Derrick Jensen Quotes

This is the key to understanding the difference between indigenous and civilized warfare: Even in warfare the indigenous maintain relationships with their honored enemy. This is the key to understanding the difference between indigenous and civilized ways of living. This is only one of many things those we enslave could tell us, if only we asked: They, too, are alive, and present another way of living, a way of living that is not - in contradistinction to our God and our Science and our Capitalism and everything else in our lives - jealous. It is an inclusive way of living. They could tell us that things don't have to be the way they are.

...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.

No anesthetic was necessary for the people who ordered the killings; they had the misleading language of technocratic bureaucracy to distance them from the killings. Thus “mass murder” becomes “the final solution,” “world domination” becomes “defending the free world,” the War Department becomes the Department of Defense, and “ecocide” becomes “developing natural resources.” No one needs to get drunk to do any of this. A good strong ideology and heavy doses of rationalization are all it takes. But it may require little more than a simple unwillingness to step outside the flow of society, to think and act and most importantly experience for ourselves — and to make our own decisions.

Jeanette [Armstrong, "a traditional Okanagan Indian"] said, 'Attitudes about the species communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.' She paused, then continued emphatically, 'It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.'

"My friend Jeannette Armstrong says, "We all have cultural, learned behavior systems that have become embedded in our subconscious. These systems act as filters for the way we see the world. They affect our behaviors, our speech patterns and gestures, the words we use, and also the way we gather our thinking. We have to find ways to challenge that continuously. To see things from a different perspective is one of the most difficult things we have to do." She continues, " I have to constantly school myself in the deconstruction of what I believe and perceive to be the way things are, to continuously break down in my own mind what I believe and continuously add to my knowledge and understanding. In other words, never to be satisfied that I'm satisfied. That sounds like I'm dissatisfied, but it doesn't mean that. It means never to be complacent and think I've come to a conclusion about things, to always question my own thinking. I always say to my writing class to start with and hold on to the attitude of saying bullshit to everything. And to be joyful and happy in the process. Because most of the time it's fear that creates old behaviors and old conflicts. It's not necessarily that we believe those things, but we know them and so we continue those patterns and behaviors because they're familiar

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

It’s never possible to know for certain the “true” source of any given interpretation, the dividing line between our association (i.e., projection) and reality. The question quickly becomes, What is real? It is always possible to consciously or unconsciously “see” almost anything we want. I can look at the ceiling and see an image of the Virgin Mary, or I can look at the ceiling and see that the spackler did a damn good job.

Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.

It's okay to be happy, it's okay to live your life exactly the way you want it... It's okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” The question still hangs heavy in the air: If our behavior is not making us happy, why do we act this way?

"Does anyone beside me experience a deep sorrow that someone called a "Hero for the Planet" and a "star of the sustainability movement" is designing truck factories and Nike headquarters? Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone. Ninety-seven percent of the world's native forests have been cut. There are 2 million dams just in the United States. Once-mighty flocks of passenger pigeons are gone. Islands full of great aucks, gone. Rich runs of salmon, gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. The oceans are filled with plastic. Every stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens. The world is being killed, and this is the respond? Not only am I angry, not only am I disgusted, I am also deeply, deeply sorrowful.

And I am deeply ashamed.

We need to act differently. "

I remember staring at the computer screen--light green letters on dark--then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.

Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.

We can talk all we want about conservation biology and about the use of science to measure biodiversity,45 but in the real, physical world the real, physical effects of science on real, living nonhumans has been nothing short of atrocious.

I wish that my childhood would have been different. I do not, however, regret what happened. This does not mean tht I would gladly go through it again. But mythologies of all times and all places tell us that those who enter the abyss and survive can bring back important lessons. I have no need to merely imagine the unimaginable. And I will no longer forget. I have learned that whether I choose to feel or not, pain exists, and whether we choose to acknowledge them or not, atrocities continue. I have grown to understand that in the shadow of the unspeakable I can and must speak and act against our culture's tangled web of destructiveness, and stop the destruction at its roots.