The mindset that can save the world is that which my wife has. She exhibited it often before, when we still had no cat in our house. I’d see a rat balefullly staring at me from the ceiling and I’d point it to her and say there’s a big rat in there but she’d caution me in a whisper not to call it a rat, or a pest, but call it instead what she had always called a rat—a MABAIT ( roughly, the Tagalog word for “the kind one”). She insists rats understand us and if we call them bad names they’d resent

The mindset that can save the world is that which my wife has. She exhibited it often before, when we still had no cat in our house. I’d see a rat balefullly staring at me from the ceiling and I’d point it to her and say there’s a big rat in there but she’d caution me in a whisper not to call it a rat, or a pest, but call it instead what she had always called a rat—a MABAIT ( roughly, the Tagalog word for “the kind one”). She insists rats understand us and if we call them bad names they’d resent it and take revenge by gnawing at our laundry, appliances or electric wirings; whereas if we call them KIND they’ll show appreciation by leaving us in peace.She thinks even as we know them, these rats also understand us, even our language. So we should therefore respect each other so that we can live in harmony.



The author of this book, Derrick Jensen, is just like my wife. He talks to coyotes, pleading with them not to raid his chickens during the night yet, because he understands that they need to eat chicken for nourishment, he’d promise to butcher some and put the meat regularly in a designated “coyote tree” so the coyotes can pick it up there without resorting to violence and thievery. It works. Jensen apologizes to the chickens before killing them and they’d willingly submit themselves up as offering.



Whenever he feels down, Jensen would go to a tree, sometimes crying, hug it, talk to it, and the tree would console him. It is not just interspecies communication he believes in. He is convinced that all living things speak, and the world itself speaks to us, and that we should listen to them.



As my wife respect rats in our home, Jensen likewise eschews the view that Man is the centre of creation or that we own the earth and can therefore do whatever we please with it—



“What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better, we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn’t mean that none shall die, nor even that I won’t kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitos, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other and toward the soil, which in truncates responsibility to each of us. What if all of life is not what we’ve been taught, a ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ competition to see who may own or kill the others before the others before the others can own or kill them? What if we don’t need to live our whole lives alone? What if life is a web of immeasurably complex and respectful relationships? What if the purpose—even the evolutionary purpose—is for each of us to take responsibility for all those around us, to respect their own deepest needs, to esteem and be esteemed by them, to feed and feed off them, to be sustained by their bodies and eventually to sustain them with our own?”





He grieves for what we have done, and are doing, to our fellow creatures and to our environment. He is apologetic that he could only talk about it when what is needed is concrete action, blowing up dams, for example, so salmon would not die:





“Change is coming. We are in the midst of it. Ecological system after system is collapsing around us, and we wander dazed through our days as though we have become in reality the automatons we so often strive to be.

“Often when I awaken I hear voices of those who will come after, and sometimes I see their faces. They speak to me of hunger, and ask, always, where are the salmon? They speak to me, too, of beauty, and ask again that same question. I have no answer for them. Sometimes I hand them a book or an article I’ve written. They read it, nod, smile sadly, and ask again about the fish. They do not care so much how deftly we rationalize our actions—and inactions—nor even how deeply we discuss the destruction. What they want, reasonably enough, is an intact and livable world. They ask what we have done to their home.

“They ask not only about salmon, but also about forests, bears, fisher, marten, lynx, cutthroat trout, bull trout, sturgeons. They ask about them all. And there is nothing I can do except hand them my book, and say I’m sorry.”



When the current pandemic started I had wondered if it is but planet earth’s way of survival, of defending itself. Halting major pollutants like motor vehicles, planes, ships and factories and killing some of us who all leave harmful carbon upon the environment during each of our lifetime. Jensen never thought of epidemics, maybe proving that mother earth is more resourceful than him, but he entertains a similar notion:



“I sometimes wonder if the other creatures on the planet are doing what they can to shut down the machine. Perhaps salmon are leaving not just because of dams, and not just because they do not like our unwillingness to participate in reciprocal relationships, and not because we make life intolerable for all others, but also to deprive us of calories; perhaps they are willing to give away their existence in order to stop civilization. Perhaps trees sometimes refuse to grow on clearcuts because they do not want to give their bodies to be used to enrich those in power. Perhaps Eskimo curlews—whose appetite for grasshoppers was legendary—left the planet so we would poison ourselves with pesticides. Perhaps the planet as a whole is now pushing us along in our own headlong rush to self-extinguishment, so that whatever creatures remain can at listened again breathe easily.

“Or perhaps the salmon and the trees are not acting merely physically but also symbolically, and perhaps then it becomes our task to ask them clearly and carefully what it is they are saying through their own deaths, what it is that they are dying to tell us. It becomes our task after that to listen to their stories, and to act upon what they have to say.”



Through the pandemic planet earth proved what once was just considered by many a fanciful theory: that we in all creation are all interconnected with each other. Now the rich, or those who have the means, are providing shelter for the homeless, feeding the hungry and taking care of the sick because it is now clear that their sickness and their death will also be the sickness and death of all the others. The distinction between the lucky “us” and the unfortunate “them,” at least at the moment, has disappeared. We take care of each other or we are all doomed together. We have learned, painfully but mercifully, the language that is older than words. It is a language—





“older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of the earth, and it is the language of our bodies. It is the language of dreams, and of action. It is the language of meaning, and of metaphor. This language is not safe, as Jim Nolan said of metaphor, and to believe in its safety is to diminish the importance of the embodied. Metaphors are dangerous because if true they open us to our bodies, and thus to action, and because they slip—sometimes wordlessly, sometimes articulated—between the seen and the unseen. This language of symbol is the umbilical cord that binds us to the beginning, to whatever is the source of who we are, where we come from, and where we return. To follow this language of metaphor is to trace words back to our bodies, back to earth.

“We suffer from misperceiving the world. We believe ourselves separated from each other and from all others by words and by thoughts. We believe—rationally, we think—that we are separated by rationality, and that to perceive the world ‘rationally’ is to perceive the world as it is. But perceiving the world ‘as it is’ is also to misperceive it entirely, to blind ourselves to an even greater body of truth.

“The world is a great dream. No, not fleeting, evanescent, unreal, immaterial, less than. These words do not describe even our dreams of night. But alive, vivid, every moment present to and pregnant with meaning, speaking symbolically. To perceive the world as we perceive our dreams would be to more closely perceive it as it is. The sky is crying, from joy or grief I do not know. Waves in a wild river form bowbacked lovers and speak to me of union. Industrial civilization tears apart my insides.”





Jensen calls for a revolution. But of a different kind. It is a revolution—



“that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from sense, but instead from our bodies, and from the land. It, too, is a part of this language older than words. It is the honeybee who stings in defence of the larger being that is her hive; it is the mother grizzly who charges again and again the train that took from her the two sons she carried inside, and that mangled their bodies beyond all but motherly recognition; it is the woman who submits to her rapist, knowing it’s better to be violated than murdered, but who begins to fight when he reaches for the knife, or the hammer; it is Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez, who says, ‘I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up…this has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis.’ It is the indigenous Zapatistas, who declare, ‘There are those who resign themselves to being slaves…But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, there are those who do not surrender themselves….There are those who decide to fight. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever color in whatever tongue, says to himself, to herself, ‘Enough already!’ It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell Oil, whose last words were, ‘Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues!’ It is the U’wa people of South America, a part of whose community committed mass suicide 400 years ago by walking off the a fourteen-hundred-foot cliff rather than submit to Spanish rule, and whose living members today vow to follow their ancestors if Occidental Petroleum and Shell move in to destroy their land. It is the U’wa woman who says, ‘I sing the traditional songs to my children. I teach them that everything is sacred and linked. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take the petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the Earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does.’ It is anyone who dares to think and speak for him-or herself. It is Nestor Makhno fighting for his Ukrainian homeland and for the autonomy of those who work the land, against the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Bolsheviks again, the Whites again, and again the Bolsheviks. It is the men and women who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple. It is the women and men who lock themselves down in front of bulldozers. It is the Chipko movement in India, begun by women who clung tight to trees so the woodmen’s axes would bite into their own, and not the trees’, flesh. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. It is the salmon battering themselves against the concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down which keeps them from their homes.

“It is not the attempt to seize power or the industrial ‘means of production,’ but it is actions based upon the instinctual drive to survive, and to live with dignity.

“This is not political theory. It is not philosophy. It is not religion. It is remembering what it is to be a human being—an animal. It is remembering what it means to love, and to be alive.

“It is to learn the power of the word NO. No more clearcuts. No more tutors on turtles. No more genocide. No more slavery, neither our own nor others.

“So long as we, or I, continue to discuss this in the abstract, we, or I, still have too much to lose. Presumably the mother grizzly did not find herself paralyzed by theoretical discussions of what is right or wrong, and presumably the same is true for the woman who takes the weapons from her attacker’s hands. If we only begin to feel in our bodies the immensity of what we are losing—intact ecosystems, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women’s capacity to walk unafraid—we will know precisely what we need to do.

“Any revolution on the outside—any breaking down of current power structures—with no corresponding revolution in perceiving, being, and thinking, will merely further destruction, genocide, and ecocide. Any revolution on the inside—a revolution of the heart—which does not lead to a revolution on the outside plays just as false.

“Anton Chekhov once said that he would like to read a story about a man who squeezes every drop of slave’s blood from himself. That is first what we must do. For when a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, we merely encounter a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man or woman, and not even death can stop those who are free.”





In this Year of the Rat we should all listen to what the rats and kindred creatures are saying.