On Derrick Jensen

Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy.


My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I googled his name and one of the first links was to a post where, back in 2004, Dirty Greek posted an interview Derrick Jensen from the Ecologist (March 2004). It was supposed to be a simply Q&A with five best book recommendations by Jensen, an author himself. The answers he gave are revealing.

Question one: Which book first made you realise that something was wrong (with the planet/political system/economic system, etc)?

My answer: It wasn’t a book. It was the destruction of place after place that I loved. And it was the complete insanity of a culture where so many people work at jobs they hate: What does it mean when the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing things they’d rather not do? The culture itself convinced me something was wrong, by being so extraordinarily destructive, of human happiness, and far more importantly, the world itself.

That said, Neil Evernden’s The Natural Alien was the first book I read that let me know I was not insane: that the culture is insane. It was the first book I read that did not take the dominant culture’s utilitarian worldview as a given.

Uh huh. The culture is insane. Which culture, Derrick? Every culture has exploited the earth, at some point, and learned to live with the results. Yes, this is not cool. No, we are not the first and only.

Yes, I agree that it sucks that people have to do stuff they don’t like to do, or want to do, all day long. However, not all of us are bestselling authors who can charge $100/hour for webcam chats, or $60 a year for a subscription to our works in progress, or $18 for a t-shirt with a quote from our books. And no, I’m not saying he’s getting rich off his books and T-shirts and webcam-speaking gigs. I’m saying that most people don’t have many options. You want to wipe out evironmental trashing? Wipe out poverty first, and you’ll have masses both free and able to join the bigger fight.

Question two: Which one book would you give to every politician?

Answer: One that explodes.

Before you freak out, let’s change the question and see what you think: Which one book would you give to Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels?

Let’s ask this another way: Would a book have changed Hitler? I don’t think so. Unless it exploded.

And before you freak out at the comparison of modern politicians to Hitler and his gang, try to look at it from the perspective of wild salmon, grizzly bears, bluefin tuna, or any of the (fiscally) poor or indigenous human beings. Those in power now are more destructive than anyone has ever been. And they are for the most part psychologically unreachable. And if someone does reach some politician, that politician will no longer be in power.

I recently shared a stage with Ward Chuchill. He said the primary difference between the U.S. and the Nazis is that the U.S. didn’t lose.

I responded with one word: “Yet.�?

Because that’s the primary difference.

Except that this kind of talk is what drives the people in the middle over to the right. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Jensen’s passionate roleplaying as an extremist surely does sell books, but it does not help spread his message. The extremism rocks the converted, turns them into passionate consumers of his writing, but it does nothing to change the culture. That’s the secret paradox of the role Jensen plays — most people will never, ever trust him or someone like him.

But the converted, they’re going to be great consumers.

He’s right, most books won’t change the politicians — but not because they’re like Hitler. Most books — maybe no books — will change politicians because politicians are humans, and books will never change most human beings.

Jensen’s books don’t change people either, not beyond the small niche of people who are looking to be changed and seek out books like his. And his lack of faith, while it is surprisingly realistic, doesn’t line up with the little niche of book-publishing, public speaking, and so on that he’s created for himself.

Question three: What book would you give to every CEO?

Answer: See above.

Exploding books. So there’s a real consistency here. And a real, palpable hopelessness.

Question four: What book would you give to every child?

Answer: I wouldn’t give them a book.

Oh, wow! I expected another exploding book! Maybe Jensen doesn’t hate humanity… or, no, wait, a more sensible explanation is that advocating violent death for children will put his consumer base off, and he cannot afford to do so.

Of course, if he had his way, most of those children would die. After all, he’s the guy who advocates the termination of civilization. He seriously wants to get rid of it, or says he does. Only someone who lives in America — hell, in California — could miss the larger implications of such a desire.

If you do away with civilization, and thereby do away with all the technologies that facilitate modern agriculture and aquaculture and the infrastructure that moves things like food and clothing and fuel around, how will people eat? How will they stay warm in winter? It’s one thing for Derrick to do okay out, Thoreau-like, in the woods in a cabin for a while, as he describes in A Language Older Than Words. It’s quite another for everyone in the world to suddenly have to do so. The termination of civilization as we know it would result in a massive die-out of humanity, because of the simple fact that we’re dependent on our technologies to support the population we’re at right now.

All those dams Jensen hates so much — that he keeps advocating blowing up — are there to provide the electricity so you can read his webpage, and cook your food. They’re there to keep water in reserve so you have something to drink or wash your body and clothing in next week.

Are they perfect? Are they optimal? No, of course not. They can be massively improved. But should we just trash technology and civilization? Jensen that’s the message I take from Jensen’s writing: yes, we should. Perhaps he should get on a plane (or a boat, or a hot-air-balloon) and go visit someplace like Liberia, or Somalia. Places where the civilization he hates so much has already broken apart. Because what you get when you get rid of civilization is not some mythic, Rousseauian return to nature. What you get is roving bands of youths with guns, raping and killing and eating whatever they find, including some of those they rape and kill. What you get when civilization falls apart is chaos. Mass starvation. And an even more desperate, rapacious attitude toward nature.
Wouldn’t it be more merciful to give those kids exploding books than to advocate abandoning them to that hellscape?

Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words.

Says the bestselling author, I wish to note. I am glad I didn’t pay much for my used copies of those samples of his work that I own — with the exception of one book — because, hey, I was saving trees. Glad to have spared you the sin of making money off something you fundamentally oppose, Mr. Jensen.

I would take children outside, and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads.

How very California. What about if you’re in the desert? Nature for Jensen is California forests, or maybe the West Coast. Someone like him would not last 3 days on the outback without a guide. Why? Oh, yes — ecocide. All those dangerous, poisonous critters — all the dangerous, stomping megafauna? The evil, terrible humans used their civilization — er, wait, they were peace-loving, egalitarian naturalist Indians, right? They can’t have had a civilization, since, in Jensenist thought, civilization is based on violence. So why is there evidence that they caused the biggest of megafauna to go extinct in the Americas, just like humans seem to have done everywhere they’ve gone? Hey, maybe they were tainted by civilization after all.

My goodness. Maybe ecocide is bigger than we thought, Derrick. Maybe we have to abolish not just civilization, but humanity in general!

The scary thing is that in his radical-chic mode, I am not sure he wouldn’t agree with the abolition of humanity. Hell, he may have written of it somewhere already!

That said, if you’re going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind in the Willows, which would I hope remind them to go outside.

Oh, wow, another surprise. I would have thought he’d have produced a series of children’s books by now. Well, he must not have, because if he had, rest assured, he’d be flogging it here.

Question five: It’s 2050. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising. You’re only allowed one book on the Ark. What is it?

Answer: I wouldn’t take a book, and I wouldn’t get on the ark. I would kill myself (and take a dam out with me).

Quick Question #1: Does it seem apparent that blowing up a dam would achieve a bloody thing when the world is being flooded by endless rains?

(Yeah, I didn’t think so. Oh, right, it’s a masturbatory fantasy. It also shows Jensen’s lack of imagination. That dams will be a major problem in 2050 assumes we won’t have made strides in any number of technologies. Jensen’s assumption is right out of Orwell: the current status quo will perpetuate itself exactly, forever — a boot stamping on a human face, yadda yadda yadda.)

Quick Question #2: Okay, then I’ll save your spot on the ark for my girlfriend, alright? Thanks Derrick.

I do not want to live without a living landbase. Without a living landbase I would already be dead.

Yet, paradoxically, you wouldn’t be, because dead men cannot kill themselves. So you’d miss the chance to tell your children how the world used to be. You’d miss the chance to seal up old issues of Nature in an airtight container for generations to come. (Which puts me in mind of Bruce Sterling’s short-short “Message Found in a Bottle” — in Visionary in Residence — a story that seemed bleak when I first read it. Wow, Derrick Jensen has succeeded in making it positively optimistic!) You’d miss out on seeing if maybe the waters subsided a decade later. You also missed how unscientific that question was: there would be a landbase, it’d just be smaller. There isn’t enough water on earth to submerge everything, after all.

No book would even remotely compensate. Not a million books. Not a million computers. Not a million people would compensate.

Not even six billion, or eight billion. Freedom, no matter what the cost. Gotcha, Derrick.

As for me, I’m on the side of life. I agree, we’re idiots when it comes to nature. We’re assholes.

But unlike Jensen, I haven’t given up on us. I have the guts to admit that while I love the natural world, we are part of that natural world, and, yes, humanity is the part I’m most concerned about keeping alive.

I also have the guts to trust in science and technology, and not just in the newagey ramblings and subjective impressions of a bestselling nature author, ramblings the logic behind which is so shaky that I only pray Jensen himself doesn’t take them anywhere near as seriously as he appears to do. But, of course he doesn’t. If he did, he’d be advocating we all trashed our computers, and he wouldnt’t have a web page, right? I mean, the amount of energy the Internet uses, alone, should be enough for him to be calling on idiots worldwide to crash the net.

Yes, I daresay he’s not quite as science-savvy as he makes himself out to be. In A Language Older Than Words, he explained that he’d trained as a scientist (a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines, says Wikipedia) and left the field in disgust. Yeah, well, I don’t know whether a BA in something counts that much for cred anymore: I graduated with a BA in Music and English Lit and when I arrived at grad school to study lit more, I was completely out to sea. I pulled myself to the banks, surely, but it was not because I had a BA in anything. Jensen’s cred as a scientist, it means very little, I think, in the big picture.

Still, who can blame him? The evironmentalist-extremist author niche was wide open, and everyone’s gotta make a living. He’s probably having fun. He might even have convinced himself to believe some of the silliness he spouts, in which case, there’s the effervescent endorphin high of self-righteous rage. But as for me, I will trust to other, more measured, and perhaps more mature, and definitely more hopeful minds to keep our world going.

236 thoughts on “On Derrick Jensen

  1. Gord,

    This is part one:

    “But from you, all we’ve seen is the vague implication that you are some kind of academic, maybe a scientist, and a pseudonym. ”

    I thought you had run my IP address through an IP locator? That may give you more of an idea. I’d prefer not to announce here where/who I am.

    “But you are wrong to conflate that claim with the idea apocalyptic visions have been preached for the last decade in classrooms.”

    I guess that depends on the classroom. You have your experience in classrooms, I have mine. Maybe things are different in the USA, but the problem of resource depletion, and the means forward from this, is certainly being discussed here. I think to not discuss this issue is foolish, this will be the reality within which today’s students and their offspring will enter. It will be up to them to create the policies for how to deal with this situation.

    “He talked about how increased farming efficiency and human adaptation to the environment (for example, laws preventing the idiotic insistence on green, grassy front lawns in desert areas) could help alleviate the problem to some degree”

    Lawns, and other forms of domestic and municipal water use only account for circa 12% of water use. Currently 88% of water use is for farming and industry.

    Currently industrial farming is completely dependent upon fossil hydrocarbons, and rock phosphate. Everything from the fertilisers and pesticides, through to planting and harvesting is dependent upon fossil hydrocarbons. The use of ethanol to replace these fossil sources is a dead-end as it takes more energy to grow/harvest/produce the ethanol as is returned by the ethanol: it is a net energy loss. The only biofuel which is giving any slight net-gain for energy is algae, however this is highly problematic. And I am uncertain if this can be used in the production of fertilisers and other chemicals associated with industrial farming.

    Irrigation systems are (imo) plain stupid. A better model to the current industrial farming model is the one used in Cuba. Or the models of perennial polyculture used by more traditional living communities in places like Bolivia.

    “he argued also that people need to be smarter about where they choose to live (for example, away from earthquake/volcanic zones) and that the idiotic notion of nation-states had made that much harder a realization for humanity to digest and follow through on.”

    Nation-states are a relatively new phenomenon arrising just prior to the industrial revolution. In actual fact the numbers of people migrating has significantly increased, however the percentage of world population migrating is not any different now to the time of the transatlantic trade when Nation-states were just forming and there were mass migrations between regions and continents. Whether the nation-state system still has any real power is extensively debated in sociology/human geography academia. There are valid arguments on both sides, I don’t wish to reproduce these here.

    “As a number of people have pointed out, it’s not like all those peak minerals are all consumed completely. There will be ways to reclaim a lot of it. The stupidity of our throwaway culture suggests one future industry that will be big: trash mining”

    My argument was that industrial society would not be the same 30 years from now. This is in part due to resource depletion. Yes, governments could mandate that human faeces and urine are collected for use on farms, but those policies need to implemented right now. They’re not, rather a war is being fought in afghanistan (probably) over the minerals and rare earth metals contained there.

    There is a further problem, and I’m sure having taken geology this would have been covered at some point: that it is impossible to have 100% recycling of any metal or mineral – not only would there be loss of chemical amount through use/consumption of the substance; there would also be the amount lost through conversion of the waste material back into a useable form. As a for instance there is currently over 90% steel recycling already taking place, and near 90% automobile recycling. However due to the reprocessing techniques employed, there is only an 80% recovery rate. Meaning that if 100 tonnes of steel goes for recycling, there will only be 80 tonnes which comes out the other side. Whilst industrial use steel is recycled in very high amounts, 50% of steel on the market is made from original iron ore, meaning that humans living in industrial society are requiring ever more steel.

    Similar will be true in processes for rare earth metals and other non-renewables. I can look up the data, but don’t have time to do so now.

    “And as for all those projections, well, they’re worth considering but they inherently present the past as bereft of technological advancements that made the past graph possible… and necessarily assume a lack of similar technological advances in the future. (Let alone new methods for the synthesis of elements, or of replacement materials including fully programmable matter, something people are researching now.)”

    I have several questions then:
    – Will these technological advancements be found before such time as industrial society reaches a resource crisis point?
    – What are the materials and manufacturing processes of these technological advancements? At every stage it needs to be completely sustainable, and so be a closed loop. And level of material loss (such as mentioned above with steel, or is found with water/minerals in current hydroponic systems) will result in the system eventually breaking down. Further if any stage of the process relies upon the use of extra non-renewable resources (such as extra mining, or use of arc furnaces using fossil fuels), then the system will again break down. The claim of new technology is very hopeful, however I am concerned about the viability and practicalities of such claims.

    Added to this, is that *every single* aspect of industrial society would need to be converted to a fully closed loop means of living. That means literally everything to do with the way industrial humans live would need to change. Will these advancements happen in the next 30-50 years when resource depletion really starts to be felt?

    “So, frankly, I’m afraid you are attempting a cheap cheat here. You don’t get to link some science-poor articles in popular magazines (which, ask any scientist, are usually full of tremendous simplifications and outright wrong data–science journalism is pathetic in general)”

    ad hominem. I expected better from a college professor.

    If you find the data at fault, then please, disprove it. Until contradictory evidence is supplied, the data stands.

    “and then declare that the burden of proof is on Wendy.”

    My apologies, I was rude there. I gave (some) evidence that industrial society as we know it is unsustainable. If you have evidence that every aspect of industrial society can be sustainable, then I’d be interested to read it.

    “Good grief, you’re arguing for the dismantling of civilization… do you think we’re actually going to take Wikipedia and a couple of New Scientist articles as all the proof we need? No, the burden of proof for your (and Jensen’s) extravagant claim remains squarely on you (and him). ”

    I’m not sure if this was an intentional reframing of the argument or accidental, however this wasn’t actually what Wendy and I were discussing at this point in time. We were discussing whether or not industrial society was in fact sustainable, and if society would look very different in the next 30 years to how it looks now.

    As i said above, if you have evidence which proves industrial society, or every aspect of living within industrial society is sustainable (ie, can carry on indefinately), then I’d be very interested to read your data.

    Thank you.

    DJ forum member.

  2. And to whomever suggested that I am Jensen. No. As far as I am aware Jensen is in California, as Gord has already mentioned, I am in the UK.

  3. Everyone, I have only four things to add at the moment, since I have some stuff to do today:

    1. I can verify that, unless Jensen is a master of internet spoofing, DJ forum member is, in fact, in the UK. Somewhere at Cambridge. We have corresponded on email already.

    2. In the course of that correspondence, it came to my attention that the dispute between Nina and DJfm supposedly extends to comments made elsewhere. Nobody has published these comments, nobody is willing to talk about them, and given the histrionic claim of “snitchjacketing” and all from DJfm, but also the fact that the rest of us are not privy to that argument, I must insist that that particular topic be left alone. I am not interested in talking about something someone may have said somewhere, but which cannot be divulged. It’s an argument for somewhere else, and I will consider further allusions to it deserving of a comment’s disemvowelment.

    3. All: this is my website. I decide who gets to participate, and who gets banned, based on their behaviour–and very liberal standards, I hope you’ll agree. But there are standards, and I would like to remind you that people attempting to suggest that another discussant ought to be banned is unacceptable. Nina, the rudeness of DJfm’s comments was not ignored: several people called DJfm to task on it. “You owe Nina an apology” is a statement of etiquette, not a threat of banning.

    Frankly, both of you are hijacking the discussion, and I’m not interested in the hijack, but at least DJfm is also discussing some ideas, towards the end, however much the approach seems to be trollish.

    4. For the love of all that’s holy, PLEASE, if you must type your comments in a word processor instead of the comment window, use Notepad or an equivalent text-file editor. Your Word Processors are Autocorrecting your straight quotes to curly quotes, your double-dashes to em dashes, and so on… and the formatting is getting messed up. I fixed one particularly bad example (yours, Wendy) but I don’t have time to fix everyone’s!

    It’s simply: just use Notepad or some other bare-bones word processor. Okay? Thanks.

    By the way, Wendy, no apologies necessary. I can’t reply to this discussion today anyway… so much material here, and so much other stuff I need to do.

  4. Gord,
    Forget anything said anywhere else. My point is that this person has accused me of doing something very wrongly, proven wrong and still has not said anything concerning it or me. For you to ask me to leave the topic alone is not right. So I will leave and DJFM can secretely congratulate his/herself. I am sorry but for someone to lie about someone else on my forum without not so much as an admittance that I did not do what they said, or at least it is possible I didn’t do it. I would ask them to leave. So Goodbye. Oddly, Derrick Jensen
    behavior follows even the conversation about him.

  5. HI Gord,

    First, THANK YOU for cleaning up my submission. I PROMISE to use notepad from now on. I didn’t realize my post was so distorted–had I, I would have certainly tidied it up myself. My apologies.

    Second, excellent. DJFM is not Jensen.

    Third, this can be a highly worthwhile discussion–especially if we keep to the issues which I take to be articulating more rational and practicable alternatives to Jensen OR a defense of Jensen that directly addresses the multiple and fair criticisms leveled against him.

    I am still looking forward to DJFM’s response to these.

  6. Hi Wendy,

    First of all, apologies for not replying sooner – I am quite busy right now. This is a topic (and discussion) that is very easy to spend way too much time thinking about.

    Let me try to reformulate what I was trying to say in my previous (overlong) post. It was sparked by your suggestion that we “articulate an alternative” to the “civilization must end” narrative that Derrick Jensen presents. Once I started to think about the history of such predictions, it struck me how there had been several of them over the last couple of hundred years, and each time humankind had changed the game somehow – this is the “black swan” theme. Now, this is NOT a statement of my beliefs about what will happen now with our current situation (i.e. I don’t have a blind faith that “someone will invent something”); it was merely an observation of what has gone before. I think it’s interesting, that’s all – history has much to teach us. I do think that our current civilization is toxic to the planet, and that we risk ending life as we know it for everybody on our fragile world, and I don’t think there are any simple solutions. But I just do not subscribe to the same single-track, dyspeptic, victim/abuse oriented vision of inevitable doom that Jensen promotes. It may happen the way he predicts; but I just find it a little too simplistic and even naive (if it weren’t so manipulative).

    On my comments about our selves being formed by childhood experiences – that is not a central pillar of my beliefs either, really. It was just part of the stream of consciousness that came out when I started to think about these issues. It sprang from my thinking on how organized religion is such a central problem here (more on that below), and this led on to the observation that people tend not to easily let go of belief systems formed when very young. That’s all.

    I appreciate your comment about metanarrative, this is (ironically) what I am arguing against with respect to Derrick Jensen’s approach (as you put it, “single engine explanation for a multi-pronged phenomena”). I am certainly not trying to say that our problems have a single cause, or a single solution.

    However, if I were to point my finger at one factor that is causing us some of the most pain right now in the world, it would have to be organized religion. Let me preface by saying that I am not a “hard” atheist; that is, I am not one of those who say that I am certain beyond any doubt that there is no god. I am rather a “soft” atheist, i.e. I simply have no firm belief one way or the other. Some might call that “agnostic”, but I don’t want to get into semantics. In any case, what I think is the big problem in the world today is organized religion, because it combines human organization and control with a tendency (almost a requirement, actually) that the members let go of certain aspects of critical thinking and rational thought. For example, in order to believe that the Christian bible is true in every respect (“the word of God”), you need to learn to ignore the many outright contradictions that lie within that huge book. Once you are able to accept one cognitive dissonance as part of your core beliefs about the world, then others come more easily, and that is extremely dangerous. I have found that religious people, at their core, have irrational beliefs about the way the world works, and this produces irrational viewpoints about how to behave in it. A prime current example is gay marriage here in the USA. Any rational person looks at this and wonders why on earth it should matter to anybody if two men or two women who love each other want to get married. Marriage is not sacred, or we wouldn’t have drive-thru chapels in Vegas and “family values” politicians getting married and divorced multiple times. The field is just so full of hypocrisy, it’s astounding that anybody takes it seriously. And yet, they do; and it’s only because organized religion promotes this combination of groupthink and irrational belief systems, combined with a deep-felt tribalism that puts more value on loyalty to the group than to thinking for yourself.

    I have no problem with spirituality, with someone finding a relationship with whatever they find within themselves, or with seeking out the deeper metaphysical meaning of life, either through meditation or whatever other means are available. This is a natural human endeavor, and it tends to promote wisdom and enlightenment, not this ugly hatred, dogmatism and manipulation that modern organized religions propulgate.

    So, I present organized religion as one of our major problems today, simply because it has so many adherents, and this mass of people is hindering any real progress on the urgent problems that matter. Instead of focusing on how to survive as a race beyond this current period of overpopulation and destruction of the environment, we rather focus on whether gays should get married, or whether women should be allowed to have control over their own bodies the day after an unwanted impregnation.

    When I was growing up, I read a lot of science fiction, particularly Arthur C. Clarke. He presented a world where mankind had progressed to the stars, where rationality and science were the basis for our civilization. So I had this rosy vision of the future getting better, not worse. I also read dystopian works like 1984 and Brave New World, which depressed me greatly – but now I can see that they are perhaps closer to the truth than Clarke’s naive vision. Also, I have been somewhat shocked as I have grown up to discover that medieval belief systems still hold such sway in our modern world.

    Now, as Gord said, a lot of the issue here is simple stupidity; but the problem is that that even the “good” religious people implicitly enable and support the “bad” ones, simply by supporting the organization that gives them power. I know that many religious people do good things in the world; however, so do many non-religious people. Religion is not a prerequisite of goodness in people, but the destructive thought processes I am talking about (letting go of rationality, holding on to dogma even in the face of new facts, adherence to the groupthink over all else) are definitely inherent to organized religion. So, saying that some religious people do good is irrelevant – they are people, people have a natural tendency to want to help others. This is the better side of humanity, but it has nothing to do with organized religion itself. In order to be a part of, say, the Catholic Church, you need to believe certain things that simply do not make any sense at all. You have to take and accept these beliefs “off the shelf” as it were, fully formed and with all the dogma and accumulated detritis of hundreds of years of human corruption and tinkering. This is not the stuff of wisdom and enlightenment, it is all about control over other people. And it has incredible power in today’s world. Can an atheist be elected President in the USA today? Not a chance. Presidential candidates must jump through all manner of absurd hoops to try to pretend that they are devout Christians. Look how much traction the “Obama is a Muslim” meme has, and tell me we’re a religiously tolerant society. And that’s another problem with religion: Extreme intolerance for people who don’t accept the dogma. This, combined with the central, virus-like component of organized religion (spread the faith), is another facet of why it’s so harmful.

    If you have an argument with someone about how to fix the world’s problems, then eventually, if you dig deep enough, you will come down to basic motivations and reasons for doing x or y. With a rational person, these reasons will boil down to pragmatic, scientific observations about how, if we don’t do something different, we will end up destroying our environment. With a religion-based person, what you come down to is quotes from the bible about how God gave the earth to man, or how Jesus is going to come back to earth soon and the end times are upon us, and there must be war in the middle east for that to happen. When you have people in government and positions of power within the military who have those beliefs, then you have a big problem. And we do have that.

    Another basic problem that we face is simply human nature – our tendency to only pay heed to our own selfish, short term needs and desires. This is evidenced every time we eat that extra donut, even though we know we’re already overweight and don’t need the additional calories, and we’ll pay for it later. This is, in microcosm, what is wrong with the world today – lots and lots of people, each mostly doing our best to muddle through our little lives, each of us not feeling in the least bit empowered to actually change the world much. So we just do our thing, and, collectively, that thing is slowly destroying the planet. We need to evolve as a race, so that we can see more clearly how each small action brings us that little bit closer to the precipice. This requires empathy, compassion, an ability to see beyond the end of our own nose to the greater world. Species are going extinct every day, and we seem unable to do anything to change our behavior. If we don’t wake up and change, then change may well be forced upon us.

    I am not presenting my entire world view here. Again, this is just a kind of stream of consciousness rant, so my apologies if it is overlong. Gord, I don’t know if you wrote the code for your site, but you might consider adding pagination to your forum – it’s getting pretty long to display on one single page. If you need any tips then let me know – I am a programmer (not looking for business, I’ve got my hands full developing my own site, just glad to help if you need any tips). Also, a preview step to the forum posting would be nice, to view our comment in a bigger format than the tiny little edit box before committing to submit.

    Nina, I feel for you, and I agree that it doesn’t seem fair that this anonymous “DJFM” person seems to be able to make these aspersions against you with relative impunity. However it is Gord’s website, to handle however he sees fit. I have to make tough decisions on my own community website sometimes, and it’s not easy to draw that line between non-censorship and keeping out the trolls. I think he treads that line pretty well here – and, if it’s any consolation, I think any rational person reading this thread in its entirety would not view you in a negative light. So don’t sweat it too much.

    Again, apologies for the overlong posts… it’s a problem I have, but this is a big issue, and it seems to produce lots of words! Wendy, if you’re interested in more discussion, then you should be able to see my website by clicking on my name above the post. Same goes for anybody else.

    And thanks again, Gord, for providing this forum.

    Neil

  7. Hey, all,

    I’m still overloaded, but yeah, Neil, I’ve been thinking of adding pagination to this blog. It’s a WordPress blog, so I can probably find a plugin to do that. Just need to find the right one.

    I will try respond to the rest later this week… I have a couple of papers I need to proofread (for a deadline tomorrow, thank goodness), a lecture to prepare, and a pile of grading to get done (and we’re only a month into the spring semester here in Korea), and a new post to finish drafting and put up here on the site… so that’s what I’ll be doing the next couple of days.

    But I will give a quick look to the pagination.

    Till then, thanks for a pretty interesting discussion so far.

  8. Regarding alternatives to Jensen’s “solution,” are you familiar with Lester Brown’s work? PBS starts running a show on his Plan B tomorrow.

    http://www.pbs.org/journeytoplanetearth/

    Maybe we are too far gone for his type of solutions to work, but it does seem logical to try them. Jensen’s solution, after all, really isn’t a solution.

  9. Wendy — “security culture” has nothing to do with “pretending that everyone could be an agent.” You can read several perspective on it in detail through zinelibrary.info

    wow, Gordon — this post makes you seem like a defensive, childish brat incapable of engaging with difficult material that challenges the fundamentals of your worldview. I’m sure you’re not, so how about actually engaging with the substance of Derrick’s arguments as they appear in his books with honest discussion instead of red herrings, straw men and other argumentative fallacies?

    it’s sad that this blog comes high up in results when cross-searching Derrick Jensen and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is an issue that Derrick Jensen deals with extensively and explicitly — and on a personal level in his works.

    He has plenty of shortcomings (e.g., a propensity to ramble and wander off on tangents and asides), but all these self-aggrandizing, wound-licking pseudo-critiques lead me to believe that you haven’t actually read his stuff directly, and are just coping with your own cognitive dissonance and protecting your current belief-system, to which Derrick Jensen seems to be a threat.

    Maybe Derrick’s an asshole, maybe he’s totally cool. I don’t care. His premises are clear, and his logic is sound and complete (not necessarily perfect!). A tenable discussion would address them directly.

    Or just keep ranting childishly at straw men and red herrings. Whatever. It shows your true colors quite clearly.

    1. ozob,

      Not sure if you’re trying to give me a good laugh, but you did.

      I haven’t read all of Jensen’s works, only a few. My “engagement” is with what I’ve seen of his work, which is:

      • A Language Older Than Words
      • Walking on Water
      • Standup Tragedy (an audiorecording)

      As for self-aggrandizing, wound-licking pseudo-critiques, are you trying to model what you mean in your critique of my post? Because you’re doing a good job of characterizing your own response. The idea that I’m motivated by anything like a fearful resistance to Jensen’s ideas, and the threat you imagine they impose to my “belief system” (about which you probably know nothing beyond what you can infer from this post) is, again, laughable. I’m an SF writer and an expat: cognitive dissonance and questioning my “current belief-system” is my friggin’ bread-and-butter, pal.

      So no, I don’t feel personally threatened by Jensen’s inanities… it’s his apparent popularity that worries me; the idea that he’s poisoning the discourse of environmentalism, by doing that classic American move — shoving the debate to the extremes — is what worries me.

      I’m pretty sure the questions I’ve posed above (here), to DJfm and others, would need to be part of a tenable discussion about the ideas of a man advocating the dismantling of civilization. So let’s set aside the ostensible red herrings (which, I must argue, aren’t, but we can talk about that later) and see what you have to say about those questions. Or, better yet, respond to Wendy’s criticisms, which are pretty clear and well-formulated, especially the ones she linked to over at her blog. I mean, if you ARE interested in a tenable discussion, and not just a defense of poor Jensen’s honor…

      Or just keep ranting childishly and dismissing others’ criticisms as straw men and red herrings, and showing your own true colors.

  10. I just want to say that I think this post completely misses the point. I don’t care about Jensen. But if you’re (gutsily, even) placing the survival of humanity as your highest goal, I don’t see how you came to this philosophy in the first place. I’m not against us, but I tire of looking for complicated, half assed solutions to problems that only exist as byproducts of our bloated desire to expand and increase our odds of…survival.

    1. Julia,

      You’re tired of “complicated, half-assed solutions to problems”? Rather than, what… simple, all-or-nothing solutions to those problems? I should think the answers will be, of necessity, complicated, since the problems are.

      And as for “our bloated desire to expand and increase our odds of… survival,” there’s good reason to believe this instinct is evolved. There’s no use in wishing it away… nor in formulating solutions that ignore it.

      Of course, if you have something more to offer, you have yet to offer it.

  11. Hi,

    This is mostly responses to DJfm. I edited into shape two papers and got them submitted by the deadline, so I have a little time tonight. However, I may not have time to answer at length. (I’m having trouble just keeping up with this thread, to be honest.)

    ‘Security Culture’ is good practice in any activist group: you treat your group as infiltrated, and consider that everyone is a fed. That way you don’t say anything which could either i) get you or someone else put in jail and ii) don’t say anything which could put Derrick in jail. From what I have seen the overwhelming majority of people aren’t interested in doing illegal acts. I remember a few months ago someone did keep posting about wanting to do illegal acts, such as naming specific targets, and they were asked to leave.
    The upshot of thinking everyone is a potential fed, is that no one person ever gets singled out as such, and no one discusses those things which could put themselves or anyone else in jail. The moderators and Derrick are very strict on no one on the forum being snitchjacketted: they have security notices in every forum that naming someone as a fed harms the movement.

    I have to agree with Wendy that this reasoning is pretty dubious. Yes, the explicit message is that it’s just good security procedure. But you’re ignoring a whole subtext to the message. For one thing, “Don’t discuss anything illegal here” isn’t something one says to any old group. One says it to groups of people one expects to be discussing, and doing, illegal things. I certainly don’t start my classes each semester with, “No discussing illegal things here, folks, okay?” This is mostly because I expect the “illegal things” my students to be doing to be tame stuff, like jaywalking or running red lights–common misdemeanours in South Korea–but also because I presume they don’t have any serious illegal stuff to talk about… I presume they won’t be doing it in the first place. On one level, I would read the admonishment to be an encouragement of the idea that illegal acts in the name of the environmental movement are normative, and that people should be talking about them elsewhere. (Just as a teacher telling high school students, “Don’t make out in the hallway,” is actually also saying, “Do that somewhere else.) The message is that one’s illegal acts are not only normative, but unobjectionable.

    (Which, by the way, may not necessarily be a bad thing. I mean, helping runaway slaves was illegal, but morally correct in my opinion. But the message is pretty clear, subtextually.)

    Further, when one suggests that people “Don’t discuss anything illegal here, because you never know who is a fed” there’s a second clear message in the idea–a much more dangerous one, which is: you’re of interest; you’re in a special group that is under assault by the authorities; you must maintain secrets, and work to protect the safety of our specially-endangered group. By a certain kind of twisted logic–a turn of logic particularly familiar to those who read Philip K. Dick–the fact that the group is small, and marginal, and dismissed as extreme, and yet of interest to the feds, suggests that they must be onto something. But it also triggers a deep-seated tribal instinct in people: we’re endangered, we should follow the leader, band together, don’t ask too many questions. Protect the group! Which certainly explains why the site’s members would be motivated to maintain participation in a group that is so rigid in its suppression of dissent.

    As for the activist groups you mention: were they online? Seriously, if Jensen were truly interested in helping people achieve his goals, there are other forms of encryption and security he would probably opt for, which would allow people to discuss whatever they liked. I mean, this is a community online. On the Internet. If P2P software sites can have explanations of how to participate with relative anonymity, why can’t Jensen’s? The paranoid activist culture thing is simply not necessary in an online forum. Which suggests that the real motivation for using it has to do with the community itself, and its psychological/emotional needs, such as for control of all discussion.

    And while you may think that the Jensen crowd is healthily non-paranoid, I hold up the events on this thread as evidence to the contrary. The last time I saw so many references to secret events off-thread, so many histrionic accusations, so many suggestions of who someone might really be, was when I was on a mailing list that was falling apart during the mental breakdown of the one celebrity participating in the list, who in fact was encouraging exactly that kind of paranoid culture–enlisting “informants” and so on. I’m saying that the past and present members of the Jensen forum here are displaying some pretty unhealthy interaction patterns. That’s saying something in itself.

    Maybe a better example would be that you wouldn’t go to an Andrea Dworkin site to discuss whether or not pornography is bad: the basic premise throughout Dworkin’s work is that pornography reinforces certain societal structures, and so you’d go to the Dworkin forum to discuss what to do about pornography.
    Surely it is up to the members of the forum if we wish to only discuss issues from an anti-civilisation perspective? If we choose to have a closed community within which to discuss this, this is up to us.

    Well, it is up to you whether you choose to join a religious cult and flush your life down the toilet, too. I’d call it a tragedy, but maybe I’m too nice. However, when a religious cult starts talking about dismantling the technoeconomic structures upon which, like it or not, the world as we know it relies–and without which, many, many people would suffer and die–then I think outsiders do have a right to point out how the cult is manufacturing consensus, and promoting dangerous ideas.

    As I said, there are plenty of areas on the internet where people can discuss the validity or not of anti-civilisation positions.

    Which is to say, “We demand the right to have made up our minds prematurely, and permanently, on fundamental issues which are of profound importance to everyone on the planet.” Okay, fine: but having made up your mind, you should realize you don’t have the right to demand we take your somehow-prescient conclusions seriously, or pretend that this insistence is anything other than ridiculous.

    I thought you had run my IP address through an IP locator? That may give you more of an idea. I’d prefer not to announce here where/who I am.

    Fine, but don’t expect us to take the fact you’re on a campus in the UK — which is all I could find out, or cared to — means we should take your arguments any more seriously than we have, given the (layperson’s) evidence you’ve posted. On my own campus, pretty much anyone can get online and post things. For all I know, you’re hanging out in the library, or a music student who thinks she has it all figured out.

    I guess that depends on the classroom. You have your experience in classrooms, I have mine. Maybe things are different in the USA, but the problem of resource depletion, and the means forward from this, is certainly being discussed here. I think to not discuss this issue is foolish, this will be the reality within which today’s students and their offspring will enter. It will be up to them to create the policies for how to deal with this situation.

    Well, I’m Canadian, but yes, classroom experiences will vary. By the way, I agree with you that it’s foolish not to discuss resource depletion, or pretend our non-renewable resources will last forever. Just because I think Jensen’s a nutter doesn’t mean I have no idea about the need for policies to deal with problems related to resource depletion, ecological devestation, monocropping, and a ton of other things.

    I just don’t think Jensen’s apocalypticism is a useful response. I happen to be of the opinion that turning our backs on technology as a crucial part of how to move forward and survive this stuff (and help other species survive it) is the best way to ensure failure, however.

    Lawns, and other forms of domestic and municipal water use only account for circa 12% of water use. Currently 88% of water use is for farming and industry.

    Well, and he was talking about things that could be done in the immediate moment to ease the strain on the aquifers. He wasn’t advocating they be left alone completely, just easing the strain to the point where they could replenish (and thus also avoid the risk of permanent damage after their temporary depletion). The point being: he was looking for ways to deal with the problem that didn’t just involve shutting down industry and farming. He did point out how stupid farming in deserts is when other options exist. He talked about the toxification of fresh water. He talked about the importance of considering natural geological properties when designing long-term nuclear waste storage. He talked about all the mining, fertilizer, and farming issues you mention, too. He (and I) happened to agree on the stupidity you mention.

    But he wasn’t trying to be a romantic Don Quixote, tilting at windmills he could never take down, or prophesying a brilliant apocalypse that would make everything better, because once again “natural”; no, he was more interested in doing things sufficiently less stupidly, less in violation of common sense, so that we could live long enough to develop a saner relationship with the world without having to don hairshirts and go back to the Middle Ages, or to a pre-civilization state, or whatever.

    Which, by the way, is the realistic response. No matter what you do, you will not get the masses to abandon civilization. You will get their iPhones when you pry them out of their cold dead hands… or you could be smart about it and find a way to make their iPhones part of the solution. That’s possible too. You’re right about the stupidity of current policies, of course. Especially when you have, and Neil notes, people (voters and policymakers) making so many of the important decisions under the influence of religious thought patterns that, frankly, contradict the kinds of thinking necessary to look at our conundrum with fresh eyes and a focus on what needs to get done.

    But also, while 100% recycling is not possible, humans are pretty damned good at refining effectiveness of use. chips aren’t just getting faster, they’re getting smaller. And I suspect between recycling and increased efficiency–and hopefully, a decline of the manufacture of disposable tech, as we develop more and more of a digital infratructure and manufacture becomes more and more of a stupid, losing proposition–that we’ll probably hold out on a lot of minerals until we have some kind of rudimentary programmable matter or something. That might not happen, and is unlikely in the case of some minerals. But there’s always space, where some minerals are found in abundance, and the Chinese are getting eager to start a new space race.

    By the way, I don’t need you to tell me that nationstates are a recent fiction. I make a point of bringing that up basically every semester. I teach in Korea, one of the most nationalistic societies on Earth, and it always comes up eventually.

    Regarding your questions:

    – Will these technological advancements be found before such time as industrial society reaches a resource crisis point?
    – What are the materials and manufacturing processes of these technological advancements? At every stage it needs to be completely sustainable, and so be a closed loop. And level of material loss (such as mentioned above with steel, or is found with water/minerals in current hydroponic systems) will result in the system eventually breaking down. Further if any stage of the process relies upon the use of extra non-renewable resources (such as extra mining, or use of arc furnaces using fossil fuels), then the system will again break down. The claim of new technology is very hopeful, however I am concerned about the viability and practicalities of such claims.
    Added to this, is that *every single* aspect of industrial society would need to be converted to a fully closed loop means of living. That means literally everything to do with the way industrial humans live would need to change. Will these advancements happen in the next 30-50 years when resource depletion really starts to be felt?

    I think you’re setting the bar too high, to be honest. We don’t need to (and obviously cannot) move from utter wastefulness and stupidity to total sustainability and super-high-tech in every single aspect of industrial society the next 30-50 years, or else just keep on as we are until we achieve cataclysmic collapse. That’s a false dichotomy.

    I’d argue the reality will be much more smack in between the two images: there were be modest gains in efficiency all the way till we hit the point of diminishing returns; meanwhile, there will be a lot of salvage, and at some point manufacturers will be required to stop engineering obsolescence into objects with more than X amount of nonrenewables used in manufacture. And while I cannot promise a materials science breakthrough, or a massive breakthrough in the processing of human waste for fertilizer, or mining of Jovian moons, I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect *some* positive changes. History isn’t, after all, merely a picture of woe, at least if one cares to look with anything besides a jaundiced eye.

    It’s not cool to have to depend on the hope of technological change alone. I’m not saying we should sit back and hope. Where I live, new buildings are still being built constantly, and they are embarrassingly environmentally-unfriendly–environmentally unaware, more like–despite the constant prattle about global standards and the importance of green space and so on. There are huge changes that could be made by the adoption of more sensible practices.

    But insisting we should abandon civilization, which as far as I understand it is Jensen’s position, is a hopeless strategy. Hell, good luck convincing yourself to keep using the computer you’re now using ten years from now. That’s a much more modest suggestion and I doubt anyone on this discussion board will be doing it.

    “So, frankly, I’m afraid you are attempting a cheap cheat here. You don’t get to link some science-poor articles in popular magazines (which, ask any scientist, are usually full of tremendous simplifications and outright wrong data–science journalism is pathetic in general)”
    ad hominem. I expected better from a college professor.

    Hahaha. Ad hominem is argument to the person. I would be, for example, if I cast aspersions on you as, say, an unwashed hippie or some glazed-eyed follower of Jensen, which I had not done to that point in the argu,ent. All I said was that you were attempting a cheap cheat: a lazy shortcut, by linking some popsci articles.

    If you find the data at fault, then please, disprove it. Until contradictory evidence is supplied, the data stands.

    You’re missing my point. If your research consists of thumbing through Scientific American and other such magazines, then I’m afraid I cannot take your views on scientific matters seriously. I don’t need to trawl through your pet articles pointing out problems, though I’m sure I could. Would you think citing Wikipedia is appropriate for a major argument in a paper in college? (It isn’t.) Would you say that citing Encyclopaedia Britannica is sufficient when backing up a claim that one must enter a war? Uh, no, it isn’t.

    It’s not necessarily because Wikipedia or E.B. get the facts wrong on a basic level. It’s because of the lack of nuance, the exclusion of uncertainties and debates inherent in encyclopedic texts of that kind. Popular science magazines have similar problems, being that they are shaped by editorial agendas, by the social beliefs of writers and editors (and not just scientific knowledge), and so on. If you look at the coverage by American pop-science magazines of the crisis in Fukushima, you see a pretty misleading account of what’s been happening… so irresponsibly misleading, in fact, that one can’t help but suspect the magazines are simply throwing in their support for their nation’s nuclear industry.

    So, no, I’m not going to go through each source and “falsify” your “data” just as I would not accept the use of Wikipedia as a source in a student essay. The problem isn’t exactly the content of the articles, it’s the credibility of someone who presents them as “data.”

    “and then declare that the burden of proof is on Wendy.”
    My apologies, I was rude there. I gave (some) evidence that industrial society as we know it is unsustainable. If you have evidence that every aspect of industrial society can be sustainable, then I’d be interested to read it.

    Well, since you’re asking for science fiction–you and I both know that “every aspect of industrial society” cannot, with technology we have now, be sustainable. And obviously we’re going to have to pick and choose, develop new technologies, and so on… but that’s not the same as flushing baby and bathwater away all in one glorious apocalypse in or by 2060.

    “Good grief, you’re arguing for the dismantling of civilization; do you think we’re actually going to take Wikipedia and a couple of New Scientist articles as all the proof we need? No, the burden of proof for your (and Jensen’s) extravagant claim remains squarely on you (and him). ”
    I’m not sure if this was an intentional reframing of the argument or accidental, however this wasn’t actually what Wendy and I were discussing at this point in time. We were discussing whether or not industrial society was in fact sustainable, and if society would look very different in the next 30 years to how it looks now.
    As i said above, if you have evidence which proves industrial society, or every aspect of living within industrial society is sustainable (ie, can carry on indefinately), then I’d be very interested to read your data.

    Were you not talking about the question of the sustainability of industrial society within the context of Jensen’s claim that “civilization” needs to be dismantled?

    Obviously society will look very different in 30 years; it is likely to have to, and it is anyway likely to do so even if we luck out and have programmable matter. Change has been accelerating for some time, after all. Obviously we will face some hard decisions, and to maintain a system anything like what we have, we will be picking and choosing what we keep, struggling to change, and maybe giving up a few things unwillingly. However, I do not buy that we will be divesting ourselves of the whole of civilization–lock, stock, and barrel–because not everything is 100% sustainable, and we certainly won’t be doing that in the next 30 years.

    I would argue rather that your move to set the bar so high–100% sustainability in the next 30 years–is a classic non sequitur. It does not follow that, since we’re living in a way not 100% sustainable now, we will need to abandon civilization (or experience a die-off, or be struck by extreme resource shortage) by 2040. There are other viable strategies beyond 100% sustainability. It will, in fact, be hard enough to get people and companies and governments to consider the sensible, more modest approaches… there’s no sense in pushing something anyway only a tiny few will consider, let alone actually decide to pursue.

  12. Neil,

    I just want to say, about your aside on Arthur C. Clarke, that while he was very optimistic, he was right about some things; he thought up geostationary-orbit telecom satellites, like the ones that may well be involved in getting my words onto your computer or iphone screen.

    Beyond that, though, I would also note that he had a clear understanding, as did HG Wells before him, of the foolishness of people, and the need for us to, in terms we’d use now, “level up.” He may have framed it in spiritual terms, or in other terms that don’t necessarily work for you or me (the psychic powers of the “Last Generation” in Childhood’s End comes to mind) but he seems to have been all too aware of the fragility and impermanence of our human species, and of how alien we would have to become (compared to our current sense of the world) in order to really make it in this universe. And he was definitely (at least in later life) a kindred spirit to you when it comes to his views on religion, believe it or not.

    That said, I haven’t actually read as much Clarke as more recent authors; to be fair, he was writing most of his famous work at a time when a lot of “environmental” issues hadn’t quite come into the public consciousness as they have now. A lot of more recent SF has had a lot more to say about it. If you’d like some recommendations, let me know…

  13. Gord, thanks for your comments on Arthur C. Clarke. He was my favorite author when I was growing up, mainly because his books were always so inspirational and optimistic – he made me “think big”, about our future, and (along with Asimov, Harry Harrison and others) he helped me make the universe my home (at least in my mind).

    I was wrong to use the word “naive” when talking about Clarke – he was certainly not naive. I think I used that word because he generally seemed so optimistic about the future, and I don’t feel that way so much now. When I was growing up in the 1970’s, we had just conquered space and visited the moon. I saw all this and just kind of assumed that we would continue moving out to explore the stars. The continuing religious problems in the middle east and other regional conflicts just seemed like the last throes of yesterday… the stuff of our ignorant past. The future was all about bionic men, astronauts in white suits, space shuttles and digital watches. As Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from magic – and those numbers that appeared and disappeared on my brother’s new digital watch sure seemed like magic to me! The future was bright. Then the 1980’s came, and I got into computer programming, and things just looked better and better. Perhaps this was partly because I grew up in the UK, where religion perhaps isn’t (or wasn’t) as “in your face” as it is here today in the USA. In the UK, people tended to keep their religion to themselves.

    As time has gone on, I have seen the space race wither and die, and the “relics of yesteryear” like religion just get stronger and stronger. Sure, computers have produced the internet, which is the biggest advance in information sharing since the printing press. As with TV, though, the early prognostications about how the internet will change our lives have started to seem more than a little naive. People said early on that TV would produce a world of education available through a screen; similar predictions about the internet have partly come true (it is now SO much easier to find out about any topic you care to think about) but all that is also at great risk of being drowned out by stupid cat videos and even stupider comments by the droves of people who seem to think that spelling, grammar and punctuation are purely optional distractions from getting their insightful thoughts across (u suck lol). Also, I have noticed that communicating via online forums, while initially fulfilling, can also be a supremely frustrating experience. Debate, something I enjoy in theory, seems to be almost impossible to conduct in any meaningful way online. Have you ever seen a case where someone who had prior, deeply felt convictions on a topic left a discussion with a different viewpoint? All the internet seems to do is produce flamefests and harden positions. And the explosion in information availability just means that now anybody can find a websites that support just about any position. How to conduct an argument and reach meaningful conclusions when nobody budges an inch from their initial position? Internet debate seems to consist mostly of people presenting their viewpoints, ignoring the valid counterpoints of the other party, focusing on the particular minutiae that are convenient, and generally trying to make it look as if the other person is completely wrong in every respect. It all seems to be about personal ego and the feeling of being on a stage with the world watching (can’t let the other guy have the last word, because that’ll make it look like I am giving in!). I actually find myself mostly withdrawing from online debates these days (this is one notable exception), simply because it tends to waste so much time, and never really gets anywhere.

    It seems that we, as humans, have a knack for taking good things, and ruining them. Look at what happened to email. A purely open and wonderful means of communication (instant yet asynchronous), increasingly hamstrung by spammers who force us to use stronger and stronger filters, so that now we can’t be sure that recipients even receive our messages. How often do we send an email now, only to get no reply and sit there fretting about whether it ended up unseen in a spam folder that the user probably isn’t even aware of? There are probably only a few thousand serious spammers in the world, but they have managed to ruin email for everybody.

    And there is the rub: Small numbers of bad people can ruin the commons for everybody. And that is also the problem in the real world: There are, inevitably, always going to be some people who are willing to go to whatever lengths they have to in order to get their profit. When you combine desire and ambition with a psychopathic personality and a modicum of intelligence, the result is business people who are very ready and willing to trade a few endangered species, a few million acres of rainforest, a few million square miles of pristine ocean, to feed their own profit and greed. So it doesn’t matter if most of us are sitting here on the sidelines wondering how on earth we can save the world – there will always be some who are only too glad to let it burn. They simply don’t care, and it only takes a few of them to ruin it for everybody.

    So how are we to save the world? If it’s inevitable that the bad people usually get their way (because they are always willing to go to further extremes than reasonable people), then what hope is there? Well, that is the story that’s being played out. It’s a work in progress. People like Derrick Jensen have basically given up on humanity, they obviously think we are irredeemable, beyond saving. They think it’s all over but the shouting. Others, myself included, feel instinctively that there is something distorted and wrong with this view. As you said, the truth will probably lie somewhere in the middle – there will be tough times ahead, no doubt about it, but will civilization disappear completely? Maybe. Maybe not. I hope that our collective better nature eventually shines through the clouds like the sun on a stormy day, and I hope that this helps us (and the rest of the denizens on our little world) get through to the next level of evolution with some lessons learned. Perhaps we really can evolve as a specie – and maybe we will, one day, make it to the stars. As Clarke put it, “Childhood’s End”. I guess I still have some hope.

    I would be interested in the more recent Sci-Fi authors you referred to earlier, thanks.

    Neil

  14. Neil,

    Yeah, I certainly relate to a lot of that. I especially think the stuff about business is spot-on, and think in fact that rather than making it about “greed” of individual businesspeople–who shouldn’t have that kind of power, without commensurate accountability–that one thing we need to do before this century is out is to rethink corporate structure seriously.

    It has been done, several times, and the answers are usually boring and unsexy to businesspeople themselves. Books like Michael Albert’s Parecon: Life After Capitalism, one of the systems that looks a little more workable than others. It’s a boring book, as Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a presentation on utopian thinking today, but a pretty well-thought-out system.

    It seems to me that business, like religion, has resisted the democratizing force that has transformed politics. We are politically democratic republicans now, in most of the developed world, but in religious terms we’re monarchists (with a chain or “royal” appointees representing deities we talk of in monarchic terms), and businesswise we’re the next most top-down thing. It’s more pronounced here in Korea, where the fascist militarism of business culture is is that much more bluntly obvious, but I have come to think it’s a part of every business structure I’ve seen… there’s always a boss, and always workers who must obey to get their money or get fired. While Western businesses have introduced all kinds of fuzzy, touchy-feely stuff, it’s not as if businesses have, in any real way, become any more informed by the democratic, republican ideal than they were when independent businesses started appearing in various civilizations.

    While saying nothing of the author himself, I will note that Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer (2000) is one of the few books that comes to mind as having explored a sincerely alternate, democratized vision of corporate structure… as well as grappling with Climate Change…

    You’d probably also be interested in Kim Stanley Robinson, who has a strong utopian/environmentalist streak. His Mars Trilogy, as well as his Three Californias books, are likely up your alley, though I think especially the Science in the Capital (which more directly and concretely about the issues facing us here and now on this planet) might appeal to you, though I should note all these are on my to-read list.

    And more recently, I’m thinking a lot of the work of Paolo Bacigalupi would appeal: he takes climate change, resource depletion, and related problems very seriously in his work. His stories in Pump Six would be a good place to start, or else with his novel The Windup Girl.

  15. Thanks again, Gord, I’ve made a note of those. I don’t have much time for reading these days, but hopefully at some point!

    It’s kind of weird the way this thread just suddenly stopped, isn’t it?

    Neil

  16. Neil,

    Well, I stopped participating, but also, Nina dropped the discussion, and I think Nina’s presence here was the real reason DJfm was participating at all.

    This comment thread has kind of worked that way, anyway — on again, off again, on again, off again — since the beginning.

    But it’s interesting how, once people start asking tough questions, and demand more than science-popularization as evidence, the discussion peters out.

    There’s another relic I used to believe was becoming less and less common–but which has, indeed, increased in power and “relevance” lately, which is the nation-state. I remember a time when globalized capitalism was filling heads with a picture of the world in which nation-states were, on some level, convenient fictions, in which workers could move where the capital did, and so on. Not so much now: I’m a Canadian citizen, but one who was naturalized as a child, which means that if I have a kid with someone abroad (ie. not in Canada) my kid will not be eligible for Canadian citizenship. (I’m technically British too, but that doesn’t help; any kid I might have would only have a right to residency, followed by eventual naturalization if they wanted it. My hypothetical kid would not be eligible for either of my citizenships, because my paternal grandfather and my mother both moved their labour to another country. In the case where the mother’s nationality would be undesirable (life ain’t great for mixed-race kids in, say, Korea, and male Korean citizens are required to do military service, which, in my observation, screws a lot of guys up) we’d basically be screwed… we would have to emigrate to Canada or UK to have the kid, in fact, to have the kid born as a Canadian or UK citizen… even though I’m Canadian (and, technically, though I would need to “get” my passport, British).

  17. By the way, I realized I went off the main topic–the point I wanted to get to was, nation-states are also very strongly invested actors in the field environmental issues… but often, by their very nature, are designed to act with short-term concerns (and rather stupid ones, considering the stakes).

    It’s another issue for concern, especially since, if religion was the dominating narrative of the middle ages, nationalist-capitalism is the dominant narrative of our age… one we seem eager and able to justify no matter how it diverges from physical realities.

    But we have a lot more to lose today.

    Anyway, I hope those novels are interesting for you, when you get around to them. I will also recommend on podcast, of the one of my stories that is most ecologically-focused: “Dhuluma No More,” was podcast by Starship Sofa, and might appeal to people reading this thread.

  18. They are. Don’t forget it, and hang in there! Trolls are easy to pick out, if you know what to look for. Ban ’em if too few people are active in the comments on your blog… or, hell, send them over here. We have a lot of bright people who have opinions and seem interested in this dicussion, as well as in pointing out what’s wrong with Jensen’s apocalyptic cultism.

  19. Thank you for your insight. I have a great reverence for nature and the natural world. I coudnt help but feel that Jensen’s view on sustanability or the impossibility of the concept was lacking whether scientifically or morally. His views in my opinion are not thorough for an adequate argument. To understand this problem, it takes a lot more knowledge than that of wildlife biology, or other related fields concurrent with this argument. It takes economics, psychology, sociology, violence psychology, criminology, physics, statistics, philosophy, and a handful of other advanced knowledges to even scrape the surface of this monumental problem. Does Jensen have a masters in all of these? If so, I bow down to a great mind. If not, I don’t want to hear him speak.

  20. Does anyone else see Jensen’s tactic as negative? How can a negative mindset approach a problem with a positive solution? Granted that through industialization, humans have an impact on the eath’s ecosystem, ( whether severe or not arguably ) at this point, if there were no workforce to run water purification facilities, (by Jensen or his brainwashed cohorts blowing them up) the earth’s ecosystem would be in a real pinch. It is unfortunate that it has come to that point, but without us to clean up our mess, the earth (in my opinion) would be at more risk of “dying” than if the human race were to be eradicated, which in my opinion, is what Jensen “really wants”.

  21. Nick,

    The problem isn’t that Jensen hasn’t a degree in each area, so much as that he is dismissive of people who are experts in all those areas, but you’re right: these systems are so complexly interrelated that it’s hard to swallow his easy answers.

    And yeah, for all that advocacy of blowing up dams and so on, one wonders whether Jensen realizes just how severely we’d drag down the ecosystem on the way down. I’m thinking more than untreated sewage… I’m thinking wars over water and other resources, severe deforestation — hell, the ecology is not doing so well in North Korea, as a case in point. When people have nothing to eat but tree bark, trees don’t do so well.

  22. Excactly. It is like I said, a “pinch”. If you wanted to stop the production and distribution of plastics, that will result in job loss (unless some genius circumvents the cause and effect process to be beneficial ) which by statistics, job loss results to subtance abuse, which results to crime/violence, which results to humans that don’t care about anything but they’re own unintelligent self interest. Nonetheless, I trust your judgment over mine simply because I know you have more experience than myself. Just a person looking for perspective. Thank you again for your insight and I look forward to more intellectual, open minded digest with you.

  23. Nick,

    I suspect there would also be more dire results from a sudden slowdown of plastics production; and of course Jensen would say the damage to the biosphere from plastics is more important than what happens to us. But he seems to forget that we happen to the environment, and we happen to it more brutally when we’re desperate than when we are acting in a conscious, intelligent manner; as you point out, we will be less conscious and intelligent if we’re panicked.

    Come on back anytime. :)

  24. Just received a frothing-at-the-mouth comment via email from one Ted Bolha <>:

    Why don’t you just post ”I am against everything Derrick Jensen stands for” because thats all you’ll ever be, anything he says you simply disagree. You offer nothing but the same old arguments for civilization that has always been used to support it, they have little concern for the natural world we live in, if something threatens civilization you see it as a bad thing, your thinking doesn’t go beyond that. No shit doing away with plastics would come at the cost of human lives, don’t you realize that plastic and anything oil has always costed human and nonhuman life? You’re suggesting more of the same because if we make real changes the pathetic systems in place will fail, that’s because those changes reveal just how Fragile and stupid the entire thing is. You of course will disagree, because you’re set, you’re comfortible, you think this is the only way it could be, us who know death and real hardships know that the changes needed will take ‘presious’ human life, the same presious lives war, cars, oil, construction, cancer and all the other aspects of civ cost. But we know, that in the long run it will be a better world. You’re willing to continue the sacrifices to Progress, we are willing to sacrifice to stop it. You see it as good, we don’t. Its as simple as that, and that will not change.

    Ted,

    If you want to have dialog, comment here. I know you know where the discussion is going on, since your email includes a link to this discussion.

    I am unwilling to get into an argument by email: my life is too rich and full to waste time on such garbage. But as for public discussion, I’m willing since it heartens people who, like me, view Jensen and his tactics with disgust.

    Meanwhile, it is not useful to simply assume that those who disagree with you believe the diametrical opposite. While Jensen may be a hero to you, he’s not a devil to me: just a misguided fool.

    By the way, that rhetoric of yours is alarming:

    But we know, that in the long run it will be a better world. You’re willing to continue the sacrifices to Progress, we are willing to sacrifice to stop it. You see it as good, we don’t.

    … because, obviously, those who are criticizing Jensen don’t think we ought to keep mass-producing plastics, or polluting, or running our biosphere into the ground. We just disagree with Jensen’s solution to the problem.

    And those who speak of being “willing to sacrifice” to make a better world — in the foaming-at-the-mouth tone you have adopted — usually are talking about human sacrifice, on a mass scale. It’s been pointed out repeatedly on this thread that Jensen’s “message” takes such a human sacrifice for granted, without demonstrating that it is the only way to transition from the system we have now to something better.

    You’ll forgive us for taking issue with the idea of mass-scale human sacrifice just because Jensen says it’s the way to go.

    As I said, if you want to discuss, post here. Don’t email me again.

  25. No worries, Neil, I only realized after the fact that anyone subscribed to this discussion would see the version of the comment originally posted but not the edited version.

    For those confused, I got an email from this “Ted Bolha” character and posted it to a comment, meaning to edit it to explain the context. I ended up saving it prior to editing, which meant it was sent out to those subscribing as if the pro-Jensen, anti-“you scumbags who disagree with Jensen” comment had been attributed to me.

    The misposting is not Bolha’s fault… only the blame for the silly email recounted about is fairly his.

  26. Hi Gord, all. I haven’t been here for a while but I must say you all are doing a great job of articulating your questions and deconstructing the Jensen follower feedback. I have nothing scientific to contribute because I don’t know anything about science. I came here to listen to what other people had to say and just give a bit of my share since I was so happy to see what was going on here. I stopped posting because I felt DJ Forum Member was here because of me, dutifully safeguarding his/her leader or something? I knew when I shut up, so would they. Also, everything they were saying was what I heard over and over again when the DJ Forum did allow most people in. They just don’t see how unqualified they are to talk about these issues, really. Gord, you are awesome! I am thankful you and the others are speaking out on this forum. Bolha’s e-mail is so telling. Sad and scary. Thanks for this thread. The science is all still new for me. I kind of got woven into the beliefs and then couldn’t word all the beef I had with what I was reading/seeing.

    Thanks for this thread.

  27. Question to derrick. Do you think you have made the world a better place?
    (you anti everything wanabe anarchist rich kid who stole most of his writings from forms, lies though his teeth, can’t defend his positions, charges the proletariat money for books about how bad money is, and reminds me of a siantologest “hey here’s the answer $20.95. Don’t forget to buy a T-Shirt”) -.-

    1. Joshua,

      I hope you realize Derrick Jensen is extremely unlikely to reply to any question posted here. If you wish to confront him, I recommend you spell check your comment, and speak to him directly. Maybe join his forum. Your contribution here, addressed to him, is the last place he’ll see and respond.

  28. Gord,
    Asked him.
    He told me to read his book.
    Asked him for a copy.
    He told me to get a fucking library card.
    Asked him if he was all about money.
    He went on a rant about a ditch his disabled sister needed dug.
    I told him our culture has ways to help people like her who need it. and he stopped replying.
    I don’t want to talk to kids that don’t know the difference between revolution and riots.
    Or ones who would rather rant aboot a typo then address why there is a millionaire “anarchist” leading this movement.

  29. Joshua,

    Well, to be fair, if I’d published a book and someone bozo asked me for a copy, I’d probably say , “Get a library card,” too. To go from there to “Is it about money?” is probably not the best tactic, either.

    Not that I’ve changed my mind about Jensen, but given what you said, it’s possible to imagine he gets contacted by a lot of cranks and weirdoes.

    By the way, is Jensen actually a millionaire? I’d be surprised if his books have made him that much money…

  30. I have debated with Jensen on-line and I can say in all honesty the man is an idiot. He has no idea about logic. He makes giant leaps in his arguments with no proof. His writing is terrible. He over simplifies things. He never answers questions. He is a terrible hypocrite. He is not half the person he pretends to be. When cornered by his own stupidities he will lash out ad hominem. A good debate it is not. Jensen is a fool no doubt about it.

    1. Hamish,

      Thanks for the details, this fits my impression of him from his writing as well; anyone who is eager to control the dialog in the way he does must have problems dealing with opposing (or even slightly differing) viewpoints.

  31. Hey Gord–I just wanted to let you know that I DID get that book contract to write a critical treatise on Jensen (and several others) eco-primitivism….the publisher with be Rowman and LIttlefield’s scholarly division–Lexington. And I am scheduled to have the MS completed by July of 2013. The Prospectus itself ran 53 pages, so I may actually be able to make this deadline. Very exciting!

    w

  32. After thinking over everything, I’ve decided that I no longer agree with Derrick Jensen. I do agree that we need to get past our current superficial priorities as a race, but I do not believe we should abandon or destroy civilization, we merely need to realize that we can have justice, happiness and sustainability- and government, but each and every one of us needs to see what’s more important – community, family, the health of the planet and environments – at the same time I feel it’s our duty as the most technologically able species on this planet, to use technology to protect life against cosmic death. I’d like to see us planet leaping one day. This is a very personal belief, but I feel like intelligent beings are responsible for exploring the universe, I feel like its why intelligence is so self-propelling in evolutionary terms…

  33. It was very interesting to debate with him – he does not really understand anything. He does not understand basic sociology, basic economics, basic trade, basic biology. Question him on any of his claims and he reverts to ad hominem. He refuses to talk about the implications of his analysis. Question him on said analysis namely how many people should die and he reverts to ad hominem. According to his theories lots and I mean billions should perish. Jensen does not comprehend the complexity of the world. He has no idea of the nuances of a complex society. he has no idea about the nature of language and literacy its importance in the development of the human species. He told me that agriculture is to blame for everything… according to Jensen humanity fell off the rails when we started to grow vegetables and speak to each other. He is an absolute fool. I am not joking about this.

  34. Dear Wendy,

    Congrats on the book deal. It is a fascinating topic and I will have to watch for the title as it is released.

    I am an anthropology graduate student currently writing a term paper on just the topic you mentioned. Do you have any recommended readings that connect to Jesen? I am using Jensen’s the Culture of Make Believe as the main focus. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks!

    1. Wendy,

      Wonderful news! Looking forward to seeing the book! Keep fighting the good fight! (Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t start a blog in the way Koreans sometimes do — an “anti-“blog, ie. “The Anti-Derrick Jensen Blog.” I bet the traffic would beat whatever I get here. :)

      But it does sort of feel like picking on the mentally ill, and, well, I think your book will be more even-handed in demolishing Jensen’s ridiculousnesses.

      Ted,

      Ha, that’s a pretty wild swing — Jensenite to Stapledonian. I do hope, Ted, that you reflect on the rhetoric in your last communication with me, which I’ll reproduce for you here:

      Why don’t you just post ”I am against everything Derrick Jensen stands for” because thats all you’ll ever be, anything he says you simply disagree. You offer nothing but the same old arguments for civilization that has always been used to support it, they have little concern for the natural world we live in, if something threatens civilization you see it as a bad thing, your thinking doesn’t go beyond that. No shit doing away with plastics would come at the cost of human lives, don’t you realize that plastic and anything oil has always costed human and nonhuman life? You’re suggesting more of the same because if we make real changes the pathetic systems in place will fail, that’s because those changes reveal just how Fragile and stupid the entire thing is. You of course will disagree, because you’re set, you’re comfortible, you think this is the only way it could be, us who know death and real hardships know that the changes needed will take ‘presious’ human life, the same presious lives war, cars, oil, construction, cancer and all the other aspects of civ cost. But we know, that in the long run it will be a better world. You’re willing to continue the sacrifices to Progress, we are willing to sacrifice to stop it. You see it as good, we don’t. Its as simple as that, and that will not change.

      By your own rhetorical standards — anyone who disagrees with Derrick Jensen (and/or Ted Bolha circa seven months ago, though at the time you seemed to see Jensen’s ideas as gospel truth) is a monster. By those past standards, you, too, are now a monster. While it’s nice that you’ve stopped following one clown (Jensen), a little humility is in order; are you sure you haven’t started following a new clown? (I smell Kurzweil in the air.)

      I’m an SF writer and honestly, I can tell you about ten serious problems with your new adopted vision of the future. But I’ll just say this: you’re right about intelligence (well, okay, complexity) being autocatalytic in the generation of more complexity (or greater “intelligence” though not in the conventional sense of that word) but the endpoint of that is likely to be that humans won’t explore space; our machine-intelligence descendants may; they may also do other things since interstellar (not to mention intergalactic) space has some serious telecom problems, bandwidth being foremost among them.

      I think a more prosaic form of that “exploration” is likely; I think some branching out in our own solar system is important though hard to pull off now; I think long-term we’re so poorly designed for life in space that either we, or our vessels, would have to be radical departures from anything we’ve ever imagined before. For some fun exploration of that idea, check out Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (or, more fantastically, his The Glasshouse). I recommend looking online for intelligent responses to the whole extropian, we must explore space with your flesh bodies notion. Charles Stross has a couple you could start with, here and here.

      Hamish,

      None of that surprises me, really. One-shot solutions for supposedly one-shot problems. It’s a pretty common human thought-process, I have to say: I constantly am telling students, “No, it’s more complex than that” when they say things like, “Video game addiction is to blame for violence in our society” (Then how come so much violence is by older people who don’t play video games?) or “Koreans use blackface just like American blackface in comedy shows because we don’t have enough information about racism.” (Well, without any outside information, how did you copy and paste the racist American blackface iconography into Korean pop culture so unmistakably?) But I certainly believe that Jensen’s grasp of many subjects is poor: it’s evident in his writing.

      Jeff,

      I have no recommendations, but would be interested to see your paper, or the gist of it, if you feel like sharing. And once again, I’d like to add to your congratulations to Wendy my own.

  35. Thanks very much for the well-wishes! For anyone who’d like to see the (53 page) prospectus for the book, please post me at [wlee at bloomu dot edu]–I am happy to send it along. :)

    [Note: I have edited the email address since for some reason it’s showing up weird in this comment.
    – Gord]

  36. Notice how the author of this does not give a single answer to any of the problems Derrick talks about and merely resorts to claiming he’s in it for the money, a laughable claim considering the language he uses puts him at serious risk of imprisonment, and his DGR movement even more so.

    You say you trust in science and technology, and then go on to dismiss what he says as “subjective arguments”. What is so subjective about 90 percent of large fish being gone, more plastic than plankton in the oceans, etc.? Nothing. If this person had any intellectual honesty he would admit that no serious solutions to these problems is at hand while we travel farther along the road to ecological collapse. All this is is an attack piece with no alternative solutions to the stated problems and no arguments against the stated problems.

    1. Notice how the Jensen devotee rams himself into the dialog like a drunk driver slamming into a brick wall.

      Damian, no serious writer I know asks for money from people in exchange for reading drafts of his work… in fact, most of the writers I know who probably could do it would refuse to do so, as it is unprofessional. Drafts are called drafts for a reason.

      As for serious risk of imprisonment, don’t flatter your unclothed Emperor too much.

      Nobody involved in this discussion disputes that the dieoffs going on in nature are real and negative consequences of how modern industrialized societies work. Some of us, however, do dispute such inanities as “the culture is insane” or the idea we need a mass human dieoff to fix these problems.

      If this person had any intellectual honesty he would admit that no serious solutions to these problems is at hand while we travel farther along the road to ecological collapse.

      Well, “this person” is me, the guy paying for this website’s hosting fees, so that you can come cast aspersions on his intellectual honesty. Consider yourself warned: any more personal aspersions and you’ll be banned; but if you’re polite, you’re very welcome to continue discussing here.

      And I think maybe you haven’t read all the comments here. As I said, everyone agrees those problems are not immediately soluble, that they are serious, and that we shouldn’t be allowing them to worsen.

      However, at the moment, I’m not willing to be responsible for a mass die-off of human beings. Are you? Come on… show us that intellectual honesty. Are you really up for a human genocide? Because that is the essential basis of Jensen’s solution, and that is what makes him a fanatic, beyond the pale.

      All this is is an attack piece with no alternative solutions to the stated problems and no arguments against the stated problems.

      The problems Jensen “states” aren’t all real. For one thing, this “the culture is insane” stuff is projection. Western capitalist industrial civilization has a lot of things going for it, despite its very serious problems. For one thing, it’s the wellspring of modern environmentalist consciousness and of a lot of scientific developments that made the knowledge we have now possible. Meaning without it, we probably would be polluting and not know what we were doing.

      Jensen’s second point — that all politicans need to be given exploding books, because all politicians are Hitlers, apparently — is so obviously idiotic it does not dignify further unpacking, but since you insist: I think that pressuring politicians, as well as educating the voting public, and generating as much entertainment as we can to counter the messages of large corporations, are all sensible moves. I think we can change peoples’ minds without killing them. We didn’t need exploding books to end the African slave trade, or the residential school system in Canada. They didn’t use exploding books to refill part of the Aral Sea, did they? It’s messy, it’s ruinous, it’s looking dark, and it may be too late… but if it is too late, is murdering a bunch of people going to help? No, it isn’t.

      His third point: that people should be mass murdering CEOs — kind of overlooks that CEOs are the people with the power to reset our course for a sane direction. If we give companies the right incentives, or pressure them enough, they will change. IT will be hard. We will need to educate ourselves, them, and the public.

      And besides that, we will also need to abandon the self-righteous crusader rhetoric: they’ll never, ever listen to us if we talk that way. We need to present better policies and so on as something that makes sense to them. If you did kill a CEO, you would just invite a new one to take over. They are much more replaceable than environmentalists, believe me. So how is that a sane strategy for changing the course of civilization?

      The thing about not giving kids a book, because trees have something to say before they’re pulped: come on, this is a best-selling writer whose books are published in paper form saying this. It’s the most faux-contrite shit ever, pure posturing. If he cares so much about trees, why publish his books in paper form? Or is it just everyone else’s books that have less to say than an unpulped tree?

      Jensen wouldn’t give kids a book unless forced, because looking at crawdads makes people environmentalists, right? Oh, wait… really? How come all the non-book-reading country folk I know aren’t environmentalists at all?

      As for blowing up dams and forgoing his spot on the ark, I’ll take it as given I responded to most of that already. The thing about us having no future without a landbase is, well, not strictly speaking sensical anyway — the last time I checked, there wasn’t enough water on the planet to cover all the land, and even if there was, humanity could (theoretically) survive on ships indefinitely, assuming ocean life wasn’t extinct. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be possible.

      Besides, if you ask me, humans need to start branching out. If there’s one thing we’ve learned abusing our planet up until now (and studying past, natural mishaps here) it’s that we shouldn’t keep all of our eggs in one basket. At least spreading out through our solar system would be a kind of insurance of sorts.

      Of course, I imagine Damian wants me to go further, and respond to all the assertions made by Jensen in all his books. This is somewhat like a cold-fusion believer arguing that the scientific community should set aside everything else and revisit cold fusion experiments, postponing all other research until we get the desired result. It’s a silly demand to make. There are plenty of sensible paths forward that are visible to anyone who simply puts away childish things (like Jensen’s emo gloom chic positioning) and looks for them.

  37. You really don’t believe he puts himself at risk with his DGR work? Have you read the book? This isn’t a personal attack but an honest question. If you read it I don’t think you would think that. It’s pretty extreme and they had to revise it because they were bordering on illegality. He makes no money from DGR and yet puts himself at risk for it. Signing onto a project for no material benefit that outlines different strategies including asymmetric warfare screams sincerity to me.

    “If we give companies the right incentives, or pressure them enough,
    they will change. IT will be hard. We will need to educate ourselves, them, and
    the public.”

    How. How are we going to convince BP to stop extracting oil and how are we going to convince agribusiness and militaries to stop using fossil fuels, especially the military considering their outrageous oil consumption and the fact that there budget is ever growing and nobody seems to want to take it down. How are we going to convince fisheries to stop fishing and exploiters to stop exploiting. How are we going to convince people who benefit from the system, and are indoctrinated into it, to end the system. With the severity of the problems at hand this is not a time for ideology but for action. If you have a realistic strategy to convince them, then I will listen, but if all you have is general statements I can’t take that as sufficient considering the scale of the problem. I will not take anything less then 100 percent certainty that everything is being done to insure that the environment will not collapse. Even if you can convince one and they act on their convictions, like you said, they are replaceable. Their profits would plummet and they would be replaced. It’s the system itself that is the problem and only a change to the system will stop it.

    “Meaning without it, we probably would be polluting and not know what we were doing.”

    And yet without industrial society there wouldn’t be any way we could pollute and kill at the mass scale we’re doing at all. It does us no good to understand it if we don’t stop it and the fact is it’s not stopping.

    “However, at the moment, I’m not willing to be responsible for a mass die-off of
    human beings. Are you? Come on… show us that intellectual honesty.”

    I am part of the urban poor. If civilization collapses I will be without the necessities of life. But the fact is it’s not about me, I am not selfish enough to put my own well-being before the lives of countless non-humans and future generations of humans alike who will have their chances at life taken from them if these things continue. As Jensen says, we need it all. His philosophy if far more than just blowing stuff up but also to prepare people for per-industrial living. If I were a member of DGR, which I am not for fear of the future of those who join it, I would make it a priority of mine to establish local food sources so those who are around after the crash won’t starve. In fact, I still do that. People and nonhumans are going to die no matter what action we take. The best thing we can do is free ourselves from this rock and a hard place and minimize the damage while we do it.

    1. Damian,

      You really don’t believe he puts himself at risk with his DGR work? Have you read the book? This isn’t a personal attack but an honest question. If you read it I don’t think you would think that. It’s pretty extreme and they had to revise it because they were bordering on illegality. He makes no money from DGR and yet puts himself at risk for it. Signing onto a project for no material benefit that outlines different strategies including asymmetric warfare screams sincerity to me.

      I haven’t read anything by the man lately, and I refuse to waste my time and money on his work, to be frank. I could get the library at the university where I work to order copies, but I try not to waste their money, nor to bring poisonous books into circulation there. So no, I haven’t read whatever book you’re referring to.

      As for profit, I think you don’t really understand how authors make a living today. Part of it, in fact for some authors a very important part of it, is their public persona. You probably haven’t heard of SF writers like Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross or Neal Stephenson, but they’re examples. There’s Germaine Greer, and H.G. Wells, and Pramoedya Anata Toer, and many more. Hell, it’s not even a modern phenomenon: Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft and Christine da Pisan and countless other authors are also examples. There is a long and hallowed tradition of authors making a living off the reputation they develop (and the readership and extraneous engagements they get) from the careful cultivation of a specific sort of persona and reputation. Trust me, as a professional author myself, I’ve thought long and hard about this!

      When Jensen signs on with this or that radical green group, he earns himself street cred. He earns a certain cachet that bolsters his claim to the persona he presents the world. Whether he is merely posturing, or actually quite serious about it, is less important than understanding that not all economics are monetary. In the game of reputation economics, such acts are crucial. And from what I have read of Jensen’s work, he has a very strong grasp on persona and its importance in securing a readership.

      “If we give companies the right incentives, or pressure them enough,
      they will change. IT will be hard. We will need to educate ourselves, them, and
      the public.”

      How. How are we going to convince BP to stop extracting oil and how are we going to convince agribusiness and militaries to stop using fossil fuels, especially the military considering their outrageous oil consumption and the fact that there budget is ever growing and nobody seems to want to take it down. How are we going to convince fisheries to stop fishing and exploiters to stop exploiting. How are we going to convince people who benefit from the system, and are indoctrinated into it, to end the system. With the severity of the problems at hand this is not a time for ideology but for action.

      I’m not talking ideology. What the hell do you think would happen if civilization fell the way Jensen proposes it should? Do you think that would be a healthy situation for the environment? Do you think agribusiness and militaries would stop using fossil fuels? Or do you think maybe they would just crack down on democratic freedoms even harder, and produce technologies useful to that enterprise? If you think we’re ever going to get fisheries to stop fishing without some kind of practical solution to how to keep them in business, you’re dreaming. Basically, what your proposing is a small rebellion followed by the criminalization of the environmental movement: you’re talking about environmentalists being dead, or in prison, because the system will do whatever is necessary to keep itself going.

      If you have a realistic strategy to convince them, then I will listen, but if all you have is general statements I can’t take that as sufficient considering the scale of the problem. I will not take anything less then 100 percent certainty that everything is being done to insure that the environment will not collapse. Even if you can convince one and they act on their convictions, like you said, they are replaceable. Their profits would plummet and they would be replaced. It’s the system itself that is the problem and only a change to the system will stop it.

      Well, I have my doubts that you will recognize a “realistic strategy” when you see it, but consider this question: are we more likely to create feasible, lasting change by (a) terrorizing society and corporations into collapse, or (b) mastering the same tools the system currently uses to control the discourse, and performing judo on it? Jensen seems to be more of a kung-fu guy, but kung-fu doesn’t work when you’re fighting a hundred-foot-tall robot. Judo just might, if enough smart people use at all at once, but kung-fu won’t do much except give a few idiots the chance to go out in a blaze of robo-laser glory.

      100% certainty is for the dead. There is never such a thing as 100% certainty: it’s a fantasy. Life is uncertainty. You don’t know that there will be a world tomorrow: at this very memory, perhaps there is a stream of gamma radiation heading out way at the speed of light from a supernova in our relative neighborhood that we haven’t seen yet. If we’re particularly unlucky, it will hit the earth, fry the ozone layer, and goodbye biosphere in what is an instant on the geological timescale. Such events — the gamma ray bursts — are, astronomically speaking, quite common. And one could be headed our way right now. We don’t know. You can never know.

      When you insist on 100% certainty, you betray the psychological attraction of Jensen’s fantasy, but you also call for the world and humans to act in ways that humans and the world simply do not act. People will not do 100% to ensure the environment will not collapse. They might do 60% or 70%, or more. They might ramp up to 110% for a little while. But most of the time, humans don’t commit more than 20-30% of the energies maximum to any single problem. That’s human nature. So by your lights, as long as humans are humans, Jensen is right, and there is no other way.

      If you’re as convinced as that — and that dependent on the absolutes apparently offered you by Jensen’s tough-guy/victim fantasy role-playing — then I hardly see the point in reasoning with you. If you can see no other way but Jensen — no other workaround than apocalypse-for-civilization — then I’d say you’re experiencing a major failure of imagination.

      Corporate structure and mandate needs to be revisited. That is one of the things people in the anti-globalization movement have been arguing for a long time, and they’re right; and it’s crucial to environmentalism too. Corporations function like hyperconsumptive, biosphere-crashing omnivoracious monsters. That’s the key to the problems related to the CEOs and the “system” you revile. Why not throw in with that, call for the reform of the laws that govern incorporation. Right now is a moment when people are seriously pissed off at companies in the Western world, and you can get a lot of support for the argument now. (And there was at least one city in the States that argued the laws regarding incorporation of companies need serious revision.)

      The impression I get is that Jensenites look at civilization, see it eating like a fucking monster, and instead of thinking, “Maybe this thing needs a gastric bypass,” or “Maybe we need to teach this thing how to eat properly,” they reach for their rifle. That’s not sane. That’s insane itself.

      “Meaning without it, we probably would be polluting and not know what we were doing.”

      And yet without industrial society there wouldn’t be any way we could pollute and kill at the mass scale we’re doing at all. It does us no good to understand it if we don’t stop it and the fact is it’s not stopping.

      Well, things don’t stop at the drop of a hat because a few angry people say it should. Civilization is like a locomotive. And that, you should bear in mind, is true whether environmentalists wage war on it, or try to work from inside to shift its course. Radical environmentalists will by definition achieve less because they will be perceived as a threat to the system. They can achieve less. Whereas visionaries building the future, or activists fighting for corporate health and responsibility, will be able to achieve much more… provided they can get half as organized as the American Republican party, and develop half the media savvy of the right. They have yet to do so, and Jensen-style histrionics and ranting don’t do them any favors.

      “However, at the moment, I’m not willing to be responsible for a mass die-off of
      human beings. Are you? Come on… show us that intellectual honesty.”

      I am part of the urban poor. If civilization collapses I will be without the necessities of life. But the fact is it’s not about me, I am not selfish enough to put my own well-being before the lives of countless non-humans and future generations of humans alike who will have their chances at life taken from them if these things continue.

      That is precisely why you can’t be part of the solution.

      (Not the “urban poor” part; I’m not a paycheck away from homelessness, but I might be three or four away.)

      I mean the part about your taking pride in your unselfishness. Look, I hate Ayn Rand as much as anyone with any literary sense, or any notion of social responsibility. But human beings do have a selfish component, and it’s an important part of how we managed to survive so long in a harsh, difficult world. We also have a cooperative component, but you’re in fantasy-land if you only acknowledge that nice side of us. We’re also selfish. Given that we do have a degree of selfishness, a degree of desire to maintain comfort and luxury, the question becomes that of how to build tomorrow’s iteration of civilization to accommodate that, without raping the planet in order to get it.

      To be frank, I sincerely doubt Americans (and Canadians like myself) have the wherewithal to do that. Collectively, they suck too hard at mathematics, at science, and especially at engineering. The problem of giving us what we want, while reducing the footprint, is a problem of design and engineering, as much as it is one of social change.

      Where I live in Korea, there’s a lot of talk of “environmental friendliness” and “green” and all that… but even buildings constructed in the last few years are ecologically very unfriendly, designed in the old way, in ways that fight against nature instead of integrating features that take advantage of our environment. (This necessitates air conditioning and light usage at times when, in a sanely designed building, it would not be necessary.) There are cultural components also: for example, I’m currently trying to get people aware of the fact that leaving windows open in rooms with air conditioners on is ridiculously wasteful. (For complex reasons, some Koreans insist, very seriously, on doing this.) But the problem of why air conditioners are necessary is not merely one of people not caring about the environment. It’s that everything is built here so thoughtlessly that one cannot remain indoors with any degree of reasonable comfort without an air conditioner. Some people are returning to older designs, like mud-packed brick homes that insulate out the heat — but it’s not common.

      Change is slow. It’s painful, and it’s difficult, and it takes constant effort. You have to convince people to care, to think about things, and often you have to convince people who seem to be less intelligent than is necessary to actually understand why it’s so important. But change is what is necessary, not a few environmentalists trying to bring about apocalypse. The latter has about as much chance of succeeding as a summoning of Cthulhu has in ending the kleptocracy that rules world. The reason is because the normal people will never back you when you look like a mad cult chanting. But if you could achieve a success rate of conversion even comparable to the Mormons… well, look what they did with gay marriage in California! That’s political power. And they believe some pretty hare-brained, obvious lies by a famous con man.

      As Jensen says, we need it all. His philosophy if far more than just blowing stuff up but also to prepare people for per-industrial living. If I were a member of DGR, which I am not for fear of the future of those who join it, I would make it a priority of mine to establish local food sources so those who are around after the crash won’t starve. In fact, I still do that. People and nonhumans are going to die no matter what action we take. The best thing we can do is free ourselves from this rock and a hard place and minimize the damage while we do it.

      Well, lots of quite sane and average people are gardening and learning to do things like cure meats, brew, and so on — all kinds of useful pre-industrial skills.

      Personally, if we did return to a pre-industrial lifestyle, I’d likely die anyway: I’m dependent on blood pressure medicine and without it I’m dead meat. So there’s no way I’ll advocate going as far as that. However, bringing those older techniques into the present is very useful, and it can be argued for on all kinds of other grounds. It doesn’t need to be a grim preparation for armageddon: I’m a member of a lively group of brewers who also cure meat, ferment beer and wine and mead, ferment vegetables, and so on. We’re the guys who will be teaching others how to brew (so there’s potable liquids around) and cure meat, and pickle vegetables, and so on if a disaster does strike. People will stay alive because of our hobbies. But all those things are our hobbies, they’re healthier than industrial versions of the foods, and we love doing it because it enriches our lives.

      Which is what people want. They don’t want to be told to go put on a hair shirt and start gardening. They want to be shown your cheapo hydroponics setup or homebrewing kit (and taste your beer) or try your homemade jam or pickles and go, wow, I can do this? And as more and more of those back-to-the-old-ways hobbies develop, more and more segments of the industrialized system simply will rust and fall into disuse. That’s a small part of the solution. The solution must be many-pronged.

      What I’m trying to say is: most people will never listen to the goth who talks about death all the time. The goth might know what needs to be done, but nobody’s going to date a goth, much less follow the goth’s 12-step plan for saving the planet for the cyanobacteria and gazelles. They might listen to a smiling, healthy-seeming person with exciting hobbies and a passion for the good life, who seems in love with not just nature but with the world, in love with humans and hopeful for us as a species, who also, quite seriously, says that things need to change.

      The attraction some feel to the goth is simply inexplicable to the rest of us. It’s an emotional fixation that, no matter how much you try explain it to us, will not make sense. Which is tragic, because if you could get over it, and try reinterrogate your relationship with civilization in general (which includes gardening, pickling, brewing, curing meats, and so on) you might discover it ain’t all so bad. Some of it is quite wonderful, and can be done in a sensible balance with nature.

      But at this point, I know: a lot of people fixated on Jensen’s story are that way because of how it speaks to them emotionally. And they will never understand why he looks like such a loon to the rest of us.

  38. This essay is fantastic on it’s own merit without even mentioning jensen-have you published it anywhere except here?

    You need to get out and make a website on these topics you talk about here, not just jensen (but your jensen criticisms are perfect! so I hope you would include him somewhere)

    Thanks – what a great read

    1. Hi there, Rogers,

      I’m a little confused… what essay? Do you mean my post, or my most recent comment to this thread? Or maybe something Wendy or some other commenter has written?

      As for needing to go out and make a website… well, the website you’re reading this on (gordsellar.com) is indeed my website, which I have made, so I don’t get what you mean. But maybe you are suggesting I should start a new website focused on the environmental movement (including Jensen criticism)? It’s a thought, though I’m not sure I have enough thoughts on the subject at the moment. (The points in the last comment I posted probably have been argued and, in the minds of many environmentalists, rebutted many times over. I don’t think they would have been satisfactorily rebutted, mind you, but my criteria and some others’ likely don’t match.)

      In any case, thanks for the nice feedback, and I’m glad you enjoyed it.

  39. “Do you think that would be a healthy situation for the environment?”

    Of course it would. If civilization collapsed there would be no fossil fuel burning, no industrial fishing, no industrial logging, no more toxic chemicals being produced. And of course they would fight back. That doesn’t mean they would win. Look at what happened with the oil companies, with their own armed forces, in the Niger Delta. A bunch of people with waaay less knowledge and waay less resources than us put a major dent in their operations.

    “Well, I have my doubts that you will recognize a “realistic strategy” when you
    see it”

    I thought personal attacks weren’t allowed?

    “100% certainty is for the dead. There is never such a thing as 100% certainty”

    I’ll assume you just misread what I said and weren’t attempting a strawman. What I said was that I won’t accept anything less than 100 percent certainty that everything was being done to save the enviornment.

    “When you insist on 100% certainty, you betray the psychological attraction of
    Jensen’s fantasy”

    Again, not what I was saying.

    “If you can see no other way but Jensen”

    I’ll assume again that you misunderstood my point. Like I said, if you have another solution that actually has a very good chance of working I will listen. Appealing to a dead system with no stated strategy to make it listen isn’t a very good chance.

    “The impression I get is that Jensenites look at civilization, see it eating like
    a fucking monster, and instead of thinking, “Maybe this thing needs a gastric
    bypass,” or “Maybe we need to teach this thing how to eat properly,” they reach
    for their rifle. That’s not sane. That’s insane itself.”

    Or more like they reach for their proverbial rifle when the destruction of all life caused by this monster is imminent. I see nothing insane about protecting all life on the planet, in fact to not do so would be far more insane.

    “Radical environmentalists will by definition achieve less
    because they will be perceived as a threat to the system. They can achieve less.
    Whereas visionaries building the future, or activists fighting for corporate
    health and responsibility, will be able to achieve much more… provided they
    can get half as organized as the American Republican party, and develop half the
    media savvy of the right.”

    sure, if you take it as a given that we must work within the system. Radical enviornmentalists may very well be more effective than the mainstreamers because they refuse to appeal to a moneyed system that never has and never will work for them. The right isn’t powerful by virtue of it’s organization alone. That’s absurd. It’s powerful by virtue of billions upon billions spent by rich people and corporations that want it’s message to be heard, along with a media a.k.a propganda system that is as far reaching as it is masterful at manipulating. Enviornmentalists will never get that kind of corporate funding and backing.

    “That is precisely why you can’t be part of the solution.”

    And this is where your moral case against Jensen collapses by the weight of its own hypocrisy. So, I can not be a part of the solution because I do not take it as a given that humans have a right to impose their selfishness on the world at the expense of the planet. I find it nonsensical to be able to condemn Jensen for wanting to take down civilization, an act that will kill people, when at the same time you are willing to risk the death of nearly everything by appealing to a system that kills every day, humans and non-humans alike, as a part of it’s basic operations.

    “But if you could achieve a success rate
    of conversion even comparable to the Mormons… well, look what they did with
    gay marriage in California!”

    Gay marriage does not pose a threat to the corporate state. Anything that does will be under fire with every tool the state and media can bring against them. Look at what happened to the Occupy movement. Entrapment, police abuse, media dirtflinging, etc. Polls show that the Occupy movement captures the views of a majority, or a very near majority depending on the demographic, of people. That did not change the response it was recieved with.

    “The solution must be many-pronged.”

    And yet you’re willing to condemn those who want to take a more militant stance. This will accomplish nothing but to make us less of a threat. Even Gandhi’s liberation movement had violent groups within it, that’s why they appealed to him. The civil rights movement had Malcolm X as well as the more peaceful King, that’s why they appealed to King. The state will fight any populist changes, it always has and it always will. Personal solutions alone will do nothing to stop the destruction of the biosphere and neither will appealing to the system alone. Even if you could organize effectively, a feat I seriously doubt given the amount of money you would be up against, by then it would be too late.

    “Some of it is quite wonderful, and can be done in a sensible
    balance with nature.”

    Please explain to me what part of our civilization is not founded on injustice. Is it globalization? Is it capitalism? Is it our unsustainable industrial economy? What part of modern society is so wonderful and is not founded on wrongs done to other people and life.

    Have you read Endgame? If you have I would be interested in hearing what you think of it’s premises.

    1. “Do you think that would be a healthy situation for the environment?”

      Of course it would. If civilization collapsed there would be no fossil fuel burning, no industrial fishing, no industrial logging, no more toxic chemicals being produced. And of course they would fight back. That doesn’t mean they would win. Look at what happened with the oil companies, with their own armed forces, in the Niger Delta. A bunch of people with waaay less knowledge and waay less resources than us put a major dent in their operations.

      Wait, did “civilization” as Jensen defines it collapse in the Niger Delta? Because otherwise, you’re mixing up points, and this one is irrelevant to my question.

      My question, of course, is based on the very sensible observation that, like the fall of Rome, the collapse of modern, industrial civilization would not be sudden. It would be slow and uneven, would take a long time, and would involve billions of human beings scrambling and struggling to survive. Which would in turn involve billions of human beings essentially trashing the environment unless you have some kind of magic wand that will turn the surviving billions into environmentalists somehow.

      Unfortunately for your argument, the only thing even remotely resembling a magic wand of this kind is to be found only in industrial civilization. Media, education, and so on are the way to do it. It will not happen overnight. It is, however, the only route that has a hope of succeeding. Radical action pretty much guarantees that humans will take out much of the biosphere during their decline, and continue to do so until or unless they go extinct.

      Unless, of course, Jensen gets his dark secret wish and there’s some kind of plague that annihilates enough of us to shove us back to subsistence and lower-footprint long enough for the biosphere to recover. You never know, the black plague and the Spanish flu together could have done it, so maybe there’s something that will, like bird flu or something.

      “Well, I have my doubts that you will recognize a “realistic strategy” when you
      see it”

      I thought personal attacks weren’t allowed?

      Hence the scare quotes around “realistic” — I was implying that we have different definitions of “realistic” and anyone who’s devoted to Jensen’s ideology isn’t going to be on the same page as me (or most of humanity) on that count. Sorry, but I assumed in my 1000-word comment, I wouldn’t have to explain everything word by word.

      And by the way, that thing about being on the same page: you don’t realize it, but the Jensen extremist ideology does alienate not only people who want to care about environmental problems and injustice and the rest, but don’t know where to start.

      Christianity, when it was starting out, only attracted people given to zealotry, because you had to be willing to die to join. Now, their bar for entry is so low that anyone can join. It’s a strategy to think about in the environmental movement.

      “100% certainty is for the dead. There is never such a thing as 100% certainty”

      I’ll assume you just misread what I said and weren’t attempting a strawman. What I said was that I won’t accept anything less than 100 percent certainty that everything was being done to save the enviornment.

      I didn’t misread you, and I wasn’t attempting a strawman. I never trust anyone who argues that they require 100% certainty about anything. It’s a foolish habit of mind to demand 100% certainty. Or hadn’t you realized that? Do you insist on 100% certainty regarding other aspects of your life?

      And as I said — when you say you want everything to be done to save the environment: that’s not how human beings work, and in fact, you should be careful what you wish for. Eveyrthing is a lot of things, and efforts can clash, cancel one another out, and so on. I think we should be doing more for the environment, but also working on other problems that matter too, like practical medical research, reforms to the medical system, more work on political reforms and on shifting the political discourse of the world back towards what it was in the 70s (before the massive rightward shift that came from the 80s onward), the rights of workers, of women, of children… and then there’s pure scientific research, literature and art… there’s just SO much to do right now. I’d like to think we can, as a species, perhaps chew gum and walk at the same time. Maybe even chew gum, walk, and wave our hands all at once, even smile while we’re at it.

      Which I’m sure you’ll take as me misreading you, but I know you don’t mean 100% of human efforts should be directed at this one issue. But the thing is, it’s impossible to know what you mean, because “everything was being done to save the environment” is a kind of weasel-words argument: it’s vague, impossible to define, and guess what: it’s precisely what someone says when they want to be able to move the goalposts at any time.

      “If you can see no other way but Jensen”

      I’ll assume again that you misunderstood my point. Like I said, if you have another solution that actually has a very good chance of working I will listen. Appealing to a dead system with no stated strategy to make it listen isn’t a very good chance.

      This is a logical fallacy: I don’t need to have all the solutions to the world’s problems at my fingertips to point out that someone else’s proposed solution is unlikely to work… let alone dangerous, deluded (or maybe self-serving) hogwash like Jensen’s.

      As for calling the modern, industrialized world “dead” — uh, step outside your door. Look around. The system isn’t serving you, the system isn’t serving most people. But it never has. Go to the library and read any work of literature from any age and tell me that it doesn’t include glimpses of a social order that didn’t include screwed-over people like you.

      Step inside your room and look into yourself. You are not just different from your grandparents in little individual characteristics. You are, in fact, a different kind of human being than your grandparents. We all are. The system you histrionically call “dead,” is a powerful engine of change in this world.

      Yes, the engine is fucked up. The engine has been very effectively harnessed by assholes. But there are a million ways to use that engine of change for saner purposes to.

      I admit that I don’t have all the answers to how to do it. I do have bits and pieces of one, but I’m not fully sure about how to do it. If you want my view, then you’ll have to wait patiently. (There’s no law that I must figure it all out myself yesterday because some stranger is posting such demands on my blog, so please get a sense of your own significance here, okay?)

      I can’t be more specific at the moment than to refer you to Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self and its presentation of the interaction between media and psychology in the role of reformulating human identity in American and British culture in the 20th century. Crackpot psychoanalysts and ad-men transformed how we think and behave profoundly; so can people who want healthier, more sane changes. We just need to get smarter about it, more effective, and harness the same power that those motivated by money alone have harnessed.

      “The impression I get is that Jensenites look at civilization, see it eating like
      a fucking monster, and instead of thinking, “Maybe this thing needs a gastric
      bypass,” or “Maybe we need to teach this thing how to eat properly,” they reach
      for their rifle. That’s not sane. That’s insane itself.”

      Or more like they reach for their proverbial rifle when the destruction of all life caused by this monster is imminent. I see nothing insane about protecting all life on the planet, in fact to not do so would be far more insane.

      Well, I grew up listening to my father’s stories of having to hunt down large predatory animals in Malawi when he worked as a farm inspector; rabid animals, sometimes (despite government reports of no rabies in Malawi at the time) but also a number of stories about poor farmers who would load their rifles with buckshot and shoot at leopards and lionesses attacking livestock. The result was animals that were maddened by the pain, but not killed; that sometimes killed farmers, or mauled much more livestock, before my father could finally show up, stalk or trap them, and kill them. (Which was what he usually had to do, sometimes spending two or three days sitting in a tree with his rifle on his lap, while raw meat swung as bait for a starved, pain-maddened big cat to catch scent of it and show up… or at least that’s the kind of story I remember.)

      What I learned from all his stories was that, unless you have a big fucking gun, often shooting at the ravenous beasst can make it go even crazier and more destructive — and it can easily kill you. And that’s if you manage to hit it.

      Jensen’s ragtag devotees do not strike me as the most well-trained, well-armed, or cunning of hunters. They strike me as subsistence farmers with a rifle loaded with buckshot, and an overblown sense of what they can do with it.

      “Radical environmentalists will by definition achieve less
      because they will be perceived as a threat to the system. They can achieve less.
      Whereas visionaries building the future, or activists fighting for corporate
      health and responsibility, will be able to achieve much more… provided they
      can get half as organized as the American Republican party, and develop half the
      media savvy of the right.”

      sure, if you take it as a given that we must work within the system. Radical enviornmentalists may very well be more effective than the mainstreamers because they refuse to appeal to a moneyed system that never has and never will work for them. The right isn’t powerful by virtue of it’s organization alone. That’s absurd. It’s powerful by virtue of billions upon billions spent by rich people and corporations that want it’s message to be heard, along with a media a.k.a propganda system that is as far reaching as it is masterful at manipulating. Enviornmentalists will never get that kind of corporate funding and backing.

      It’s apparent to me you don’t really understand just how prolonged and sustained effort will be to effect actual change. Radical environmentalists are a finite resource; money (which is what will be used to oppose them) is finite too, but in much greater supply.

      You’re correct that the right isn’t powerful only by organization; but organization, intelligent use of media, intelligent networking, and a powerful interest in what the masses envision themselves as being able to have, deserving of, and wanting… these are all important.

      And, I’ve come to realize, what’s most important is that last point. The American right wing has very effectively crafted a narrative that fits with key issues in modern American self-conception, so that the contradictions are less compelling that the core resonances. People who are poor are willing to endure policies that ensure their sustained poverty and powerlessness because of the appeal of the narrative. It’s a profound thing. Environmentalists could learn to use that too. Problem is, some of them — like Jensen and his devotees — are too busy shouting against the narrative, or crafting narratives (like “we need to kill civilization! the culture is insane…”) that cannot and will not gain traction with the masses.

      “That is precisely why you can’t be part of the solution.”

      And this is where your moral case against Jensen collapses by the weight of its own hypocrisy. So, I can not be a part of the solution because I do not take it as a given that humans have a right to impose their selfishness on the world at the expense of the planet. I find it nonsensical to be able to condemn Jensen for wanting to take down civilization, an act that will kill people, when at the same time you are willing to risk the death of nearly everything by appealing to a system that kills every day, humans and non-humans alike, as a part of it’s basic operations.

      Ha, everyone’s a hypocrite. We’re arguing about environmentalism on the net, using electricity from our local grids. (I’m pretty sure you’re not pedaling a bicycle generator to power your computer, or all the routers between you and my blog’s location in Hong Kong, right?)

      So call me a hypocrite. That’s a great way to make friends and ensure alliances. Cool, I’m a hypocrite, you’re a hypocrite. Look at Jensen’s comments above: he’s the biggest hypocrite of all, preaching against books in his bestselling author interview.

      Maybe I’m a hypocrite, but it doesn’t mean I’m not right. As for my position being nonsensical, no: it’s a calculated risk, because I think Jensen’s calculated risk is much worse odds. Stupidly bad odds.

      “But if you could achieve a success rate
      of conversion even comparable to the Mormons… well, look what they did with
      gay marriage in California!”

      Gay marriage does not pose a threat to the corporate state. Anything that does will be under fire with every tool the state and media can bring against them. Look at what happened to the Occupy movement. Entrapment, police abuse, media dirtflinging, etc. Polls show that the Occupy movement captures the views of a majority, or a very near majority depending on the demographic, of people. That did not change the response it was recieved with.

      Gay marriage doesn’t pose a threat to the corporate state. Neither does environmental conservation need to do so, however. But if you construct your worldview so that corporations and the environment MUST exist only in opposition, or as victimizer and victimized, then of course corporations will fight to the death against environmentalism.

      As for the reaction to Occupy, interestingly, I’m overseas and the reaction I’ve seen in online media is overwhelmingly supportive and positive. Entrapment, police abuse, media dirtlfinging: well, we have to expect that from an establishment that sees itself as besieged. I would suggest that seduction might work well either as a complement to, or in pace of siege.

      “The solution must be many-pronged.”

      And yet you’re willing to condemn those who want to take a more militant stance. This will accomplish nothing but to make us less of a threat. Even Gandhi’s liberation movement had violent groups within it, that’s why they appealed to him. The civil rights movement had Malcolm X as well as the more peaceful King, that’s why they appealed to King. The state will fight any populist changes, it always has and it always will. Personal solutions alone will do nothing to stop the destruction of the biosphere and neither will appealing to the system alone. Even if you could organize effectively, a feat I seriously doubt given the amount of money you would be up against, by then it would be too late.

      Sigh. The prongs need to be useful. Maybe there is some use for a violent, extremist faction, in making the sensible majority look okay. But on the other hand, this can backfire. For example, even the majority of my female students in Korea have a very negative opinion of feminism — the same feminism that played a part in their being able to attend university in Korea, or put off marriage until age 28, or, you know, be named anything other than “Seob-seob” (Disappointment) or “Hunam” (Boy-Next) by parents who would probably have aborted a female child if the technology had been available 100 years ago. But my female students all say, “Feminism is extremist, feminism is a small number of women who want to oppress men.” Part of that is the rhetoric of the anti-feminist backlash here, but part of it is because Korean feminists, faced with a very extreme (and downright idiotic at times) resistance from society, have been driven to great extremes. They have, in fact, alienated the very women whose rights they claim to be fighting for… to the point where they aren’t any longer primarily fighting for the rights those women want or need. (Or that’s the impression I get from foreign-educated Korean feminists I know.)

      And by the way, the radicals in a movement, when they do succeed in pulling off a revolution… sometimes they set up something worse than what existed before… the USSR after the revolution is one example, but pick any horrid, genocidal government and look at their extremist-penned rhetoric from before their victory. It’s almost universally salutary and visionary and seductive in ways that remind one of Jensen’s.

      So be careful what you wish for.

      “Some of it is quite wonderful, and can be done in a sensible
      balance with nature.”

      Please explain to me what part of our civilization is not founded on injustice. Is it globalization? Is it capitalism? Is it our unsustainable industrial economy? What part of modern society is so wonderful and is not founded on wrongs done to other people and life.

      Man, if I need to explain that to you, you ain’t never gonna get it.

      Hint: today, in my Public Speaking course, we discussed common debating fallacies. One of them was the Black and White fallacy. You know, where something is either all good or all bad.

      We live in one of the least violent moments in human history. Violence is all around, but it’s less prevalent than it’s ever been.

      Women have more freedoms and rights (including the technology-empowered ability to control their own reproduction to an amazing degree) than in any society prior to ours.

      We are arguing about environmentalist tactics and strategies on a global computer network. I’m using a compuetr that cost me approximately $700 and a free, open-source OS developed by many thousands of volunteers.

      I have been (and I assume you have been) inoculated against a myriad of diseases that likely could or would have killed me long ago if I’d been born a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years ago. I am alive today because of modern medicine, and the wonderfully inexpensive, and very effective) pills I take help keep my blood pressure at a manageable level.

      I have never, even known what it is like to starve. In reality, I don’t know what the word hunger, as used by my own ancestors of a few centuries ago or before then, actually meant. I have no conception of it whatsoever.

      I am able to travel safely in most of the world, including a place where, a hundred and fifty years ago, foreigners were supposed to be killed on sight. But thanks to law, media, government, and a myriad of other systems that are part of civilization, I am not killed for my race, nor are people from this placed killed in my homeland.

      We have more wonderful entertainment; more tolerance of difference; more astonishing ways of seeing and thinking about the world than ever before.

      And that’s Derrick Jensen rocking back and forth in the corner with glazed-over eyes, arguing we need to put on our hairshirts and pipe bomb it all.

      Are there bad things, horrific things in civilization? Yes, but even babies shit all over you sometimes. Can we save both the environment and civilization? You’d better hope so: because if we have to choose one, the vast majority of humankind is going to choose civilization.

      Have you read Endgame? If you have I would be interested in hearing what you think of it’s premises.

      How many bloody times do I need to say this?

      NO, I HAVE NOT READ ENDGAME, AND I WILL NOT BE SPENDING MONEY ON JENSEN’S BOOKS. And by the way, look at the original post: this is years old now, and I haven’t looked at Jensen’s work in years.

      If you would like an informed response to the premises in ENDGAME, I recommend the link Wendy has posted in the comments thread: she has a long and thougthful blog post deconstructing his premises one by one, and her account affirmed what I see as problems in Jensen’s earlier work.

      If you are just constantly asking if I’ve read ENDGAME to disqualify me as a commentator, stop it. I’ve read enough of Jensen to know what I think of him, and Wendy’s post was enough to dissuade me from thinking I needed to read more. Unless I am writing a new article about him, I will not be reading him again. There are too many good books by non-crackpots, or, hell, too many more-interesting crackpots out there.

      And I most certainly am not spending my hard-earned money on that man’s books ever again. Now, if you want to post me your copy, I’d be glad (well, honor-bound, more than glad) to peruse it and send it back, and post my impressions. But in a sense I feel like you’re asking me whether I’ve read the sayings of Chairman Mao over and over. I’ve read enough bits of it, and a lot more about Mao by others; I’ve read enough to know what I think of Mao and his policies, and your repeated insistence I read “the right book” by the man is beginning to annoy me.

  40. I meant your reply here-it could stand on it’s own as an essay not just as a reply

    Yes a critical website of the environmental movement (and how it makes it’s $ and who gets it) would be nice but I will look around here – didn’t know it was your website-just was reading the jensen stuff

    1. Well, most of the postings here have nothing to do with environmentalism, just with stuff that happens to interest me generally. I’d say Wendy’s site (look for her comments in this thread, click on her name for a link there) might be what you’re looking for…

  41. Hi Gord, I am still keeping up with this site. It’s really scary to me that I have found more specific information about Derrick Jensen’s beliefs than I did in his books or on his own forum. What I mean is, I always wondered why they seemed to think that a few of them could magically bring down civilization everywhere. I never knew how to word it. The critique on this site is amazing and thorough. If Derrick Jensen hasn’t felt compelled to respond (trust me, he knows about it. I met him once and he was talking about a nasty thing written about him. He is hyper aware of everything said about him) I can’t take him seriously at all as a thinker but I do take him seriously as a dangerous person. I can’t believe how ridiculous people are. This thread has opened my eyes to so many things, the control on his site, why he uses the whole straight jacketing jargon. I feel like he is a cult leader for sure and I am deeply disturbed. It was total tongue in cheek before, but now I wonder if he isn’t a fed? Pretending to be an “activist” to round up the most rebellious and crazy ones. Either that or a dangerous idiot. I hope I can contribute more. I am soaking it in. Good job again. I would love a site or a book. I would love to see Derrick respond. He can’t obviously.

    1. Nina,

      Sorry, this got stuck in spam moderation, I’m not sure why. I’m glad you’re finding the discussion here useful. I also think it would be cool if people put together a site that critiqued Jensen thoroughly, though I don’t have it in me.

      As for nasty things written about him, well… he’s a public figure. It will happen. He’s written plenty of nasty and inflammatory things himself, so if he has a problem with it, maybe he ought to get himself a mirror. I certainly never took him all that seriously: anyone who claims he has what amounts to telepathic communication with fowl he’s about to slaughter is hard for me to take seriously.

      But I do find all this speculation about him being “a fed” odd… it sounds paranoid enough to be taken straight out of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly or something — and in fact, that is a similar plot point in the book (and film). But it’s pretty illogical: even if there are federal agents undercover in environmentalist circles, I sincerely doubt they’re taking on as high a profile as this. It’s very hard to fake the kind of over-the-top kook fervor that Jensen envinces, especially for years at a time. (And I imagine he would have been caught out by now.)

      It’s a funny, paranoid fear — and one that fits very much into the neo-70s zeitgeist we’re in the middle of now — and like Philip K. Dick’s own real-life paranoia, it probably has more to do with a desire to get (and a lack of) more positive attention, than with the possibility of any actual surveillance and infiltration operations.

  42. What you said about an author’s persona and how they make money has me thinking also. To be fair, Jensen once offered to appear at a DIY show at my university for 500 plus airfare and hotel. He told me his usual fee was 5,000 plus the airfare, etc. So I am looking at past events, and just counting his speaking gigs from 2004 before hand it looks like he has always made near 100,000 a year before taxes. This is speculation of course. I don’t know how much he charges every time. I don’t know if he charges for benefits and interviews but I think it is an interesting question. I remember him saying once that he only cleared about 50,000 each year but that seems low to me. Thankfully his appearances are going down. I hope it has something to do with the beautiful writing of David Abram who is what Jensen used to be like but better, and so far is not shoving hopeless politics down anyone’s throats before he even changes their hearts. So this guy made more than my parents because he appeals to stupidity by talking about blowing up politicians? I am beginning to hate this man.
    sorry, but I can’t believe what gaps there are in his thinking and how unashamed he is about this.

    1. Nina,

      I will never criticize a writer for trying to make money from his or her writing, or extensions of it (like speaking gigs).

      I will criticize someone who talks big about opposing capitalism, hating ecological destruction, but who is willing to fly about promoting his cause. I will criticize someone who, as in the post for this which is a comment, argues that kids should not be reading on dead-tree formats while he himself has his work published in that format. (When ebooks are widely available now.)

      I will criticize someone who promotes and markets a politics of despair and of inherently futile radicalism (because talk of blowing up politicians is very unlikely to lead us to good places).

      I don’t know anything about David Abram, and so cannot comment on him or his work. But Jensen is clearly, clearly bad news.

  43. Have you got nothing else to do than to post this kind of blogs? Do you feel personally offended by his writings because his theories talk to much about people like you?

    1. Anna,

      Have you got nothing better to do than fumble around the internet insulting people for bothering to discuss authors and their ideas?

      My post was kind of an attack, I’ll admit… but an attack on a potentially dangerous hypocrite. If you’re actually interested in sensible and measured criticisms of Jensen and his ideas–and why they deserve such criticism–check out the comments to this post. Many of the people there don’t have “nothing else to do,” and are passionately committed to issues of climate change and ecological preservation… and find Jensen’s “contributions” counterproductive or problematic. Or perhaps the comments by people who’ve interacted with Jensen and his organization online might enlighten you… a number of commentators are former Jensen fans who realized the man had feet of clay.

      But frankly, if the above is all you have in your arsenal of intelligent commentary on why Jensen and his ideas should be taken seriously, I’m afraid there’s really not much of a discussion to be had with you.

      1. Gordsellar

        The truth is, I don like your critique on what Jensen writes, because you come across as a consumer who defends western lifestyle without taking your responsibility. In a kind of way you defend the system, and that´s what I don like about you. You ignore the fact that we murder and exploit everywhere outside our culture. You ignore the fact that woman rights are still being under attack by widespread domestic violence and rape in every western country. You will be amazed how many woman still get beaten to death in the free west by western men…

        Why would I discus with you? I don like your ideas and that´s all I can say.
        I don´t like Derrick Jensen as a person but the truth is I like his ideas better than yours.
        At the end of the day and don´t like both of you.
        What else can I say….

        1. Anna,

          1. I’m going to assume you’re not a native English speaker, so I’ll just say: the word is “don’t,” not “don.”

          2. You have no idea from my post whether I’m an eager consumer with a western lifestyle to defend. Amusingly, last week in an internet discussion people were assuming the opposite: that I’m some kind of luddite opposed to technology, electricity, and capitalism. Both they and you fell into the trap of thinking that just because I’m critical of XYZ, that I must fall into political camp Q, and spouse Qist ideology.

          In other words, you’re assuming that just because Jensen disgusts me, that I’m totally cool with sexual and military and political and corporate horrors all over the world. It’s one of the stupidest readings possible of my post. If you look around this blog, you’ll see what I think of big corporations; what I think of the oppression of women and children and the poor and the ill and the vulnerable and, yes, even of men. You’ll see I hate all those things Jensen uses to bolster his thesis. I just disagree that they’re caused by “civilization,” full stop.

          I don’t live in the West. I’m not really a “good” or very “active” consumer. I rarely buy anything I don’t desperately need, and I use everything I own for as long as humanly possible. (Far beyond what most people I know would do, and perhaps beyond the point where sensible people would consider it worn out. I’ve recycled every one of the few computers I’ve owned, and run Linux on most of them to ensure that I could use them as long as possible. (With the exception of my current machine.) I own books and musical instruments, and not much of anything else. I avoid owning much of anything else. I think engineered obsolescence is a horror, I think industrial manufacture is too often abusive of people and the Earth, I think most people don’t care enough about the planet and its future condition.

          So you don’t know me, okay?

          3. If you think women are only under attack in Western countries, or beaten to death there, then wow have I got news for you. I’ve been in places outside the West where teenaged girls asked if they could walk down a road with me because they feared rape by a stranger… on a road they walked everyday. That was a road in Northern India, and the girls were (Tibetan) refugees. I’ve fought to get my employer to do something when exchange students from Taiwan and China were being systematically forced to drink liquor by classmates who wanted to rape them, and I was the only person saying, “This is a growing problem and someone needs to do something about it.” I would not be amazed how many women are still beaten to death by men—in the west, and everywhere else—because I have covered it in my culture and history classes so many times… for example, when I teach students how women got the vote. (The forced feeding of suffragettes contradicts their imaginings of feminist liberation being somehow inherently Western, for example, rather than a radical, counter-traditional, and countercultural shift.)

          By the way, I live in East Asia. Women have it worse here in South Korea, a first world country, than almost anywhere in the developed world in terms of gender empowerment. Women in most places outside the Western world still have it worse than in the West. That’s not to say the West is best: it’s to say the West has been consciously, collectively, working through it in ways a lot of places haven’t even started doing, or started and stopped. (Korea had an interested women’s movement eighty and sixty years ago; it’s less impressive now than it was in the days of Japanese occupation or right around the beginning of Independence.)

          I rail against gender inequality often. I raise the issue in class often. I talk about environmental issues in my classes often. I help my students develop a critical apparatus and English vocabulary for talking about corporate and political abuse and the oppression of women, the poor, the marginalized, children, and even many men in the lower class. I clue them into how skewed the media coverage of those issues is here. I spend vast quantities of energy helping raise awareness among my students about this stuff… or I did when I was in a position when I could. (It’s less possible in the kind of language teaching job I do now.)

          So how dare you assume I am some pro-corporate pro-environmental-depredation cheerleader. Do your homework before you decry someone like that, Anna.

          4. I most certainly don’t defend the system, no mater how muddled your reading is: I think we need to fight to radically reform it. I just happen to think that advocating its dismantling (as Jensen does) is grossly irresponsible and wicked, and I suspect he only halfway thinks it’s a good idea. Either that, or he is a mentally ill fanatic, as well as a proto-fascist. (His forum rules are outright fascistic, after all.) To me, the problem with Jensen isn’t that he’s so radical, it’s that he’s so radically (and adolescently) pessimistic, and so willing to urge effective human genocide as a cure-all. I know other people who are too radically optimistic, and dismiss very easy fixes to horrendous problems (people who think, for example, that our planet’s horrifying embrace of single-use plastics is simply no big deal, because hey, we’ll figure how how to fix that later…).

          5. Why would you discuss with me? Because you think Jensen’s views are deeply problematic, which is something we agree on, and because maybe by discussing we could build rapport, share ideas, and help one another toward a saner response than Jensen’s to the horrors that you, he, and I all see as problems. Because maybe you would learn something about the subject. Because maybe you think I might learn something too.

          6. Why would I discuss with you? Well… I’m not strongly inclined, given that you’re apparently the sort of person who wanders about the internet deciding whether you do or don’t “like” someone (and that you know all about their thinking and lifestyle) on the basis of a single blog post. But if you were willing to try harder and roll with the punches when people point out how lame and silly this or that argument is, I might be willing.

          What else can anyone say?

  44. I hope Jensen understands that air dams, aka giant WIND TURBINES, are as bad as water dams in many ways, and far more visually intrusive on natural scenery. 250,000 of the blasted things litter the Earth already and that number is slated to multiply 10X or more, though protests are mounting as mountaintops keep getting razed. Lakes are at least something that occurs naturally so hydro power blends in fairly well, even though it disrupts river ecosystems. The famous Bridge of the Gods on the Columbia river is named after an ancient landslide that dammed it once. There’s an odd breed of environmentalist who vilifies water dams but declares air dams “green” or “beautiful” just because they’ve been told so.

    But I agree with Jensen that people are operating as a plague that won’t be stopped by today’s bland mitigation. Something radical needs to happen but his particular methods would lead to anarchy. Destroying infrastructure just leads to more material waste when it’s repaired or replaced. The focus should be on a serious campaign that convinces the average dullard why birth control is necessary for balance (we’ve controlled deaths without compensating on the front end). It’s worked to some degree in several countries and needs to be emphasized planet-wide.

    1. I’m not really following Jensen’s antics these days: has he said something about air dams recently?

      What you say makes sense. I’ll say basically no species exists without some kind of environmental footprint; what we need to do is figure out how to make ours smaller, while maximizing the benefit we get for the footprint we do leave. Birth control is good, though as many note, probably educating women and giving them the freedom to choose has consistently done more to control birth rates than anything else. Which is to say, birth control is a wealth and education issue, really. The problem is that in terms of wealth, education is a luxury item; and wealth is currently only possible with an income, which, because of the stupidity of our systems, means no ecological footprint, no wealth.

      For now, anyway.

  45. Jensen’s people continue to spew their nonsense each year at the public interest environmental law conference in Eugene. They draw big crowds but ultimately say nothing. They talk about revolution and direct action and underground activist networks but they are frauds. They don’t do a damn thing. Never will. Jensen himself has penned a few lyrical lines that inspire those who don’t delve too deeply, but that’s pretty much all he is good for.

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