The Task We All Face as Human Beings and Other Quotes From Derrick Jensen

The tragedies sweeping the Earth will only be transformed 
and healed as we embody the individual and collective 
courage to see the truth and to act. — Molly
 

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.

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

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. 

You can rarely prove something to someone who does not want to see it proven, and even more to the point, you can almost never prove something to someone who has financial or ideological reasons to not see it proven. 

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

To be clear, civilization is not the same as society. Civilization is a specific, hierarchical organization based on 'power over.' Dismantling civilization, taking down that power structure, does not mean the end of all social order. It should ultimately mean more justice, more local control, more democracy, and more human rights, not less. 

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens. 

All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple. 

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.

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

We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems. 

* * * * * 

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

We have a need for enchantment that is as deep and devoted as our need for food and water. 

We must learn how to think like the planet.

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

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system. 

There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends. 

From the beginning, this culture — civilization — has been a culture of occupation. 

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?  

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

Where will you drive your own picket stake? Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at which you will finally stop running, at which you will finally fight back.

Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight. 

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement — the sense of contempt, the hatred — on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?

The task we all face as human beings ... is to find and become who we are. The task teachers face is to find their own way of teaching, one that manifests who they are.

If we celebrate life with all its contradictions, embrace, experience, and ultimately live with it, a chance exists for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness, but also with joy, community, and creativity. 

I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home. 

— Derrick Jensen