We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous vi… - Derrick Jensen

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.

Other double binds are false. This is one of the latter. There is an unspoken premise of the argument in favor of wind turbines: that harvesting energy is more important than birds and bats. That some sacrifices (billions of sacrifices, in this case) are justifiable to provide industrial humans with energy. This is, of course, the usual human supremacist assumption. The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. That’s what we must do.

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I — or does anyone else — have to destroy them.

At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?