Orion Magazine - May/June 2012

salmon as they do about marijuana, or football. But they don’t. If people collectively had to make a choice between living rivers and electricity from dams (and recreation on reservoirs, and the value of some people’s vacation homes), we can guess what they’d choose. In fact, we know what they already chose. The answer is evident in the 2 million dams in this country; in the 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall; in the 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall; and in collapsing mollusk populations, collapsing fish populations, and dying rivers and floodplains. If people collectively had to choose between iPods and mountain gorillas, we know which they would (and do) choose. If they collectively had to choose between laptops in their laps and human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we know that answer too.

You could say I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I’m really just talking about people’s priorities in action. By their fruits ye shall know them.

But it gets worse, because most people won’t acknowledge even to themselves that they’re making these choices. Any choices made long enough over time (on personal and especially social scales) stop feeling like choices and start feeling like economic imperatives or political inevi-tabilities or just the way things are. Too many people argue—or rather don’t argue but just blithely assume—that we don’t have to choose between living rivers and dams, that we don’t have to choose between a living planet and the industrial economy. But I’m not talking about wishful thinking here. I’m talking about reality, where, as Bill McKibben so frequently and eloquently points out, you can’t argue with physics. Millions of dams and hundreds of thousands of ruined rivers and streams later, we should all know this. Just as we should know that burning carbon-based substances releases carbon into the air; and just as we should know that items that

require mined materials — iPods, laptops, windmills, solar photovoltaic cells, electrical grids, and on and on — require mines, which means they destroy landbases.

The notion that we needn’t choose, that
we can have the “comforts or elegancies,”
as one antebellum proslavery philosopher
put it, of this way of life without the conse-
quences of it, that we can have the goodies
of empire (for us) without the horrors of
empire (for the victims), that we can have
an industrial economy without killing the
planet is completely counterfactual. This
notion can only be put forward by those who
are either beneficiaries of, or identify with
the beneficiaries of, these choices, which is
to say those who do not primarily care for or
identify with victims of these choices. This
notion can only be put forward by those
who have made themselves—consciously
or not—oblivious to the su=ering and in-
deed the actual existence of these victims.
Which brings us back to how we really do
live in a democracy. This failure of imagi-
nation— this failure to care —is one of the
things that keep our incredibly destructive
brand of democracy functioning. Without
question, most people in this culture pre-
fer their “comforts or elegancies” to a living
planet, and so theft and rape and pillage are
allowed to rule the day.