Derrick Jensen Quotes

Love does not imply pacifism.

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.

"White [...] "Indian wannabees" or as those who mine indiginous traditions the way multinationals mine their land."

Have you ever felt love?

Did you need scientific proof of this? How would you have definitively and scientifically proved your love existed? If you could not prove it, would that mean your love didn't exist? What would you trust: your own feelings, or science?

Make no mistake, our economic system can do no other than destroy everything it encounters. That’s what happens when you convert living beings to cash. That conversion, from living trees to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system. Psychologically, it is the central process of our enculturation; we are most handsomely rewarded in direct relation to the manner in which we can help increase the Gross National Product.

I want to bring down civilization. It's really clear that civilization is killing the planet. I’m interested in living in a world that has more wild salmon every year than the year before. A world that has more migratory songbirds every year than the year before. A world that has less dioxins and flame retardants in mothers' breast milk. A world not being destroyed. A world where krill populations aren’t collapsing. A world where there are not dead zones in the oceans. A world not being systematically dismantled. I want to live in a world that is not being killed. I will do whatever it takes to get there.

This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.

Food exemplifies the difficulty of withdrawing from the modern economy, because you can’t live without it and because not many people produce all of their own. And if its uncommon for a modern person to be food self-reliant, it is almost unheard of for a community to supply all of its own food.

Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?

Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.

We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.

I got a call a while ago from one of 20/20’s reporters, who wanted to talk to me about deforestation. The next “myth” Stossel is going to debunk, she said, is that this continent is being deforested. After all, as the timber industry says, there are more trees on this continent today than there were seventy years ago. She wanted a response from an environmentalist. I told her that 95 percent of this continent’s native forests are gone, and that the creatures who live in these forests are gone or going. She reiterated the timber industry claim, and said that Stossel was going to use that as the basis for saying, “Give me a break! Deforestation isn’t happening!” I said the timber industry’s statement has two unstated premises, and reminded her of the first rule of propaganda: if you can slide your premises by people, you’ve got them. The first premise is the insane presumption that a ten-inch seedling is the same as a two-thousand-year-old tree. Sure, there may be more seedlings today, but there are a hell of a lot fewer ancient trees. And many big timber corporations cut trees on a fifty-year rotation, meaning that the trees will never even enter adolescence so long as civilization stands. The second is the equally insane presumption that a monocrop of Douglas firs (on a fifty-year rotation!)393 is the same as a healthy forest, that a forest is just a bunch of the same kind of trees growing on a hillside instead of what it really is, a web of relationships shimmering amongst, for example, salmon, voles, fungi, salamanders, murrelets, trees, ferns, and so on all working and living together. Pretty basic stuff.

a real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves

Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent.

Grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgment that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. Nobody ever gave you a grade for learning how to play, how to ride a bicycle, or how to kiss. One of the best ways to destroy love for any of these activities would be through the use of grades, and the coercion and judgment they represent. Grades are a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do, an important instrument in inculcating children into a lifelong subservience to whatever authority happens to be thrust over them.