Sacrifice – Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Just when I thought our depravity couldn’t get any deeper……

Last night I caught an article on Truth Out about uranium mining in the southwest. For the first time I read the words “National Sacrifice Area”. Digging further into this concept brought a wave of despair, disgust and sadness that I haven’t felt (read: allowed myself to feel) in a very long time.

Living in the world today I’ve had to harden my heart much as anyone if they want to  do anything other than bury their head in the sand of…pick one; overwork, electronic toys, extreme vacations, gambling, sex, drugs, remodeling the house, playing the market. After all, I came of age on the hard stuff like atomic bombings, starving Biafran children and Viet Nam.

But this? The fact that my government has actually held meetings and made decisions and plans to designate areas of our lands too valuable to waste on preservation and guardianship and life? That we, as a nation, have ruined and despoiled whole regions of the country to the point of writing them off as a “National Sacrifice Area”? This I don’t know how to deal with. Adding the fact that the vast majority of these lands just happen to be on Native soil or in communities of poor people of all colors crushed me down to a place where getting out of bed this morning became the stuff of legend. This is what I read: from www.earthlight.org/2002/essay46_sacrifice.html.

“For example, the most polluted site under the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program is at Tar Creek, Oklahoma. Toxic contamination from lead and zinc mines at Tar Creek has had significant impact on seven Indian tribes and three states. Acid mine drainage and wind-blown dust have poisoned many of the tribes’ sacred and ceremonial sites. The dust blows off the mine tailing piles, which stand like gray mountains hundreds of feet high above the flat plains. The underground mine system reaches into the aquifer, leaching heavy metals, and depositing them to the surface water of Tar Creek.

Tar Creek is only one example of how places and communities have been “sacrificed” for the American way of life. This sacrifice has been recognized by the US government in a National Academy of Sciences study, which concluded that some areas of the country could be used for national priorities irrespective of the resulting permanent environmental damage. Such places are designated “National Sacrifice Areas.”

Many of these areas are on native land and are open to resource extraction and defense activities. The Four Corners area of the Navajo Nation and the Black Hills of South Dakota, sacred to the Lakota Nations, have been officially designated as “national sacrifice areas.” Seventy-five percent of the US national uranium reserve is on Indian land under the control of the major oil companies. In fact, most of the armaments and munitions that supplied American forces in both World Wars and Korea came out of the Tar Creek mine fields.

In secular terms, a sacrifice occurs when a person or group gives up something in order to achieve another, greater good. In this context, it is important to ask what “greater good” is being aimed for–and to note that no one should have the ability to give up another person’s land or health for any reason.

A closer look at the western religious origins of the term is even more disturbing. The “sacrificial lamb” or “scapegoat” is symbolically understood to take on the weight of the community’s sins, and is then either exiled from the community or killed as an act of atonement. In that sense, the designation of many Indian lands as National Sacrifice Areas is a disturbingly accurate recognition of present reality.

Native communities are the scapegoats for Western consumer culture, bearing the burdens of the sins of the community.”

The vision of a bunch of guys sitting around a table and blithely coming up with the idea that it is fine to lease other people’s land, damaging it permanently in such a way that thousands of human beings (not to mention all of the other life that was carried and cradled there…) are forced to abandon the area, because we can’t live without munitions for our wars (Tar Creek) or power to run all of our toys (uranium and coal) is stupefying and I don’t know where to put it.

Imagine if we were talking about a building. I lease this building, I make it radioactive to where no one can go near it for 30,000 years and then walk away. The building is permanently ruined, sacrificed, for the good of myself and whatever I got out of the poisoning of it. No matter that no one can live there for 30,000 years. I held the lease so I have the right to do whatever I want.

But of course we aren’t talking about a building. We are talking about our lifeblood, the land. We are nothing without the land. None of us. When we live in cities we lose this knowledge. We begin to think that it is our right to have whatever we want when we want it if we can afford it. No matter that scores of people, animals, river systems, plants and other forms of life have to die for us to have it. We can afford it. We worked for that money and by god we deserve that iPod. Or that Prius or that Game Boy.  We are destroying the planet we live on and depend on for EVERYTHING we consume, we all know this, and yet we refuse to change our way of life in any meaningful way. Name one thing that you have right now that did not come from the land. Just one thing. We think that we can separate ourselves from nature and survive. What folly! We rule by virtue of numbers and tell ourselves that we are better, smarter and more deserving than the rest of the web of life around us because we are human.

The shame of belonging to the species of human beings is sometimes more than I can bear. I don’t know if it has always been there but an evilness has taken up residence in our modern life that is so vast it can make me tired of being alive. Because we are not really alive when we are in this collective evil. We only exist. When we are cut off from the web of life all around us, which we are a part of, we are not alive at all but merely conscious. Human beings are very clever but not overly intelligent. Not the brightest bulbs on the block are we? Clever because we can make nuclear energy. Stupid because we use it and carry the illusion of controlling it.

I believe that we are in the beginning stages of a collapse of human industrial civilization right now and for just the reason I’ve been talking about, clever but not intelligent. At least I’m hoping that we are. Truly, if we’ve devolved to the point where we permanently poison huge swathes of our beautiful jewel planet and designate it a “sacrifice area” to our modern needs then we’re due for a fall. A big one. And when this happens there will be a vacuum where our folly once was. The question becomes what shall we fill that hole with? More of the same or something radically different? We decide.

We decide if we want money and corporations and profit to rule or not. We decide if men unfit to raise a cabbage plant are in charge of our destiny, resources and children. We decide if we want destruction to be the way we move through the universe. We decide who among us has power. We decide with every choice we make. Everyday. Start anywhere and choose differently or die, taking the rest of life with you. It’s up to you.