(For Jason, who understood)

Once you start looking past immediate symptoms at causes, noting that symptoms do not occur of their own accord and, if widely recognized as "bad," require some kind of motivating force visibly disconnected from the end result, it becomes apparent that the major factor of humanity's assault on nature is its tendency to put price tags on everything. A patch of ground where one hundred thousand species have coexisted in natural balance since the last ice age is no longer a living, breathing, existential thing, but a piece of real estate, and anyone - regardless of intent or character - who comes along with the right sum of little tokens can purchase it and do whatever they want to it.

In theory, this is freedom. The capitalist states uphold this practice as a virtue, claiming that because someone can rise from dire poverty through hard work at a bureaucratic job or selling tedious little products to small minds, they have the right to develop land as they see fit. This represents everyone but the forest, of course, which cannot fit into an office and will not go get some job pushing paper, so it is assumed that it is less than sentient; unfeeling; a completely submissive state of material which can be run through machines and shaped into profit centers from which we can empower other people with wealth. That is, in the view of the capitalist state, "progress" as it is in theory enhancing human lives and of course, if the forest cared, it would speak up, or vote, or protest, or something.

Communist states are no better, as they make the old mistake of assuming that the inverse of something is its opposite, when what they need to do to achieve not-thing is to reverse its founding assumption. Under Communism, upholding not-money is so important that the forest must submit to the will of the state, which naturally is busy creating an economy and breeding future warriors against capitalism, so the effect is the same, as is the motivating force: it is trying to compete in the world of money with not-money, but ultimately not-money must conform to the same ideals and eventually, is absorbed by money because money, as a simplest lowest common denominator, is a more vicious competitor. (These states are also alike in that like all modern orders, they aim to replace lawless nature, in which death can occur any minute, with a human order in which death only occurs when fiscally convenient.)

Both of these states are in the grip of a granular absolute, which is a type of pragma, or fragment of theory, which is applied without context or regard for the whole. A simple example would be the old argument that Kant brought up, time and again. "Thou shalt not lie" makes great sense on paper; if everyone obeyed it, immediately, perhaps the world would be a marginally better place. But lying is not the only disease of humanity, so if the S.W.A.T. team comes to your door and says, "We're looking for your brother, so we can haul him off and shoot him for being the unabomber, is he here?" You look in the back and he's busy typing a manifesto. In theory, it's "wrong" to lie, because your brother is there; in practice, you say, "Haven't seen him for years" and the S.W.A.T. team goes away.

Money, and not-money by extension, is a similar absolute. It is the only determiner of a situation, but it exists without consideration for the whole, such that if some bright enterprising guy comes along and wants to take your ancestral forest and make it into a McDonald's or another subdivision, there's not much you can do about it. After all, he has the money - the right sum for which that patch of ground (and forest, which is counted as timber) - and how can you deny it to him? If you do, you're blocking his ability to earn money and thus can be sued and are demonized by society as a whole, because you have obstructed his dreams. If you're as wealthy as all of the rest of society put together, you can save that patch of land, but few people are, especially healthy ones, who tend to view money as a means to an end and thus, when they have enough for their families, put it out of sight and focus on enjoying careers, people, experiences.

One would literally need to be as wealthy as all of society to counter it, because of two factors. The first is the forest, which as an ecosystem composed of interlocking ecosystems, requires more land than humans, which have a singular purpose and replace whatever is on that land with sole human habitation (the handful of species that survive in suburbs, like sparrows and squirrels, are as domesticated as cockroaches: they depend on the human order). The second is humanity, which since it operates by contextless absolutes such as money, will never stop growing, even as resources become scarce; instead, they will simply compete for what is left, in the process consuming all of it and leaving behind cities which can never recreate the forest. They might plant trees, and breed squirrels, but what about the other 99,998 species?

When these arguments are presented in public, the many who suppose themselves witty come up with objections: humanity will regulate itself! Money empowers the impoverished and oppressed! You'd leave us without jobs or the ability to purchase products! These can be recognized as fear of change, since societies have existed using money without having it be a wholly unchecked resource; we could change nothing about money, but simply put some higher preference above it, whether local leaders or a spiritual elite or simply electing Ted Kaczynski president, and all would continue as previous except that unchecked expansion would no longer exist. It's as simple as saying that price tags only go on some things, and not on others, and that humanity has already consumed more than its fair share of forest, wetlands, prairie, and desert.

Those who object to such things are demonstrating fear, more than anything else, because they trust money more than nature. Money is uncritical, if you have money, and if you don't, you can easily get it by trading your time in doing simple tasks for that check every two weeks. Money empowers those who are weak, oppresssed, enfeebled, and even deranged, along with the strong. Therefore, to people who fear the end of the money order, it is a "moral good," since it helps humans. But that's all it does, and that task is far from the whole goal of a species attempting to surface on this planet. Let money run amok and soon "forest" will be something you find in a special preserve which, like a museum, will be a place for visitors and be tromped by uncountable feet and strewn with candy wrappers.

Some would say this is anti-human, but to this columnist, it appears as something far simpler: maturity. Maturity is recognizing that although you'd eat chocolate for every meal if you could, that's not a sensible long-term plan for your life. It's recognizing that while you wish all your friends could just get along, some of them never will, so you have to not seat them next to one another at dinner. It's knowing that because winter is coming, you have to gather and pile up dead wood so you can have a fire on the days when snow obscures the fallen logs. And so forth. Money is short-term gratification and lack of a plan; we need to establish some higher order above it, and regulate it, before everything that is natural on this earth is replaced by fast food and faceless subdivisions.

There is another reason to create a higher order than money: ourselves. Just as becoming mature makes us stronger people, and the ability to make long-term plans forces us to develop our higher intelligence, creating for ourselves a hierarchy of goals that requires having a plan and a strong set of values in turn creates in us a broader spiritual consciousness. Utilitarian orders, or those in which if most people approve or don't notice something is considered a social good, such as democracy and money-above-all and thou shalt not lie, do not develop this, and thus turn us into small-minded, distracted, contextless people who cannot appreciate the majestic beauty, complexity and life of a forest. Maybe we are not as different from the order of the forest as we would presume, and this is why in fear we destroy it.

January 12, 2005