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 … - Derrick Jensen

We’re going to suggest what is for this culture a radical redefinition of what it means for an action to be “green” or “environmental,” which is that the action must tangibly benefit the natural world on the natural world’s own terms. Not that the action helps fuel the industrial economy. Not that the action makes your life easier. Not that the action seems like a success, such that it helps you not feel despair. The action must tangibly help tigers, or hammerhead sharks, or Coho salmon, or Pacific lampreys, or sea stars, or the oceans, or the Colorado River, or the Great Plains.

I said that I feel bad whenever I drive, because I’m adding to global warming. The Maori nodded agreement. So did Jeannette. Then she added fervently, “But you didn’t set up the system. Do what you can, but don’t identify with the problem. If you internalize what is not yours, you fight not only them but yourself as well. Take responsibility only for that which you’re responsible — your own thoughts and actions. You didn’t make the car culture, you didn’t set up factory farming. Do what you can to shut those things down.

Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state--where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised--to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized. Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.