Bright Green Lies Quotes

“Green cars could be made of pure refined nonsense and fueled by bright green hot air combined with the broken and destroyed dreams of every nonhuman on earth, and they’d still be destructive.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“Twelve thousand years ago, the war against the earth began. In nine places,2 people started to destroy the world by taking up agriculture. Understand what agriculture is: In blunt terms, you take a piece of land, clear every living thing off it—ultimately, down to the bacteria—and then plant it for human use. Make no mistake: agriculture is biotic cleansing.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“The shock doctrine also perfectly describes the entire bright green movement: Because of a terrible and very real disaster (in this case, climate change), you need to hand over huge subsidies to a sector of the industrial economy, and you need to let us destroy far more of the natural world, from Baotou to the Mojave Desert to the bottom of the ocean. If you don’t give us lots of money and let us destroy far more of the natural world, you will lose the luxuries that are evidently more important to you than life on the planet.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“Other double binds are false. This is one of the latter. There is an unspoken premise of the argument in favor of wind turbines: that harvesting energy is more important than birds and bats. That some sacrifices (billions of sacrifices, in this case) are justifiable to provide industrial humans with energy. This is, of course, the usual human supremacist assumption. The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. That’s what we must do.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“Well, even if we had the money, and even if solar power were a social good, it’s not a planetary good. And that’s the point. Industrial solar energy doesn’t help the world. It’s just another way to power industrial capitalism. At root, it’s an industrial product designed and built in the global capitalist marketplace to make a profit. Like other products, it leaves behind the wreckage of destroyed land, poisoned water, and devastated communities.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“We’re going to suggest what is for this culture a radical redefinition of what it means for an action to be “green” or “environmental,” which is that the action must tangibly benefit the natural world on the natural world’s own terms. Not that the action helps fuel the industrial economy. Not that the action makes your life easier. Not that the action seems like a success, such that it helps you not feel despair. The action must tangibly help tigers, or hammerhead sharks, or Coho salmon, or Pacific lampreys, or sea stars, or the oceans, or the Colorado River, or the Great Plains.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“The industrial economy is based on systematic theft from land bases, and the conversion of these living communities into dead products. That’s what an industrial economy is. The economy does not create value for the real world: It destroys the real world.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

“And there is also this fact: The only people who want a nuclear power plant, or a solar panel, or a wind turbine, are people who demand industrial levels of energy. Those levels are needed for a single purpose: the wholesale conversion of the living to the dead, the longest war ever. And our choice is now very stark: Stand with the living or go down with the dead.”
― Derrick Jensen, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It