Activist and Utne Visionary Derrick Jensen has never been the sentimental type. I’d go so far as to call him pathologically unsentimental. In his essay "Forget Shorter Showers," published in Orion, he takes on the activist phenomenon of simple living as a political act.

Simple living as a political act, he writes, “accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers”:

By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

“The endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act,” he adds, “is suicide”:

If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

So what do we do? Jensen never signs off without a call to revolutionary action:

We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Source: Orion 

Image by Robert Shetterly.

Derrick Jensen is an environmentalist who sure knows how to rile up the environmentalists. The radical green author and Utne Visionary has launched a new column in Orion magazine, Upping the Stakes, and its first installment, “World at Gunpoint,” has set off a tempest on Orion’s website, landing 174 comments on 22 web pages when we last checked.

What did Jensen do to spark this upwelling? He suggested that mere “green living” lifestyle choices aren’t going to save our asses, and that much bolder actions are necessary to confront environmental devastation, which he likens to a gunslinging murderer:

If someone were rampaging through your home, killing those you love one by one (and, for that matter, en masse), would the question burning a hole in your heart be: how should I live my life right now? I can’t speak for you, but the question I’d be asking is this: how do I disarm or dispatch these psychopaths? How do I stop them using any means necessary?

Not all the respondents take issue with Jensen: Some hail his line of thinking, and others admit to deeply conflicted feelings. Which to me means that he’s asking important and necessary questions, taking the dialogue to a deeper lever. I eagerly await his next column, which will be online July 7.

Source: Orion

Environmentalist Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame and, most recently, As the World Burns, is the closest thing today’s green movement has to Ed Abbey, dispensing unvarnished and often inconvenient truths with a daggerlike delivery. A Q&A with Jensen in the spring issue of Northern California’s Terrain magazine is notable for prompting zinger after zinger sure to either inflame or inspire. A few of my favorites:

• “I got an email from a woman who told me I just seemed angry. I wanted to say how sad it is that I feel wounded at the death of the planet. There’s a tremendous fear of anger at the hands of the so-called resistance. She wanted me to meditate. The salmon don’t give a shit about whether we meditate—they care about the dams.”
• “I heard a radio show about the world-saving machine that can convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. The guy who runs Virgin airlines is going to give millions to develop this technology. We have it already. They’re called trees.”
• “Any social construct, including industrial capitalism, is simply that—a social construct. What’s real are these huckleberries and redwood trees.”

—Keith Goetzman