Social Uprooting

Search

About this site

Pretend you are not civilized. Pretend you love the land where you live. Pretend you were never taught to value economic production over life, or pretend you unlearned this. Pretend you were never taught that everyone else is here for you to use, or pretend you unlearned this. Pretend you do not feel entitled to take from those around you. Pretend you know that someday you will die. Pretend you are not separate from your landbase, but a part of it, as it is a part of you. Pretend you were taught to take care of your landbase as though your life depends on it. Pretend that’s what you do.

Those who hold others captive are captives themselves. Freedom feeds freedom, and captives keep captive. This is true of those who hold humans captive. This is true of those who keep the world captive. It is true of those who hold rivers captive. Not only the wild water on one side of a dam is held captive, but entire communities on all sides of every dam. Freedom feeds freedom, and a river no longer feeds the freedom it finds to everyone and everything downstream which was once held captive by the captivity of the river.

Have you ever listened to a plant as it drinks up water? You can hear the water drawing up its roots, moving through stems, moistening (ever so slightly) the surfaces of leaves. When a dam breaks it is not only water but freedom that is absorbed and expired, exuded and extended, because much of the community downstream from a dam is, in a very real sense, locked up or extremely limited in terms of its proper movement until the medium of motion - wild water - is restored.

I want to be there when river after river finds freedom and feeds it to everyone else. This will be the most beautiful and appropriate kind of feeding frenzy.

Those who really know freedom will not and cannot want to keep this freedom from others anymore than they can want to lose it themselves. Only terrified, helpless, stupid slaves - including the civilized - could and would protect their own prisons, be their own bars.

Pretend you are not civilized. Pretend you are not a slave. Pretend you are a free human being. Pretend you were taught to value freedom, your own and others, enough that you will fight for it. Pretend that is what you do.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame