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Granted, the grizzled curmudgeon, in one of his shortest but most unrelentingly logical essays, "Eco-Defense," proposed that "Self-defense against attack is one of the basic laws not only of human society but of life itself, not only of human life but of all life" (29). After filling in more of his logic, Abbey concludes that defending wilderness is an "obligation" and "ethically imperative," and should be accomplished "by whatever means are necessary" (31). If we insert "Mainstream Environmentalism" (hereafter mostly "ME") as a replacement for "Politics" and "Representative government" in the following quotation from the same essay, we will, sadly in this case, also speak truly: "Politics is a game for the rich only. Representative government in the USA represents money, not people, and therefore has forfeited our allegiance and moral support" (30). Relative to ME, environmental correspondent Mark Hertsgaard points out in a poignant article gracing a recent issue of The Nation (July 31/August 7, 2006) that it’s high time environmentalists "face issues of race and class--issues they have long skirted." And in fact, the narcissistic Big ME increasingly has become like and even often part of both politricks and grubberment--and thus has grown increasingly bureaucratic and corpserate. But Abbey’s words, as they often do, need some qualifying. His own role as a trickster within "Environmentalism"--tossing bottles and cans onto the side of roadways (paved ones being ruination anyway), apparently once rolling old tires off into a part of the Grand Canyon, driving a gas-guzzling old red Cadillac--demonstrates not only his complexity, but also his emphasis on flying in the face of the machine-society, including the self-righteous aspiring saints who would make of environmentalism a movement, a depersonalized machine, stripped of humor and life and the wildness both thrive on. Corporations in any form are prone to abuses of power and money; they are a major element of fascism, as many anti-environmentalists (and many enviros) have duly noted. Item: Have you tried to get to talk on the phone to a human being affiliated with the Sahara Club’s national donations? When I was still a member a few years ago, they messed up my membership and monthly contributions. I called and called, leaving messages, somehow (but only) two or three times being contacted back merely to have that person manage to keep things balled up. For all I know, I was talking to people trained in American accents in Bombay. I was, of course, a small donor. Upon quitting the Club, I wrote a fairly harsh letter detailing my experiences and complaints. In return?--no acknowledgment, just continued appeals for money, continued glossy magazines and flyers, continued letters fraught with scare-tactic rhetoric. Fear-mongering (sound familiar?) in a society running on empty because it is running on fear, foulest of fuels, fouler even than oil. ME has become increasingly environ-mental and fundamentalist. Not a-busy being born, but a-busy dying. Publishing those sleek magazines, running all sorts of crybaby emergency funding appeals, paying high salaries to CEOs and consultants and the like (and generally low salaries and paltry benefits to those in and near the field), offering careers and advancement to carpetbagging movers-on, targeting the big-monied, resorting to turning people into numbers, professionalizing itself in every way imaginable. Seemingly more interested in perpetuating its own money-oiled machines than in doing definite good where it can. As Hertsgaard also notes, "[N]o one can say the environmental movement lacks financial resources; the budgets of local and national groups amount to an estimated 1.7 billion a year." He later adds that, of that amount, "only $187 million--barely ten percent--goes to groups that work at the local level." Queries: When was the last time you read or heard of an ME group accepting criticism from within the ranks, let alone seeking it? I thought so. What tends to be the reaction whenever such criticism somehow miraculously surfaces? Hyperdefensiveness; distortions; bad or absent logic; ad hominem attacks; lies, damned lies, and the worst lies, abstract statistics; villainization and demonization; spin, spin, spin. March in lockstep or get gunned outa the ranks, podnuhs. ME’s abuse of facts and statistics and the like is not a recent phenomenon. For instance, the oft-sainted David Brower was well-known as a down and dirty fighter and for distortions and lies, many of which came back to haunt him and the organizations he represented, arguably doing more damage than good, and that with more than Glen Canyon. It is small wonder, then, that the larger-than-life bombastic dammer of rivers, Floyd Dominy, comes across as more human, more likable, more alive than the "Archdruid" in their shared section of John McPhee’s Conversations with the Archdruid. Nonetheless, over the years Big ME has still managed to become increasingly like the enemy, like the Roves, the Cheneys, the Bushes, Big Oil, Big Coal, and so on: scripted; full of conflicts of interest, dissimilation and dishonesty, depersonalization and dehumanization; snarled with smug self-importance; immune to constructive criticism. Made over in the vipers’ spinning image. Given his even greater valuation of individualism and anarchism, there’s little question that none of this is likely what Abbey intended by "whatever means are necessary," little doubt but that ME too has become a part of America’s raging "Culture of Death." Moreover, so-called "ecotourism," at least for the most part, is but another garden variety of industrial tourism and thus of ME. Abbey’s already twice-mentioned coinage "Sahara Club" suggests desert excursions, safaris. A social club. Go to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Glacier, National Forests, exotic overseas ecotourist haunts, wherever, and witness the artificiality, the commodification (commode-ification?), the destruction that "experiencing" nature has wrought. One could go on nigh unto eternally, but there’s no need to do so with the self-evident. Old Abbey friend and fine writer in his own right, Charles Bowden, has commented to the effect that environmentalists are right about almost every issue but seriously flawed, often even less likable than their sworn enemies in their penchant for "True Belief." In fact, Bowden has fought winning environmental causes around his home of Tucson, at least one of them major, with little money but mainly grass roots support. But denial is a powerful human trait, probably most pronounced among Americans since the unholy advent of Industrialism and its partner in grime, consumerism. Big ME is filled with it. But we are so lacking in vision that we can only seem to envision the same methodologies, the same warped ethics, employed and perfected by the enemy as our own way of operation. In life, as individuals and as groups, we define ourselves as much, perhaps more, by our enemies as by our friends. What then does it indicate when we ape the enemy? Item: At a Christmas party a few years back for a major national environmental organization, I was naively shocked to see that major members of the local group--a family of four, as I recall--owned a vast house (I’m guessing at around 8,000 square feet) outside of Rapid City and invasively nestled high up in a prime portion of the Black Hills. A large outdoor swimming pool, a large stable, a number of horses, several vehicles and not all of them fuel-efficient. It is difficult to imagine their level of work and money undoing their level of damage. We can see the enemy, see it clearly, and it is us, too. David Cremean lives in Spearfish, South Dakota. |
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