this week's excerpt

Hey All,

Here is this week’s excerpt, chosen by Austin

Myth of Human Supremacy:

How you perceive the world affects how you behave in the world. If you perceive only human constructs as having meaning or function, then you will overvalue human constructs. And if you perceive nonhumans and their creations as not having meaning or function, then you will undervalue nonhumans and their creations. The same is obviously true for those who perceive the creations of males or whites as being more important than those of women or people of color.

It is crucial for those who are destroying the planet to insist that nonhumans have no inherent and true functionality, because if species do not serve true functions, the larger communities they are part of won’t suffer when humans eradicate them. They seem to believe they can destroy the great schools of fish without harming oceans, clearcut forests without harming forests, dam rivers without harming rivers, and so on. Human supremacists are maintaining this belief even as they cause the planet to die. But that is never what is important to them; even life on earth matters less to them than their feeling of superiority. Life on earth doesn’t matter to them except as it affects their ability to maintain this way of life.

Having grown up in the arid western United States, I’ve thought a lot about water rights, and how these rights to water are allocated. Generally it is through something called “prior appropriation,” also called the “Colorado Doctrine” after an 1872 Supreme Court ruling. In a nutshell, prior appropriation says that the first person (or economic entity) to use water from a river or other source for what is defined by this human supremacist culture as a “beneficial use” has the perpetual right to continue using that same amount of water for that same use. A phrase to describe it is, “First in time, first in right.” Anyone who comes along later can use some (or all) of the remaining water for the same or some other “beneficial use” provided the new user doesn’t impinge on the rights of those who came before. These rights then become property, and can be bought and sold like deeds or other markers of ownership. So let’s say a mining corporation is going to use a lot of water for some planned operation. And let’s also say that all the water rights to the river have already been claimed. The corporation couldn’t use the water from the river till it bought the rights to do so from enough owners of already-allocated rights.

Why do I mention this? Because the definition of “beneficial use” ties right to that same old ridiculous naturalistic [sic] belief I’ve been hammering in this book: that the only true functionality is human functionality. “Beneficial uses” are generally defined as industrial, agricultural, and household uses. And the inclusion of “household uses” is a Trojan Horse, since more than 90 percent of all water used by “humans” is used for agriculture and industry, which means that “beneficial use” is for all practical purposes defined as industrial and (industrial) agricultural uses.

There goes the world.

Of course, any worldview that was not human supremacist, and that was not in thrall to industrialism and to a way of life that is killing the planet, would recognize that the first beings to have beneficially used water from rivers are the rivers themselves, and the fish who live in those rivers, and the forests who live with the rivers, and the oceans fed by those rivers, and so on. And the Indigenous humans who live by those rivers. Benefitting the real world, indeed benefitting anyone but members of this human supremacist culture, is not real benefit. It does not effectively exist.

But how do these supremacists believe the rivers became so fecund in the first place? It was through the beneficial use of the water by the rivers themselves, and by other members of their communities.

In the narcissistic worldview of the supremacists, the only benefits that really count are those accrued by the supremacists themselves. And so what the Colorado Doctrine means in practice is that the Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean. Nor does the Rio Grande. Nor do many other rivers the world over; this is what happens when you allocate 100 percent of a river to “beneficial uses”: there is no water left for the real world. Likewise, this all means that the Columbia has been turned into a series of reservoirs, with disastrous consequences for all of those—human and nonhuman—who have the real original claims on the water, and who truly put the water to “beneficial use.”

The same doctrine applies not only to water. It is true of mineral deposits, where it’s finders keepers, everyone-devastated-by-the-mine weepers. It’s also basically the “doctrine of discovery,” where any colonial power gets to rationalize taking possession of—that is, stealing—anything it claims to discover. In every case, discovery by nonhumans or by Indigenous humans doesn’t count as discovery.

Of course it doesn’t, because the only true functionality is industrial human functionality.