroy the planet’s Creation?”

I would recommend that anyone concerned with social activism should read The Diversity of Life. All political persons with a social conscience need to become trained amateur biologists capable of understanding how life on the planet works, how it is being destroyed, and why every struggle nowadays boils down to an attempt at saving habitat before it can no longer sustain human and most other forms of life.

New Ethos
This requires all of us to develop a completely different ethos toward human development on earth. Our peace activism will be meaningless and ineffective without completely redefining our personal awareness and actions along biocentric sustainable lines that will go against the grain of almost all our daily multi-tasking of housekeeping, shopping, school achievement, and business activities.

Picture the earth as a complex unified organism like the human body. We have pulled out the teeth, blinded one eye, made both ears deaf, cut off the right hand, removed one testicle and one ovary, taken out a kidney, cut off all ten toes, contracted emphysema from cigarette smoking, diabetes from sugar overload, colon cancer from eating Frito Bandidos, and high blood pressure from stress. The body is still alive, even able to reproduce, and with the aid of chemotherapy, radiation, and Lanoxin it can remain alive for a while longer. But the prognosis ain’t so hot.

I believe that a nonviolent life does not start when we withhold war taxes, or get ourselves killed by an Israeli bulldozer, or picket the Pentagon. A non- violent life begins when we recognize the natural world that sustains us, and realize that our participation in the capitalist juggernaut ruling the globe causes great damage to all life, destroying the habitat we live in. A nonviolent life begins by questioning the consumer values we were raised in. A nonviolent life starts when we adopt a biocentric ideology to guide our further adventure on the planet.

“In biocentric thinking,” explains David Morris in his book Earth Warrior, “no single species has dominion over the earth. The earth instead is viewed as a community where human and non-human life are intricately entwined, where all species live and develop together, where the biosphere, not humanity, occupies the center.”

This means that our activism should strive for a “sustainable” life style at home. Perhaps impossible in today’s world, but simplifying way down is a start; voluntary poverty, if you will; public trans-portation, if possible; a small, gas- conserving vehicle, if not; serious cutbacks in spending for clothing, entertainment, food and rent. Quit smoking: Cigarettes kill violently a thousand times more people yearly around the globe than bombs, guns and bullets. Boycott the economy across the board, thinking about everything you buy and consume, the size of the house you live in.

Our survival depends on tiny crustaceans scuttling through the roots of mangrove swamps, and on massive agglomerations of minuscule planktons floating across the polluted oceans. We need to recognize these things as having an equivalent right to life on earth, stopping our growth obsession so that the other organisms on earth can regroup and re-establish themselves accordingly.

I propose that this means essentially dismantling our capitalist system and inventing another way. Fomenting a revolution that will destroy our negative way of life in order to create a true way of life.

The laws that govern our social and economic interactions need to be revamped from scratch. This is not impossible. A civil rights movement defeated Jim Crow laws; Roe v. Wade was the end of hundreds of years of struggle; women’s suffrage took effect less than a hundred years ago. The endangered species act is a gesture in the right direction. Every change is possible. Current nightmares don’t have to last forever. If we begin to teach our children different, there’s a chance there will rise new economic philosophers with an influence akin to Marx or Adam Smith ... or to Einstein or Darwin or Thoreau ... who can and will invent it fresh for all of us in the future.

The poet Walter Lowenfels once wrote, “When the tragedy of the world market no longer exists, unexpected gradations of being in love with being here will emerge.”

I believe that and am committed to looking for it every day. I know that you are too. Hasta la victoria siempre.

John Nichols is author of the novels The Milagro Beanfield War and The Sterile Cuckoo among other works.