The Illusion of Ownership

I've been reading the first volume of Derrick Jensen's tome Endgame for the past week. I am certain that I agree with his premise, but am not so comfortable with his prescription. He argues among other things that civilization as we know it is killing the planet (this is a definite duh, but significant nonetheless). He says that all nonviolent means of attempting to undermine or alter the course of a fundamentally undemocratic and physically destructive system is like "using the master's tools to take down the master's house," which is simply not a realistic proposition. He says that the only way we can confront the system is to quit waffling and just destroy it. I'm not sure if I agree with him yet.

But I agree with him on a great many things already; especially his critique of property ownership in a society based on capitalist consumption. Consumption wouldn't be possible without the seizure, destruction and conversion of the natural world into products to be bought and sold at a price in the market. The rules of the market are such that power flows in specific directions, intuitively based upon what each of us want or need. "The premise of private property," says Jensen, "is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves." Makes good sense. Elsewhere in the book: " To want to close the [Mexican] border to people yet leave it open to the theft of their resources (importation is the preferred term in polite society), is to show that your alleged concern over population is nothing but the same old bigotry and exploitation. I don't want you, but I do want the coffee grown on land that used to be yours.

What struck me while reading this is that we leave admission of the primacy of resources out of our political discourse. "Notice the language," says Jensen. "Overpopulation, zero population growth. How different would it be if we spoke instead of overconsumption and zero consumption growth? This shift wouldn't happen, of course, because zero consumption growth would destroy the capitalist economy."

We have indeed become experts at shrouding our everyday speech to the point of impotency. We do this in ways that only make sense to us because even the slightest shift in wording would awaken us to the reality that the changes we are failing to make on a large scale are linked to the suffering of millions across the globe. Live and let live, we keep saying. What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. But what if what's mine was never rightfully acquired in the first place? What must I do to ensure that the process of acquisition doesn't harm others? Do we dare quit hiding behind the statistics of population growth or sustainable development and look at the damage caused by the economic way of looking at the world?