what I would do for the river, and the salmon

by Derrick Jensen

THERE’S REALLY ONLY ONE QUESTION in life, and only one lesson. This question is whispered endlessly to us from all directions. The moon asks it each night, as do the stars. It’s asked by drops of rain that cling to the soft ends of cedar branches, and by teardrops that cluster at the fold of your nose or the edge of your mouth. Frogs, flowers, stones, pieces of broken plastic, all ask this of each other, of themselves, and of you.

The question: Who are you? The lesson: We’re born or sprouted or hatched or congealed or we fall from the sky, we live, and then we die or are worn away or broken or disperse into a river, lake, or sea, ripples flowing outward to bounce back from the far shore. And in the meantime, in that middle, what are you going to do? How are you going to find, and be, who you are? Who are you, and what are you going to do about it?

If modern industrial education—and more broadly industrial civilization—requires “the subsumption of the individual,” that is, the conversion of vibrant human beings into “automata,” i.e., into a pliant workforce, then the most revolutionary thing we can do is follow our hearts, to manifest who we really are. And we are in desperate need of revolution, on all scales and in all ways, from the most personal to the most global, from the most serene to the most wrenching. We’re killing the planet, we’re killing each other, and we’re killing ourselves.

And still our neighbors—hummingbirds, craneflies, huckleberries, the sharp cracking report of the earthquake that shakes you awake in your bed—ask us, who are you, who are you in relation to each of us, and to yourself?

Our current system divorces us from our hearts and bodies and neighbors, from humanity and animality and embeddedness in the world we inhabit, from decency and even the most rudimentary intelligence (how smart is it to destroy your own habitat: who was the genius who came up with the idea of poisoning our own food, water, and air?). I’ve heard defenders of this system say that following one’s heart is not a good enough moral compass, that Hitler was following his heart when he tried to conquer the world, tried to rid the world of those he deemed unworthy. But Hitler was no more following his heart than are any of the rest of us who blindly contribute to a culture that is accomplishing what Hitler desired but could not himself bring to completion.

The truth is—as I have shown elsewhere, exhaustively and exhaustingly—that it is only through the most outrageous violations of our hearts and minds and bodies that we are inculcated into a system where it can be made to make sense to some part of our twisted and torn psyches to perpetuate a way of being based on the exploitation, immiseration, and elimination of everyone and everything we can get our hands on.

Within this context, the question the whole world asks at every moment cannot help but also be the most dangerous: Who are you? Who are you, really? Beneath the trappings and traumas that clutter and characterize our lives, who are you, and what do you want to do with the so-short life you’ve been given? We could not live the way we do unless we avoided that question, trained ourselves and others to avoid that question, forced others to avoid placing that question in front of us, and in fact attempted to destroy those who do.

As we see.

It is nearing the end of the first week of class, and I have a question. “If you were suddenly given more money than you could imagine, say a million dollars, would you stay in school?”

Someone says, “I can imagine a lot more than a million.”

“Okay, three.”

“More.”

“Don’t get greedy. Now the question: Would you stay in school?”

“You must be crazy.” Someone else asks what I’ve been smoking. Nobody in the class would stay in school. I’ve asked this question for several years now, and maybe five or six students total have said they would stay.

We talk about what they would do instead. Many would travel. Some would stay home and watch television. Some would throw elaborate parties. Many would make sure their parents, siblings, and friends never have to enter the wage economy. Many would buy their parents a house. A few—especially older, returning students—say that with the exception of quitting school, they wouldn’t change much about their lives.

“Would you get or keep a job?”

They laugh. No one says yes.

“Okay, you’ve got all this money, and the next day you go to the doctor for a regular checkup. You discover you have the dreaded Love Story disease, which means you’ll live for a year with no symptoms of illness—looking great all the time, by the way—but at the end of that time you’ll suddenly die. What will you do?”

“Get a second opinion.”

I laugh. “It’s the same as the first.”

They think about it.

“Would you stay in school?”

Of course not.

“If you only had a limited amount of time to live—which is of course the case—would you get a job?”

Of course not. Again, many would travel. Many would spend time with families. Several say they’d have lots of sex. One woman says she’d have a child. Some think that because the child would soon be motherless she’s not acting in the child’s interest, but others support her decision. A few would learn how to skydive (and on day 366 would skip the parachute). One says that on the final day he’d walk into the (moving) propeller of an airplane, just so he’d have a dramatic exit. A couple would spend the year at hospitals searching for a cure.

When the responses begin to slow, a student asks, thoughtfully, “What’s the point of doing this exercise here in class?”

I think a moment, shrug, and say, “To have fun.”

He seems to accept that. Someone else asks what I would do differently, if I had the money but no disease.

“Not a damn thing,” I say.

“Nothing?”

“Maybe I’d go out to eat more; I’m a wretched cook. And if I had enough money I’d buy land and set it aside so it can recover.”

A woman shyly raises her hand. I look at her and nod. She says, softly, “Don’t you think you could buy a new jacket, one that fits?”

Someone else says, “And do something about those shirts. Where do you shop, Value Village?”

“Well, actually. . . .”

Many of them agree that even if they were to win this money and not I, that they would buy me stylin’ clothes. They give great detail. When they finally have me properly outfitted, someone asks, “And what if you had only a year to live?”

“I’d write nonstop. I’ve got a list of books in me, and I don’t want to die with a couple of them still there.”

“Would you do anything special on the last day?”

“Yeah,” I reply. “I’d strap on explosives and head to the nearest dam. That would be the least I could do for the river, and for the salmon.”

this essay was excerpted from Walking On Water: Reading, Writing And Revolution

photo credits: Boy and Butterfly © Sven Klaschik / iStockphoto

Derrick Jensen is the author of The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, a USA Today Critics Choice for one of the best nature books of 1995, As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial, and How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.