Derrick Jensen:
Attacking Industrial Civilization at the Grassroots.
Derrick Jensen is an author, environmental activist, and public speaker who has given talks all over the United States. He has also published several books critical of industrialism and modern civilization, including The Culture of Make Believe and Endgame.
Originally printed in the Summer 2008 issue of Black Oak Presents, pg. 4-8.
Black Oak: In your writings and speeches, you talk about how we need to get back to a primitive way of life to create a truly sustainable world. How do you personally try to live that lifestyle?
Derrick: That is actually utterly irrelevant. That's one of the problems with our so-called “resistance.” I just did a talk in Thunder Bay, a few days after I did the talk there [Urbana, Illinois] and it was mainly to a bunch of Native Americans and also some white people and I talked about bringing down civilization. Some white guy raised his hand for the second question during Q & A and his question was, “Are your books on recycled paper?” I was like, “fuck, I was talking about bringing down civilization for 2.5 hours and you are worried about personal purity?”
I'm sorry if this answer comes across as angry, but that's one of the problems with our resistance. This whole so-called “resistance” has been taken over by this notion of personal purity, and the job of an activist is not to manifest any sort of personal purity whatsoever. The job of an activist is to confront and take down oppressive systems of power. Part of the problem is that we have allowed those in power to redefine us not as living animals, human beings, in functioning communities – functioning natural communities – but as citizens of a state. When we internalize that redefinition, it limits our options, it constrains us. More recently we have allowed those in power to redefine us not even as citizens, but as consumers and that's pathetic. What that does, once again, is constrain us and constrain our options. Such that the land is supposed to fight back by not buying a car or not buying meat or not buying a computer game.
Even though I flew quite a lot, I accounted for 1/9,000,000,000th or 1/900,000,000th of United's income for last year. Whether or not I fly is irrelevant to the larger picture. It's like Al Gore’s book and movie. He talks about all of these problems and then at the end he puts it back all on individuals. You can inflate your tires, etc., instead of taking down Exxon Mobil, which accounts for, I think, 5 percent of all carbon emissions put out by this culture in the last 130 years.
Black Oak: That leads directly into our second question. Can you explain how mainstream solutions to environmental degradation take industrial capitalism as a given?
Derrick: Dick Cheney said it very well when he said the American way of life is not negotiable. All the solutions to global warming, or anything else, take industrial capitalism as a given, and they take the natural world as that which must conform to this given, as opposed to the way any culture should be, which is that it takes the natural as a given because the natural world is that which is real. Any social construct is a social construct. No matter how groovy the social construct is, it's still a social construct and must conform to the natural world if it wants to last.
If you were to ask any reasonably intelligent 6 or 7 year old how to stop a global warming that is caused by the burning of oil and gas, I hope any reasonably intelligent 6 or 7 year old would say that you have to stop burning oil and gas. If the water is on in your bathtub, and you have it plugged and the water is overflowing onto the bathroom floor, the first thing you would do is shut off the water. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that people are using teaspoons to bail out the water that is coming in at thousands of gallons a minute.
I don't know how far we want to take that simile, but this way of life has been killing the planet for 6,000 years. They say one of the signs of intelligence is to recognize patterns and here's a pattern. Let's see if we can recognize it. One of the first written myths was Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and plains of Iraq. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing you think of cedar forests so thick that you couldn't see the ground? That's what it was prior to the arrival of this culture. Saudi Arabia, and the Arabian Peninsula, was oak savannah. The Near East was heavily forested. Greece was heavily forested. Italy was heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested. All of those have come down. You can't destroy a land base and live on it.
There is a great line by Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle, he said, “it's hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” And likewise, with our culture, it's really hard to get us to understand something when access to ice cream 24 hours a day and ESPN relies on us not understanding it.
Black Oak: You have said that the slogan, “survival of the fittest” should be changed to “survival of the fit.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Derrick: I got that line from Dolores la Chapelle. It's pretty funny. Years ago I interviewed John A. Livingston who wrote The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation. He was an old guy at the time and he had written some really great books. As I was interviewing him, he began by saying that natural selection was based not on competition, but on cooperation. I was thinking—this was 15 years ago—that he had gone off the deep end. It's so interesting because three or four years later I found myself realizing that it makes no sense for natural selection to be based primarily on competition.
What I say at my talks is that the way we can know that natural selection is not based primarily on competition is that, obviously, those creatures that have survived in the long run have survived in the long run. You don't survive in the long run by hyperexploiting your surroundings. You survive in the long run by actually improving your habitat. That's what salmon do. What they do is they help the forest become more healthy. That's what chickadees do. If you take chickadees out of the forest the trees grow much slower. The same with salmon. Salmon are a tremendous nutrient pump into the forest. That's how you survive in the long run—by making the land where you live more healthy.
I said that somewhere at a talk and somebody sent me an e-mail a few days later that said, “that's nonsense. All animals destroy their habitat.” I just had to laugh out loud because if all animals destroy their habitats, that means there was at one time some perfect habitat that has been being degraded ever since. Because the truth is, how did the world get to be as resilient and beautiful as it was prior to the arrival of this culture? It happens because crows live and die and chickadees live and die because grasshoppers live and die because salmon live and die because redwood and cedar trees live and die and mushrooms live and die. That's how the world becomes more resilient.
Even Richard Dawkins, in the Selfish Gene, which is a book I can't stand, says there are two ways to make a stable evolutionary state–one is through pure competition and one is through pure cooperation. That is a way that you can have everything work together. The problem with the pure cooperation method is that if you have a cheater, everything falls apart. I remember reading that and going, “Richard, read your own book. Everything's falling apart because we have a cheater.” That's a pretty strong bit of evidence right there.
Black Oak: We'd like to switch gears a little bit. You've talked about how violence only flows down the social hierarchy. We were wondering if you felt the media reaction to the school and office shooting phenomena illustrates that point.
Derrick: I'm going to switch questions a little bit, and if you want to bring it back, that's okay. Do you remember the Tylenol murders from about fifteen years ago? Some guy put cyanide in a bunch of Tylenol tablets and then 4 people died or 9 people died or 7 people died. It was pretty extraordinary because the company that made Tylenol immediately issued this huge recall and then almost everything has tamper resistant caps that you can tell if the things been opened. That cost, I'm sure, a bundle and that's less than 10 people dying. And yet they responded to this threat immediately. Similarly, Ted Kaczynski [the Unabomber] mailed out however many bombs and killed 4 or 7 people [editor's note: Kaczynski's bombs killed 3 and wounded 23]. In response to that, the Post Office made it so that if you mailed something that weighed more than a pound, you had to go to the window. It used to be that you could have a postal scale at home and just put on the number of stamps and just put it in a mailbox. They stopped doing that.
Now let's contrast that with the 15,000 Americans who die each month from preventable cancers. Or a half million children who die as a direct result from so-called debt repayment from the First World to the Third World. Or any number of others. The point is that if there is a threat in which stopping this threat does not point toward changing the system, then those threats can be addressed. You can spend all sorts of money, infinite amounts of money, to try to put cops in school to stop that particular threat; but if there is a threat that the resolution of which will point towards changing the entire system, then we all of the sudden get really stupid. We don't have solutions that will get to the heart of it.
Once again, some guy puts cyanide in Tylenol and all of the sudden you have tamper resistant caps on vitamins for cats. On the other hand, you have people that are systematically poisoned through pesticides, dioxins, and all this stuff, but you can't suggest changing that because it will interfere with business too much. That's, I think, a crucial point.
Black Oak: Do you believe that civilization is at all redeemable?
Derrick: No, for a number of reasons. In A Language Older Than Words I talked about how I didn't think it was redeemable from a psychological perspective, in that we are deeply traumatized by this culture that we are really, in many ways, incapable of having relationships with other human beings, much less with non-humans. One of the reasons for that is we are so traumatized and so terrified that we can't open up. Many of us can't open up to other humans, much less non-humans. And in that book, one of the most important parts is a small section where I talk about how scientists made monkeys permanently psychopathological by removing them from their social nexus. It didn't matter what you did to them later, they were still permanently psychopathological. Similarly, I think there are many, many people in this culture that are simply unreachable.
In the book Culture of Make Believe I talk about how Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist, tried to figure out why some cultures are good and some are bad, to use her words. Some treat women and children well, they aren't warlike, have a lot of cooperation, not much competition, and people are generally happier. In other cultures people are less happy, women and children are treated poorly, there’s a lot of competition, etc. She found there was one really simple rule, which is that the good cultures recognize that humans are both altruistic and selfish. That we are both selfish and social creatures and the way good cultures dealt with that was by making it so behavior that benefited the group as a whole was socially rewarded. You were praised for doing things that were good for the group and you were disallowed or punished for doing things that benefit the individual at the expense of the group. And what that means is that everyone in the group ends up being secure, to use her word.
If I go hunting and kill some animal and then bring it back, if I hoard all the meat to myself, everybody is going to shun me or beat the hell out of me or exile me or shame me. If on the other hand I go kill an elk and bring it back and share it, everybody praises me as being really wonderful and amazing. The reason I can give all the food away is because I know that tomorrow you are going to go out and you are going to gather a bunch of berries and you are going to give those to everybody. So what's happening is we are building social networks. We are building relationships as we do that. On the other hand, our own culture rewards behavior that benefits the individual at the expense of the group. In the Culture of Make Believe, I talk about how that leads to hatred and atrocities because it's based on competition and it's based on me getting what I can and trying to steal it before you get it. That's not going to build good relationships.
In Endgame, I talk about how civilization is not redeemable on the level of resource movement. We can all become enlightened; we can all start living these wonderful, eco-groovy green lives; we can all put solar panels on our houses, but where are you going to get the metal for the electrical wiring? Where are you going to get the metals for the batteries? Where are you going to get all this? Even something as great as photo-voltaics requires the whole industrial infrastructure to go along with it because you still have to have mining; you still have to have transportation infrastructures, we still need to have the oil infrastructure, etc., to move the stuff around. I don't see people voluntarily giving up all these goodies.
Black Oak: Elsewhere, you've said, “hope is the problem.” What did you mean by that?
Derrick: I don't know if I've said hope is the problem, if I did I should have said hope is a problem. A year ago a friend of mine who is HIV positive sent me a bunch of material on HIV. As I was reading through it, one of the things that slapped me in the face was a sentence that said, “eliminate false hope.” That slapped me really hard because I realized that false hopes are really dangerous. One of the reasons my mother stayed with my father is that there weren't battered women's shelters in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Another reason she stayed with him is because of the false hope that he would change.
Why do so many of us stay in bad relationships? It's because of the false hope that it's going to get better. Why do we stay in bad jobs? The false hope that it will get better. The same is true on a larger scale. Remember a couple of years ago how we were so excited… well I don't know about you, but I wasn't actually that excited because I knew what was going to happen. But my Mom was at least so excited that the Democrats won both Houses of Congress because now they were going to stop the war. And then, of course, last night the Senate gave Bush exactly what he wanted on the immunity for the wiretapping. Does anybody really think that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the White House is going to make anything better?
Black Oak: We believe that has to do with individuals wanting other people to come and save them as opposed to doing anything themselves.
Derrick: That it such a great point. Yes, that is a huge, huge point. The problem is not only false hope, the problem is hope itself. Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. People will say that I hope the salmon survive or I hope that global warming doesn't kill the planet. What they are saying is that they have no power. The truth is, the things over which you have agency you can change. That's the logic of addiction, actually.
The classic example is somebody sitting on a couch complaining that his plants are dying and they need water, as he sits on the couch and eats chocolate covered raisins complaining about the plants. That is the logic of addiction, right there. Instead, just get up and water the fucking plants. It's the same. We have this attitude that someone else is going to take care of the problem. Whether it's Barack Obama or brave tree-sitters or whatever. We keep just hoping that somebody else will solve the problem instead of rolling up our sleeves and doing the work ourselves.
That's one of the reasons why I get a little bit annoyed when people call me the violence guy; because I'm not. I really believe we need everything and we need people working to help women that are being battered. We need people working to help the salmon. We need people working to take out dams. We need people working to stop global warming… everything. There's all those different acts that individuals can do. Which are, once again, far larger than not consuming. We can actually resist. Then hope drops out. This is just, “I'm going to get the job done.”
Black Oak: What are your suggestions for introducing an anti-civilization message to people who wouldn't normally have access to it, such as children who live in low-income areas?
Derrick: That's a great question and I think that one of the important things is to tailor the message to the people you are trying to reach. By which I don't mean to soften it, I mean finding an angle. If I talk to a small business owner, I won't necessarily talk about salmon because they might not care about salmon. I'll talk about big box stores and how large corporations are killing everything. They can get that and we can find a lot of alliances.
It used to be when I would do talks, that sometimes at universities instead of talking about the other issues I would talk about how bad school is and the college kids would totally eat that up. Because they hate school and they realize that school is destroying their individuality, it's destroying their creativity, and it's destroying their intelligence.
If you are going to talk to kids in low-income areas, the first thing is to ask them what they need, what they care about and to respect that. I think it would be absurd to expect that somebody whose older brother is in prison and is having trouble himself with making a living would particularly care about the salmon. Especially if the person lives in Illinois and there aren't any salmon in Illinois. So meet them where they're at and find out what their concerns are and work with those. It’s important to listen and to learn from them, and to not attempt to impose.
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