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Show THE ZEPHYR/ APRIL-MAY 2007 S POINTBLANK WAR & POPULATION By Michael Carter While searching for the number of wars in the world, I found this definition of “armed conflict:” “...[A] political conflict in which armed combat involves the armed forces of at least one state...and in which at least 1,000 people have been killed by the fighting during the course of the conflict.” Project Ploughshares, a Canadian anti-war organization, lists thirty-two such conflicts occurring in 2006, most in Africa and Asia, a handful more in Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. : This arresting statistic expands when “political conflicts” include social unrest and disintegration—militia violence, small civil wars, looting and extortion. Covert political violence as a tool of coercion and domination is also widespread. The word war can elicit any number of definitions; I’ll try for a more inclusive one: Conflict arising from an imbal- ance and subsequent theft of resources from other communities. Add non-human com- participation, regardless of consequences, and not an uncontrolled experiment set to end in disaster. Or—and here is an idea you just don’t hear about, even from most environmentalists—we can admit our civilization is only an experiment, not an eventuality, and let go of the insanity of war (all war), restoring ourselves to the community of life that is our heritage. If we choose this second option, and I think we certainly can, then what we are choos- ing is a living world. Set aside, just fora moment, worries of great hordes of impoverished, desperate, hungry and traumatized people; we have to, have to remember that we belong here, we want to be at home, we want the earth to last. If we continue to choose devotion to civilization as an entitled, inevitable force—well, we deserve what we get. And what we'll get is more of the same. munities to this equation, and we have worldwide war without relent, since civilization has committed war against itself and its neighbors since its inception. Not just “armed conflict” but agriculture, forestry, commercial whaling, mining, and so on. It’s a built-in feature of the invention. There can be no reasonable argument that the human population (now at more than 6.5 billion) can exist without food to keep it alive; no army can march forth without rations. By focusing on civilization as an inevitably aggressive force requiring constant importation of resources for the existence of its cities, we see other clarified aspects of our predicament—industrial agriculture and overpopulation, for example. Since any army (from the Fertile Crescent of 6,000 b.c.e. to the “Coalition Forces” in Irag of 2006) requires food to function, intensive extraction of this resource is a prerequisite to imperial aggression, as are a substantial number of military recruits. And since we are still animals (like it or not) subject to the same rules of ecology as any other organism, exhaustive cultiva- tion of food inevitably results in a population increase. This is a stunningly ill-discussed factor in population debates. There can be no reasonable argument that the human popu- lation (now at more than 6.5 billion) can exist without food to keep it alive; no army can march forth without rations. An agricultural style that destroys all competition for food (wild plants, prairie dogs, wolves, bison) is the technological engine that drives our culture and its expansion. Military aggression, colonialism, the usurpation of tribal lands and cultures, have all been supported by a food surplus and an ever-increasing food surplus is the subsequent prod- . uct of civilization. Because industrial agriculture like most features of civilization is utterly reliant on fossil and other limited resources (synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are primarily petroleum-based), this population simply cannot grow and sustain itself forever. Particularly since topsoil erosion and aquifer depletion also invariably limit and decrease food production. Now, there are two ways to confront this. One is continuing to pretend that limitless expansion of civilization—through war, technology, or “prudent planning” (as one demographer put it, speculating on what will be needed for the U.S. to reach the 400 million mark with little adverse effect) —is an invention worthy of blind allegiance and Use your radio as a tool for the people! 90.1 & 106.7 fm It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see into this future, only a look at the nations that have been at the mad dream of domination longer: Iraq, say, the very “cradle of civilization,” where dominating agriculture began, and war reigns. India, China, Indonesia, all desperately overpopulated, polluted, impoverished —despite all that rice and factory work, famine is a chronic fixture in these places, further evidence that surplus is not our friend. Another more immediate and uniquely grotesque example of this: ever since the ag empires of Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, and the like hit upon the idea of dumping their corn surplus into our bodies via high fructose syrup, we in the U.S. have suffered alarmingly increased obesity rates. The work against war, poverty, pollution, against the destruction of biodiversity, must focus on the availability of better options. We build our cultural world and all its atrocities anew every day, and the choice to abandon it for something else, something almost certainly, inevitably better, is also available to us, each day. Community and reciprocity—lives in accord with readily observable biological laws—are anxiously waiting for us to return (since for most of our existence as humans, that was the world we lived in), and I can see not one thing we have to lose in trying. Keeping at what we're doing, for no essential good reason, is literally suicide, since our war upon the living world is a war upon ourselves. How could it be otherwise? Our culture is not the whole of humanity, and the insane behavior we observe in ourselves and others is not “human nature.” This is lazy thinking because it presumes that we, the civilization builders, are the only people that ever mattered, and never mind the tens of thousands of cultures that lived (and in threatened scattered tribes, still live) in accord with the rules set down by the biosphere. To call war, atrocity, and overpopulation human nature is arrogant and reckless, defeatism that demoralizes resistance and rein- forces the perception of activists as do-nothing complainers. Stand and fight, dammit. What else do we have to do, with our limited time in this fantastic miracle of the living world? Find a way, that’s all. There’s plenty of work in all directions. We owe our lives to the earth, and we owe every bit of intelligence, anger, reason and love we can assemble to resist its piecemeal extinction. Michael Carter lives in Moab. 1) www.pl ca/libraries/ACRText/S y 2005 pdf g hs} 2) Manning, Richard. Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization. New York, North Point Press, 2004. POINTBLANK SUBMISSIONS The Zephyr welcomes unsolicited contributions from readers; however, please do not expect acknowledgement of receipt. If your essay is selected you will be contacted. Submissions should be 1000 words or less. Pointblank contributors receive a five year subscription to The Zephyr. ez KZMU fm, Moab Community Radio Creating Sound Alternatives Since 1992 Spring Radiothon, April 20-28 Thanks for your support! Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence. Dorothy Thompson |