Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

Red

22 Cavel West During its years of operation, the Cavel West slaughterhouse in Redmond, Oregon, killed up to five hundred horses a week and shipped the meat to European and Japanese markets. Cavel West was owned by a Belgian company , Velda Group, which ran several horse-slaughtering facilities in the United States and Canada. Its manager, Pascal Derde, described the speed and transnational scope of the plant’s slaughtering operation this way: “KilledonFriday,processedMonday,Thursdayweloadthetruck,andthen it’s flown to Europe. Monday it’s sold in Belgium, Tuesday eaten, Wednesday it’s back in the soil.”1 Derde’s description of an efficient, waste-free globalized circuit of capitalist production, circulation, and consumption elides a more disturbing reality: Cavel West was notorious in the Redmond area not only for the stench it produced but also for the blood, tissue , and contaminated sludge that entered local waterways, sometimes overwhelming the wastewater facility. Such problems are endemic to areas around horse-slaughter plants, where blood and tissue are a common sight in local streams, even spilling from taps and bubbling up in bathtubs. For years, Redmond residents had protested the plant’s environmental abuses, but to no avail. The plant gained further notoriety when it was revealed that many of the slaughtered horses had been rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management under the aegis of a program originally intended to protect them. T O B I A S M E N E L Y A N D M A R G A R E T R O N D A If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut— . . . Red, I said. Sudden, red. —robert hass, “The Problem of Describing Color” Red Red 23 On July 21, 1997, the Cavel West slaughterhouse burned to the ground. Later in July, a communiqué was sent from the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) to the media, claiming responsibility for the fire. According to the communiqué, the fire was set with three electrically timed incendiary devices and “35 gallons of vegan jello” (identified by authorities as a blend of soap, gasoline, and diesel); in addition, they left “two gallons of muriatic acid” to taint any remaining horse flesh. The arson, the activists claimed, “would bring to a screeching halt what countless protests and letter-writing campaigns could never stop.”2 Part of a string of ELF arsons in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s, the Cavel West fire is considered by radical environmentalists to be one of the most successful acts of “ecotage.” Will Potter, in his study of radical ecoactivism, Green Is the New Red, describes its status among activists as “folkloric.”3 Not only did it cause $1.4 million in damages, but it led to the plant’s permanent closure and drew national attention to the environmental issues involved in the industrial rendering of horse meat. The incident also highlighted the rise in the United States of a radical, underground movement carrying out direct action aimed at environmentally destructive corporations and a juridical order dedicated to protecting private property. What its participants describe as “ecodefense,” the state has characterized as “ecoterrorism .” By March 2001 the ELF was named the greatest domestic terrorist threat by the FBI. The Sign of Red In this chapter, we read the story of Cavel West—the slaughterhouse and the global market, the blaze of resistance in the name of the nonhuman, and the state’s hyperactive response—in terms of a dialectic of appearance and nonappearance, which we associate with the sign of red. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce returned often to the semiotic primacy of red. “First, imagine a person in a dreamy state,” he writes in “What Is a Sign?” “Let us suppose he is thinking of nothing but a red color. Not thinking about it, either, that is, not asking nor answering any questions about it, not even saying to himself that it pleases him, but just contemplating it, as his fancy brings it up.”4 Redness is an example of “firstness,” which Peirce elsewhere defines as “a degree of disturbance of your consciousness. The qualityofredisnotthoughtofasbelongingtoyou,orasattachedtoliveries. 24 Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda It is simply a peculiar positive possibility regardless of anything else.”5 In laying the groundwork for a theory of signs, Peirce repeatedly refers to the color red as an instance of primordial vividness, an apprehensible quality distinguishable from the given...