Excerpt from Endgame

Jack and Jill (p. 609)

From chapter "Dams, Part II"

There are those who tell us not to listen. There are those who tell us we must be reasonable. There are those who caution patience. There are those who against all evidence tell us the system can be made to work. These people are wrong.

They are journalists and scientists and activists and engineers and technicians. They are the doomed men—the already dead though still breathing men—huddling against the walls of the ballroom in the ship, terrified lest anyone break their unacknowledged death watch.

Foresters preside over the murder of forests. Hydrologists preside over the murder of lakes and rivers. Of course they do not call it this. They call it management.

The doomed ones huddled in the ballroom will try to stop you through any means necessary. They have been listening too long to the echo-chambers of their own intra-human institutions, and like Jack of R. D. Laing’s Jack and Jill they must stop anyone from listening to the natural world, lest they be reminded of what they have forgotten—that they and the institutions they serve and with which they identify are murdering the forests and rivers and plains and oceans and skies and aquifers and mountains and those who live in these places, those who are these places. They’ve forgotten also—and will stop anyone from reminding them—that they too were once capable of hearing the salmon and the spotted owl speak. They will kill you to maintain their enforced deafness, because otherwise they will lose their identity as journalists and scientists and activists and engineers and technicians; they will lose their identity as civilized; they will, from their perspective, die.