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Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet
“In America, four hundred people own the wealth of more than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich , but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it .”
—Arundhati Roy Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn’t even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing. Until Earth at Risk. Earth at Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame , who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself. The twelve people in this volume present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every William Catton Jr. explains ecological overshoot; Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Jane Caputi exposes patriarchy’s mythic dismemberment of the Goddess; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem. Earth at Risk
—Arundhati Roy Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn’t even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing. Until Earth at Risk. Earth at Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame , who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself. The twelve people in this volume present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every William Catton Jr. explains ecological overshoot; Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Jane Caputi exposes patriarchy’s mythic dismemberment of the Goddess; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem. Earth at Risk
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2012
6 people are currently reading
107 people want to read
About the author
Derrick Jensen
52 books683 followersDerrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. He has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.
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December 12, 2020
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin coined a term when he said, we are committing intergenerational larceny. We are only stealing from future generations. Nature safely sequestered carbon underground and yet civilization insisting on digging it all up and burning it all going to make civilization crash so those who survive will have to go back to foraging again. Consuming a one-time exhaustible source of energy as though its supply was inexhaustible - madness. The frontispiece of a 16th century manual for Spanish conquistadores explained the civilization game clearly enough – It’s text reads, “With the compass and the sword, more and more and more and more”. It’s not far from the Bible where God commands Adam to subdue and dominate the land, and Eve too. Mary Daly says patriarchy is our dominant religion with the central message being necrophilia. We don’t appreciate things until they are dead. Liberals turned on MLK after the Riverside Speech and didn’t like him again until he was dead. This culture will cut down the last tree to make the last box of Kleenex. Gilgamesh sets out to kill the guardian of the forest. The Catholic church deliberately cut down forests where people met for sacred earth rituals. St. Augustine called those who worshipped nature, “filthy” and “obscene”. Translation: the biggest crime of the non-human world was the crime of being beyond the church’s control. Now, in a twist, today’s visitors to Florida, find St. Augustine “filthy” and “obscene”.
BP and the Coast Guard kept reporters 1,500 ft up and away from filming the thousands of dead animals caught in death gyres post the Exxon Valdez spill. The mass death was dumped at night (“birds too numerous to count, sea turtles too numerous to count”) according to local fishermen who were involved. You’d see people in full Hazmat suits on the beach near children playing in the water where the dispersants and oil were. A visual image of how the public rarely knows the truth, while the officials may know but won’t tell. Civilization has always been at war against nature. Funny how most of the people around us defend this culture which is determined to kill the only thing protecting us all – the natural world (a.k.a. our children’s future). Wetiko madness writ large. George Lakoff says don’t try to have a national movement without including the Deep South.
Seven million dispossessed Palestinians exist in the global diaspora. Some live in refugee camps twenty minutes from their ancestral land. 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed between 1948 and 1952. Colonizers have throughout history used attachment to the land as a weapon against those living sustainably. “if you have an intrinsic romance with the land, then you are easily conquerable.” The con artists we meet say, show me a nice guy and I’ll show you a sucker. When the Palestinians committed their worst crime, voting the wrong way in a free election, an economic blockade was imposed that tellingly banned all anesthesia for Gaza. What is the accepted psychological term for people who want total strangers specifically to feel as much pain as possible? There was a small zoo in Gaza, Israelis bombed it while it was full of animals. This culture is not accountable to nature, to animals, or even to its own followers.
Hugh Hefner made the most money not by commodifying sex, but by sexualizing commodities. That brought in the advertisers and changed the industry. Penthouse lost by showing everything and sending the advertisers back to Playboy. As a result, Gail Dines says today’s girls have two options: be fuckable or invisible. Hypersexualized girls are more apt to show signs of someone who has been raped (depression, drug & alcohol abuse, etc) even if they haven’t been. Hotels make a half a billion dollars a year off of porn; even hotel mini-bars simply can’t compete against those numbers. Oprah Winfrey took cameras to porn star Jenna Jameson to tour her art collection, fancy home and cars. Meanwhile, the average porn star has “a shelf life of three months.” Remember, the U.S. Bill of Rights wasn’t wanted by our founding fathers but was “forced in by the states”, a resistance group of sorts. In Western Pennsylvania, truck drivers emptied radioactive fracking water directly onto the roadways because such water couldn’t be sent to treatment plants. What’s the number one non-natural cause of death among U.S. farmers? Suicide. You couldn’t “murder” a slave because it was a property crime. Rape across the U.S. was only a property crime until the 1860’s to 1870’s. In both cases, at worst, you just paid damages. Sorry I raped your wife, here’s a cow. Indigenous see themselves as keepers of the land; outsiders wanted to “civilize” them but to the indigenous it has never been about God or civilization, it’s always been about being defenders of the land. Genesis 1:26 is about domination and subjugation with man atop the hierarchy. For this reason, Waziyatawin sees Christianity as unsalvageable. If protecting the land is not front and center in one’s religion, what good is it? What good is thinking you are separate from nature or the land? The extermination rate of the indigenous in the Americas, Waziyatawin estimates at 98.5%. Civilization has always been opposed to the threat of a good example. In 1862 Native Americans learned the hard way that whether you as indigenous assisted the US 100% or opposed it 100%, you were screwed. But you don’t curry favor by going along. History showed the Nazi’s would torture you whether you were a mild opponent or a strong opponent (Mayor of Leipzig’s death). Waz ends her section with, “We don’t have time for this culture to come to it’s senses.” Right on.
The amazing Lierre Keith is next: What is agriculture? Biotic cleansing. Killing the soil through drawdown. “We owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” Richard Manning says you can’t make agriculture sustainable. It’s the most destructive thing we have done to the planet. It creates a surplus you now have to protect while you deplete the soil where you are and you have to move on conquering the next bit. Agriculture overshoots the landbase. Leisure in agricultural societies requires slaves; we’ve forgotten that bit because of fossil fuels now do the slave’s work. But in 1800, three quarters of the planet were slaves or indentured. That’s how the work got done. It took 600 old growth trees to make one tall ship.” Here’s how civilization has always rolled: “If you are willing to destroy your forests, you are going to win against those who aren’t willing to destroy theirs.” Wetiko. “This is a culture of profound entitlement, based on a masculine violation imperative.” Isn’t Lierre cool? The culture in front of us is violating sexual boundaries, biological boundaries (shaping rivers and forests) and genetic boundaries of other species. Liberalism is idealist. Radicals know better, that social subordination has to stop. Justice is done by taking power away from those doing harm. From the harmless Gaelic Revival came the effective IRA and Irish pride. It was Florence Kennedy who coined that great term “horizontal hostility”. If it feels like high school again, there’s a reason. Because you are fighting sideways and not fighting upstream/above. You’ve got to sustain the fight. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first. Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were both dragged from buses before Rosa. When you ask yourself what can little old me do? Ask yourself, what did 6 year-old Ruby Bridges do? “Successful resistance movements are always multigenerational”. Lierre’s cute term for transition towners and permaculture/voluntary simplicity types are OIMBY’s – Only In My Backyard. The problem is they all need to be part of the culture of resistance and not divorced from it. A Cornell University study found that 40% of human deaths “are caused by water, air, and soil pollution.”
We weren’t taught in school about the Nazi concentration camp Sobibor because the prisoners fought back successfully freeing around 600 prisoners. This culture doesn’t want you thinking of resistance. Everyone should watch “Don’t Talk to Cops” on youtube.com. Most green radicals got caught not by forensics but by informants and infiltrators. If we can’t stop the destruction of our planet, then all of our individual work healing our landbase will be wiped out. Lifeboats won’t be sufficient. Why do civilized people think they can do better than all those before who successfully protected their own landbase for countless millennia? Aric McBay tells us, “You could supply one-quarter of all the energy Haiti uses with the gasoline Americans spill every year filling their lawnmowers.” Many liberals try to avoid conflict and even talk needed to force change today, but the future holds a violence post-collapse that will only be a far greater conflict to face.
Arundhati Roy states simply, “Finding ways to divide the people is the main practice of anybody that is in power.” Big dams in India have displaced more the 30,000,000 people in just India in the past 50 years. 80% of India lives on less than fifty cents a day. India has 100,000,000 indigenous people. In India, under the UAPA, you can be jailed for seven years for “thinking an antigovernment thought”. To indigenous, “if you consume the flesh of another, you take responsibility for the continuation of the other’s community.”
I read all of Derrick’s interview books well over a decade ago and gave him a grant to do a conference where he would do his interviews on stage using two comfortable chairs and the audience could enjoy a fascinating day of brilliant chats with the top minds on saving the planet. Derrick immediately suggested calling it “Earth at Risk”, and both us living at the time in California, I suggested we do it in San Francisco, the closest place we could get the audience and the guests to be interviewed. We did Earth at Risk conference two different years and a film and book of the events were released. I forgot how damn good Earth at Risk was until I reread this book again just now during COVID. Wow. Another great interview book with Derrick with a top lineup. I’d like to re-fund this project again during COVID with Derrick on Brady Bunch Zoom style continuing the crucial conversation with other amazing voices in a way that can see seen later on youtube.com by the general public for free. This book should have also included the Earth at Risk interview with Alice Walker. I really dug that.
BP and the Coast Guard kept reporters 1,500 ft up and away from filming the thousands of dead animals caught in death gyres post the Exxon Valdez spill. The mass death was dumped at night (“birds too numerous to count, sea turtles too numerous to count”) according to local fishermen who were involved. You’d see people in full Hazmat suits on the beach near children playing in the water where the dispersants and oil were. A visual image of how the public rarely knows the truth, while the officials may know but won’t tell. Civilization has always been at war against nature. Funny how most of the people around us defend this culture which is determined to kill the only thing protecting us all – the natural world (a.k.a. our children’s future). Wetiko madness writ large. George Lakoff says don’t try to have a national movement without including the Deep South.
Seven million dispossessed Palestinians exist in the global diaspora. Some live in refugee camps twenty minutes from their ancestral land. 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed between 1948 and 1952. Colonizers have throughout history used attachment to the land as a weapon against those living sustainably. “if you have an intrinsic romance with the land, then you are easily conquerable.” The con artists we meet say, show me a nice guy and I’ll show you a sucker. When the Palestinians committed their worst crime, voting the wrong way in a free election, an economic blockade was imposed that tellingly banned all anesthesia for Gaza. What is the accepted psychological term for people who want total strangers specifically to feel as much pain as possible? There was a small zoo in Gaza, Israelis bombed it while it was full of animals. This culture is not accountable to nature, to animals, or even to its own followers.
Hugh Hefner made the most money not by commodifying sex, but by sexualizing commodities. That brought in the advertisers and changed the industry. Penthouse lost by showing everything and sending the advertisers back to Playboy. As a result, Gail Dines says today’s girls have two options: be fuckable or invisible. Hypersexualized girls are more apt to show signs of someone who has been raped (depression, drug & alcohol abuse, etc) even if they haven’t been. Hotels make a half a billion dollars a year off of porn; even hotel mini-bars simply can’t compete against those numbers. Oprah Winfrey took cameras to porn star Jenna Jameson to tour her art collection, fancy home and cars. Meanwhile, the average porn star has “a shelf life of three months.” Remember, the U.S. Bill of Rights wasn’t wanted by our founding fathers but was “forced in by the states”, a resistance group of sorts. In Western Pennsylvania, truck drivers emptied radioactive fracking water directly onto the roadways because such water couldn’t be sent to treatment plants. What’s the number one non-natural cause of death among U.S. farmers? Suicide. You couldn’t “murder” a slave because it was a property crime. Rape across the U.S. was only a property crime until the 1860’s to 1870’s. In both cases, at worst, you just paid damages. Sorry I raped your wife, here’s a cow. Indigenous see themselves as keepers of the land; outsiders wanted to “civilize” them but to the indigenous it has never been about God or civilization, it’s always been about being defenders of the land. Genesis 1:26 is about domination and subjugation with man atop the hierarchy. For this reason, Waziyatawin sees Christianity as unsalvageable. If protecting the land is not front and center in one’s religion, what good is it? What good is thinking you are separate from nature or the land? The extermination rate of the indigenous in the Americas, Waziyatawin estimates at 98.5%. Civilization has always been opposed to the threat of a good example. In 1862 Native Americans learned the hard way that whether you as indigenous assisted the US 100% or opposed it 100%, you were screwed. But you don’t curry favor by going along. History showed the Nazi’s would torture you whether you were a mild opponent or a strong opponent (Mayor of Leipzig’s death). Waz ends her section with, “We don’t have time for this culture to come to it’s senses.” Right on.
The amazing Lierre Keith is next: What is agriculture? Biotic cleansing. Killing the soil through drawdown. “We owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” Richard Manning says you can’t make agriculture sustainable. It’s the most destructive thing we have done to the planet. It creates a surplus you now have to protect while you deplete the soil where you are and you have to move on conquering the next bit. Agriculture overshoots the landbase. Leisure in agricultural societies requires slaves; we’ve forgotten that bit because of fossil fuels now do the slave’s work. But in 1800, three quarters of the planet were slaves or indentured. That’s how the work got done. It took 600 old growth trees to make one tall ship.” Here’s how civilization has always rolled: “If you are willing to destroy your forests, you are going to win against those who aren’t willing to destroy theirs.” Wetiko. “This is a culture of profound entitlement, based on a masculine violation imperative.” Isn’t Lierre cool? The culture in front of us is violating sexual boundaries, biological boundaries (shaping rivers and forests) and genetic boundaries of other species. Liberalism is idealist. Radicals know better, that social subordination has to stop. Justice is done by taking power away from those doing harm. From the harmless Gaelic Revival came the effective IRA and Irish pride. It was Florence Kennedy who coined that great term “horizontal hostility”. If it feels like high school again, there’s a reason. Because you are fighting sideways and not fighting upstream/above. You’ve got to sustain the fight. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first. Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were both dragged from buses before Rosa. When you ask yourself what can little old me do? Ask yourself, what did 6 year-old Ruby Bridges do? “Successful resistance movements are always multigenerational”. Lierre’s cute term for transition towners and permaculture/voluntary simplicity types are OIMBY’s – Only In My Backyard. The problem is they all need to be part of the culture of resistance and not divorced from it. A Cornell University study found that 40% of human deaths “are caused by water, air, and soil pollution.”
We weren’t taught in school about the Nazi concentration camp Sobibor because the prisoners fought back successfully freeing around 600 prisoners. This culture doesn’t want you thinking of resistance. Everyone should watch “Don’t Talk to Cops” on youtube.com. Most green radicals got caught not by forensics but by informants and infiltrators. If we can’t stop the destruction of our planet, then all of our individual work healing our landbase will be wiped out. Lifeboats won’t be sufficient. Why do civilized people think they can do better than all those before who successfully protected their own landbase for countless millennia? Aric McBay tells us, “You could supply one-quarter of all the energy Haiti uses with the gasoline Americans spill every year filling their lawnmowers.” Many liberals try to avoid conflict and even talk needed to force change today, but the future holds a violence post-collapse that will only be a far greater conflict to face.
Arundhati Roy states simply, “Finding ways to divide the people is the main practice of anybody that is in power.” Big dams in India have displaced more the 30,000,000 people in just India in the past 50 years. 80% of India lives on less than fifty cents a day. India has 100,000,000 indigenous people. In India, under the UAPA, you can be jailed for seven years for “thinking an antigovernment thought”. To indigenous, “if you consume the flesh of another, you take responsibility for the continuation of the other’s community.”
I read all of Derrick’s interview books well over a decade ago and gave him a grant to do a conference where he would do his interviews on stage using two comfortable chairs and the audience could enjoy a fascinating day of brilliant chats with the top minds on saving the planet. Derrick immediately suggested calling it “Earth at Risk”, and both us living at the time in California, I suggested we do it in San Francisco, the closest place we could get the audience and the guests to be interviewed. We did Earth at Risk conference two different years and a film and book of the events were released. I forgot how damn good Earth at Risk was until I reread this book again just now during COVID. Wow. Another great interview book with Derrick with a top lineup. I’d like to re-fund this project again during COVID with Derrick on Brady Bunch Zoom style continuing the crucial conversation with other amazing voices in a way that can see seen later on youtube.com by the general public for free. This book should have also included the Earth at Risk interview with Alice Walker. I really dug that.
April 8, 2013
I have read a lot of this stuff before in previous Jensen books, but, it doesn't make it any less scary. We are really trashing the planet and ..other than taking down the system, it seems we have little recourse. I don't think I am brave enough ....
September 12, 2019
I tried to finish it but I couldn’t. It was extremely boring and not at all what you would expect from the title.
May 1, 2014
This book was great fun. I had no idea when I got it from the library that it was a manifesto for bringing down Western civilization to save the environment. The contributors to this book were self-described radicals with very different views on things like capitalism, and the US Constitution. It definitely raised my eyebrow a time or two.
Good luck saving the world for humanity. If you don't succeed, the earth will turn without us.
Good luck saving the world for humanity. If you don't succeed, the earth will turn without us.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews