SAND Issue 19

111 Down in the boat, a man with a knife in his belt mutters as he heaves aboard bodies and luggage. Then he takes his place by the motor.

He says: “In wintertime, there’s nothing under the ice. When the dams open downriver, the water level drops, but the ice stays put.

Careful when you’re out on the snowmobile. If you break through, well, there’s nothing that’ll stop your fall.”

Rollicking, German-sounding laughter, unaware.

The mountain’s gaze on the far shore is that of an old woman. We land right at the edge of her shadow.

A society’s norms shape its actions. But the reverse also applies: a society’s actions shape its norms. A perceived need to cut down forests, till the land, extract oil or breed animals in captivity impacts the cultural story that surrounds these practices. In the same way that a culture that sees trees as meaning-bearing subjects won’t engage in clear-cutting, a culture that engages in clear-cutting will never see trees as meaning-bearing subjects.

In our cultural mythology, there is no environment with which to enter into a relationship; there are only resources to extract, materials to exploit. If the concrete apparatus of production works by transforming living into dead – tree into paper, mountain into tin can – the cultural mythology works in the same way, just more efficiently: Trees and mountains aren’t living things, are they? Nothing is killed because there was never a life to take. A story about the world such as this is both a condition for and a consequence of the large-scale devastation we are witnessing today. A culture based on exploitation has no choice but to deny the subjectivity of the exploited.

It’s evening when I take my first steps up a steep, dust-dry path so well-trodden that the pates of subterranean stones have been laid bare, the flesh of the earth gnawed to the bone. Dusk is but a subtle shift in the light, another mosquito landing on your neck, a faint modulation in the rapids’ roar.