This essay originally appeared in Orion Magazine Written by Derrick Jensen
A FEW MONTHS AGO at a gathering of activist friends someone asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?”
The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.
The second is that this is pretty much the only question that’s asked in mainstream media (and even among some environmentalists) about the state of the world and our response to it. The phrase “green living” brings up 7,250,000 Google hits, or more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards combined (or, to look at it another way, more than a thousand times more than the crucial environmental philosophers John A. Livingston and Neil Evernden combined). If you click on the websites that come up, you find just what you’d expect, stuff like “The Green Guide: Shop, Save, Conserve,” “Personal Solutions for All of Us,” and “Tissue Paper Guide for Consumers.”
The third and most important reason the question stuck with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question. By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can start looking for some of the right questions. This is terribly important, because coming up with right answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.
So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause. Think about global warming and attempts to “solve” or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t changing, but to blame global warming for those disasters is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop, or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m merely saying we’ll have a better chance of succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable (at this point) result of burning oil and gas, of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture, and so on. The real threat is all of these.
The same is true of worldwide ecological collapse. Extractive forestry destroys forests. What’s the surprise when extractive forestry causes forest communities—plants and animals and mushrooms and rivers and soil and so on—to collapse? We’ve seen it once or twice before. When you think of Iraq, is the first image that comes to mind cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reaches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this extractive culture; one of the first written myths of this culture is of Gilgamesh deforesting the plains and hillsides of Iraq to build cities. Greece was also heavily forested; Plato complained that deforestation harmed water quality (and I’m sure Athenian water quality boards said the same thing those boards say today: we need to study the question more to make sure there’s really a correlation). It’s magical thinking to believe a culture can effectively deforest and yet expect forest communities to sustain.
It’s the same with rivers. There are 2 million dams just in the United States, with 70,000 dams over six feet tall and 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall. And we wonder at the collapse of native fish communities? We can repeat this exercise for grasslands, even more hammered by agriculture than forests are by forestry; for oceans, where plastic outweighs phytoplankton ten to one (for forests to be equivalently plasticized, they’d be covered in Styrofoam ninety feet deep); for migratory songbirds, plagued by everything from pesticides to skyscrapers; and so on.
The point is that worldwide ecological collapse is not some external and unpredictable threat—or gun barrel—down which we face. That’s not to say we aren’t staring down the barrel of a gun; it would just be nice if we identified it properly. If we means the salmon, the sturgeon, the Columbia River, the migratory songbirds, the amphibians, then the gun is industrial civilization.
A second part of the problem is that the question presumes we’re facing a future threat—that the gun has yet to go off. But the Dreadful has already begun. Ask passenger pigeons. Ask Eskimo curlews. Ask great auks. Ask traditional indigenous peoples almost anywhere. This is not a potential threat, but rather one that long-since commenced.
The larger problem with the metaphor, and the reason for this new column in Orion, is the question at the end: “how shall I live my life right now?” Let’s take this step by step. We’ve figured out what the gun is: this entire extractive culture that has been deforesting, defishing, dewatering, desoiling, despoiling, destroying since its beginnings. We know this gun has been fired before and has killed many of those we love, from chestnut ermine moths to Carolina parakeets. It’s now aimed (and firing) at even more of those we love, from Siberian tigers to Indian gavials to entire oceans to, in fact, the entire world, which includes you and me. If we make this metaphor real, we might understand why the question—asked more often than almost any other—is so wrong. 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?
Finally we get to the point. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world—are not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened. They’re not going to care what sorts of excuses we had to not act (e.g., “I’m too stressed to think about it” or “It’s too big and scary” or “I’m too busy” or any of the thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.
They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They’re going to care whether the land is healthy enough to support them.
We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, and if the people (including the nonhuman people) can’t breathe, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but that we stop this culture from killing the planet. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this. The land is the source of everything. If you have no planet, you have no economic system, you have no spirituality, you can’t even ask this question. If you have no planet, nobody can ask questions.
What question would I ask instead? What if, instead of asking “How shall I live my life?” people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?” If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?
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Interesting. But is the alternative simply to return to the hunter-gatherer or pastoral lifestyles? Lifespans are lower as is infant mortality. I wonder if the realistic approach is better technology rather than trying to return to a paradise never lost as it was never there in the first place?
Mr. Jensen does us a service in examining root causes, rather than symptoms, but is his anger he forgets that industrial culture is not a “them.” As Walt Kelly said long ago, we have met the enemy and he is us. “If someone were rampaging through your home” you would take the obvious measures to stop the outsider. But if one finds one’s schizophrenic/addict self out of control and on that rampage, the question “how should I proceed now” is certainly an appropriate one. It’s a horrifying thing to realize and most people, even environmentalists, stop short of the full analysis because it is so disturbing. And unfortunately we can’t get help from outside, check ourselves into an institution/detox. We have to collectively self-diagnose and self-medicate. That’s hard. I’m with R Margolis, the “let’s all revert to primitivism and live off the land” is a romantic thought but a non-answer — if our goal includes mitigation of human suffering at all, total collapse and a massive die-off of billions to sustainable-at-hunter-gatherer level is something to be avoided. So… what? I have no good answers but it seems that “how should I live my life” is certainly an appropriate question. Inasmuch as it does not get to the center of the issue, Mr. Jensen is right, it shouldn’t be the only question.
E, I’ll answer you with excerpts from Derrick Jensen himself:
“It is dangerous to us and to others to maintain the illusion that we are responsible for the destruction, an illusion that may have been appropriate when we were powerless. But we are not…
Here, once again, is the real story. Our self-assessed culpability for participating in the deathly system called civilization masks (and is a toxic mimic of) our infinitely greater sin. For what, then, are we culpable?
…we can be forgiven, because we did not create the system, and because our choices have been systematically eliminated (those in power kill the great runs of salmon, and then we feel guilty when we buy food at the grocery store? How dumb is that?). But we cannot and will not be forgiven for not breaking down the system that creates these problems, for not driving deforesters out of forests, for not driving polluters away from land and water and air, for not driving moneylenders from the temple that is our only home. We are culpable because we allow those in power to continue to destroy the planet.”
You can read the full excerpt at http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/10-Abuse%20pt4.htm
nice article,
except, you are quite mistaken,
they will care how compassionate I was, that I voted green,
they will care that I was an enlightened, nice, non-violent, simple living person, and that I tried hard and was pure in thought and action.
As if I don’t live this way, there will be no one there to care. whilst thay are breathing good air, they will look back and be grateful for all those whose actions led to a better future.
Any and all means necessary?
Would you become the hangman to kill the murderer?
Cause and effect, all actions exist in connection to all others, and so your call for any and all means is destructive, violent, and will only play on the egos of those you seek to destroy. They will then react accordingly. act violent, and they will be violent. guilt trip them and they will come at you with all the power of their pride.
Such actions are not the path to lasting change.
Us and them, adversarial attitudes perpetuate the problem.
You seek root causes?
There is nothing wrong with the system, it’s the people within it. and you don’t change people for the better through any and all means neccesary.
Remember the serenity prayer, and treat others as you would be treated.
Cheers
Grillzey
I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t extremely fitting, but I wrote an essay on my blog a few weeks ago disagreeing with arguments for saving our (yes, OUR) environment such as the one Jensen puts forward in this article. You can read it here http://greenroomwesu.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-environment.html but I’ll paraphrase below.
We tend to create this imaginary division between organism and environment, when in reality the relationship between the two is dialectical- organisms partially create, and in turn are partially created by, the environment which they live in. So, humans are not alone in their consumptive practices- proportionally to their body mass, ants actually consume more than humans. So I think its incorrect to see the conspicuous consumption of humanity as cultural (aka unnatural). Jensen writes of the long history behind these practices. In fact, we could trace these practices back far past the evolution of humans, arguably to the base of the tree of life, wherever that may lie. What we need is not a consumption that is more or less natural, but a consumption that isn’t so damned destructive to the world around it.
Contrary to what Jensen writes, there is no THE environment, and never was (he uses the term world, but I’m sticking with environment). There is no such thing as a fixed state of things that life on Earth has ever been in. Life and the world it has existed in have continually fed back upon each other going back, again, to the base of the tree of life. Therefore, what we are trying to save is not THE environment, its AN environment. Why is this particular environment so important? Because we exist in it. We are not fighting for life, but for a specific version of life, one which has humans in it. Life is much stronger than climate change, or for that matter any human-induced catastrophe. Were the Earth to warm 5-6 degrees in the next 100 years, life would not come to an end. What we fight for is THIS environment, and there’s nothing wrong with that selfishness.
Sam is on point.
@ pete: In the excerpt you link to, Jensen frames the issue in terms of the dynamics of sexual abuse. An interesting lens, and like a victim of sexual abuse, it is indeed harmful to castigate ourselves for being exploited. But it also harmful to castigate the loggers, the miners, the factory workers, the cops, the politicians, the easy symbols and targets of our anger. All of whom are just fellow humans caught in the same exploitive web. It’s a class war, but it’s the logic of capitalism that needs to be destroyed, not the individuals involved.
This is where we need to think about our approach. Jensen says we need to stop berating ourselves and just act:
“It’s a wondrous thing to get up off your knees, to stand again (or for the first time) on your hind legs, to say “Fuck you”—classes in “verbal nonviolence” notwithstanding—or to say “You have no right,” or “No” to those in power, to choose where, when, and how you will express yourself, where, when, and how you will fight back, where, when, and how you will defend what and whom you love against those who exploit and destroy them. You should try it some time. It’s really fun.”
Noisy opposition is fun, and cathartic, but I believe as a tactic it’s been useless for decades. Look at the anti-globalization movement since Seattle — what anti-globalazation movement? Capital learned how to contain dissent.
my computer decided to do weird keyboard stuff>>
not only is dissent contained< it"s commodified< packaged as culture
this is why the initial question “how do i live my life” is still pertinent> back to the land is not an option> protest and shouting is worse than useless because it gives us the feel_good illusion of productive action without any productive consequences>>>> bright green techno_optimism relies on the abuser to save us>>> and those are all the easy options i can think of> none areany good> which means we have some more thinking to do> goddamn this punctuation situation makes writing difficult i”d better stop here and figure out my computer>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Stickykeys, thanks Windows. Back in action.
Anyways, I looked thru a bit more of Jensens’ work (accessible from the link in pete’s comment), which gives me a sense of where he’s coming from.
His premise is: “civilization will crash, that the crash will be messy, and that the crash will be messier the longer we wait.” Therefore we should prepare for and accelerate the crash. Call me pollyanna, but i disagree on the first point. Civilization may crash, and it’s worth putting some real thought into the possibility, but I don’t think it’s going to crash in the next 20, 50 years, no matter how many dams are blown up by ecoterrorists. Though I am no fan, capitalism is extraordinarily powerful and adaptable and has a seemingly organismal urge for self-preservation. Don’t underestimate that: there have been many crises over the past 400 years, and it adapts. My position is: how do we take its teeth out, channel its power from domination to service. Possible? I’m not sure. In any case if we let ourselves be led by blind, destructive rage, we are easily controlled (ask yoda).