a review for both volumes...
Derrick Jensen has compiled a tremendous amount of passion and information into these two stupendous volumes, one of which provides a stunning critique of what we like to call by the name of civilization, with the second discussing the nature of effective resistance.
One value of this work has been its punching through of the denial and wishful thinking that keep so many environmentalists and thoughtful critics locked into fantasies that turn into failures. The term "spiritual bypass" has been used to describe the flight into contemplations of goodness and light that leap over the hard work of understanding the darkness now gripping the entire globe. I'm reminded of the Jungian analysts who wrote to George W. Bush and suggested that he take up a contemplative practice so he wouldn't be so destructive. The critique of taking too much responsibility--e.g., "We're all part of the destruction"--also goes straight home. To my ears this inappropriate shouldering of accountability sounds like abuse victims blaming themselves for the perpetrator's misbehavior. As Murray Bookchin pointed out long ago, the role of a poor black kid in Harlem hardly compares to that of the CEO of an oil multinational.
On the other hand, the author's dismissal of both hope and the usual activist methods ignores some crucial facts. One is that the environmental movement, which stretches back well before Rachel Carson, has proven one of the most successful in history. We shouldn't be blinded by how seldom the mainstream media dwell on this fact. For examples the reader might look over Rebecca Solnit's book HOPE IN THE DARK.
Secondly, there are plenty of social science studies that demonstrate the ineffectiveness of shock tactics and scaring people who might otherwise be willing to take a deeper look at the growing planetary crisis. The perpetrators of it should certainly be held accountable, but for the person in the street, such tactics are no more convincing than the photographs of destroyed fetuses displayed by anti-abortion stalkers at Earth Day festivals. People generally respond to attacks on their defenses by going numb and turning away. We can't afford the luxury of that.
It also seems to me that the analogy to Star Wars is in some ways false. I've spoken with many people at various levels of the corporate hierarchy, and not all of them are Darth Vaders (a psychoanalytically unfortunate choice, alas) or Vader slaves. Many, including executives and board members, find what they do repellant but feel caught up in a capitalistic system that requires them to behave destructively. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, these people are actually hoping for alternatives; declaring war on them shuts down any possibility of dialoguing about how they could do business differently.
What the SW analogy also neglects is that the Empire was beaten not by the Rebel Alliance, whose valiant efforts did set the stage, but by a single man who surrendered his weapon and refused combat with the Dark Father. Why did he do this? Because he realized that behind the mask of the opponent he demonized hid a fearful human being like himself. He was able to move beyond seeing his enemy as an inhuman monster and to feel such compassion for him that balance was restored to the Force after all when Vader turned against the Emperor. Luke neither backed down nor continued to retaliate; he evolved into the kind of warrior who does no violence and yet cannot be beaten. As a result, the day was saved, as was the planet the battle station threatened to pulverize. One could even argue that the Death Star's destruction was unnecessary. When stripped of its armaments it would have made a fine museum to the history of tyranny: a permanent memorial of what we should not build, and why we should not build it. I've been wishing for years that some Native Californians would push their way into the missions of California and create their own more honest displays as remembrances of the terrible consequences of unbridled genocide and greed.
Incidentally, six years of steady work with domestic violence perpetrators, murderers, rapists, and berserk soldiers has only strengthened my conviction of two things with regard to the destroyers around us: 1. They must be unfailingly and unflinchingly held accountable for their actions, and 2. They are only irredeemable to the degree we give up on them and turn away from their humanity just as they already have.
I would also like to recommend Jensen's other books, particularly LISTENING TO THE LAND, a very fine selection of interviews with many key thinkers and activists in the environmental movement. I earnestly hope their author can stay out of jail long enough to give us more of these admirable examples of speaking on behalf of landscapes under siege.
Well-written essays from the heart, not from the brain
I want to like Derrick Jensen, I really do. I like where he's coming from. I'd probably like to be his neighbor. But, oh, are these books frustrating. (I should note that I'm reviewing both books together, which is how they should be reviewed.)
His book jacket describes Jensen as "author, teacher, activist, small farmer, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, he regularly stirs auditoriums across the country with revolutionary spirit." I'll have more to say about his "uncompromising dissent" and "revolutionary spirit" later on, but just ponder those phrases for a moment. Think too about how much time he has for each of those activities, if he's serious about any of them. This matters here because a lack of editing mars these books.
These books consist of a bunch of essays, though they're presented as something more. After a while, they read like second drafts of what Jensen writes in his daily journal. As you'd expect in a journal, they often revisits themes, adding a new perspective on old themes or tying together two or more themes that were treated separately before. That's all fine, up to a point, but it ultimately becomes repetitive. Repetition is deadly in a book of 891 pages of text, or 929 pages including end matter.
In the end, Jensen needed to rework this material more extensively than he did. He's a brilliant writer, and it's oh-so-easy to let him take you along on a ride. He is passionate about the environment and provides trenchant criticisms of economic development, civilization, and other matters. But the lack of editing means that he doesn't really have a strong argument overall, and in fact he shrunk back from where I thought he was going. Indeed, he never came back to a number of issues that he had promised earlier that he would return to. These issues, unfortunately, are the hard issues that I really wanted him to address.
Another measure of the unnecessary repetition in these volumes is, I think, the fact that there are a lot more Amazon reviews of Volume I than Volume II - - apparently a lot of people don't feel they need to read the second book even if they liked the first one.
What do his essays concern? Well, Jensen is particularly impassioned about dams and salmon runs. Many (most?) dams are completely uneconomic and survive only because of large government subsidies to the businesses that build them and maintain them. Yet these dams destroy rivers and riparian habitats, and have devastated salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest (where Jensen lives).
Jensen is also a strong critic of civilization. He's right that civilization is ultimately unsustainable. Though it's not often recognized, Jensen *has* to be right that economic growth is unsustainable because we will ultimately run up against the energy constraints provided by the sunlight hitting the earth's surface. Technology cannot escape those constraints, though it can postpone the day of reckoning.
Though Jensen is right about the ultimate problem, he wrongly sees things changing now. For example, he predicts a violent revolution, leading to a new, localized form of human living within our generation. That's not right. Why not? Jensen is a neo-Malthusian but doesn't consider critiques of original Malthusians, in particular the role of technology. He doesn't consider that a post-industrial civilization might still use technology to increase living standards and carrying capacity. For good or ill, technology will postpone the revolution for a long time.
After the revolution, would small-scale communities living off the land make the world a better place? Think of the small-scale communities in farming and ranching that you may know. Are these the leftists utopias that Jensen would like, or are they deeply conservative places? Be careful what you wish for, Derrick Jensen.
There are various other problems with his overall themes. Jensen romanticizes indigenous peoples, and treats them as an undifferentiated whole, and "Good," while civilized peoples are similarly undifferentiated and "Bad." This doesn't treat indigenous peoples as real people with both virtues and faults, but as cardboard cutouts. Indeed, this romanticization of the indigenous is every bit as racist as the mainstream colonial/imperialist perspective.
Jensen is highly critical of trade because he dislikes globalization. However, he hasn't thought through the issues - - he accepts the notion of a division of labor between writers such as himself and small farmers, artisans, and other people. Presumably these people live by trading things. Even the indigenous peoples whom Jensen so loves traded, often at long distance - - trade between coastal peoples and inland peoples being an obvious example. The logic of this trade is no different at the global level, and by improving efficiency trade can *lower* our impact on the environment. It's possible to argue that trade can be bad for the environment too, but Jensen doesn't want to address these questions with his head, preferring an emotional reaction against excesses of development.
His heart also makes Jensen come across as intolerant, not only of his enemies but of his potential allies. For example, he provides superficial but biting criticisms of Krech's _Myth of the Ecological Indian_ and Mann's _1491_, both of which I've reviewed on Amazon if you're interested. Taken as a whole, these are both *pro*-indigenous books (indeed, I criticized Mann for being a bit too uncritically supportive). Both are politically on the Left, like Jensen. But Jensen dismisses them in offensive terms, apparently because they are not as uncritically pro-indigenous as he is.
Finally, it must be said that, by the end of the book, Jensen comes across as possibly hypocritical. He advocates violence but doesn't put himself on the line. He advocates blowing up dams but doesn't do it himself. In fairness, he's honest about being a coward. He also believes that he can do more good as a writer, and he may be right. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Whew! My overly-long review probably also needs editing, but it reflects the fact that Jensen is nothing if not thought-provoking. I'll give the first volume four stars for the ideas and the writing, and the second volume only three stars because the lack of editing wears the reader down by then. Save a tree and borrow it from the library.
Fits Like a Gun in Your Hand
Derrick Jensen is one of those authors that people love or hate. As for myself, I have mixed feelings about the guy and his message. Despite these mixed feelings, though, I never fail to read his books when they come out - and Endgame was by far an away the most anticipated and climactic one yet due to its highly controversial subject: taking down civilization. That's right, taking down civilization.
But why would anyone want to take down civilization, you might ask? At this point, I should say that if you have not already had the pleasure of receiving a formal introduction to the man and his work, you might want to start with one of his earlier publications, such as Listening to the Land, A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Strangely Like War and Welcome or the Machine. In fact, I would recommend reading them all. They lay the groundwork from which Endgame both springs and builds upon: specifically, that civilization is F-U-B-A-R and doomed to collapse in the near but not too distant future, if not from climate change, then from resource depletion, soil erosion, toxic buildup or any other of the common environmental factors outlined in Jared Diamond's Collapse or the Worldwatch Institute's annual State of the World reports.
Or you might want to just dive right in, since in Volume I of Endgame Jensen outlines many of the fundamental flaws of our cherished civilization. And although each page reads with the power and relevance of an anarcho-primitiveist manifesto, Endgame, the two-volume summation of Jensen's writing career, amounts to nearly 1,000 pages in total - a lot of lumber for a strident call to arms. In fact, under the right circumstances, the book itself is large enough to be used as a blunt instrument to aid the deconstruction of civilization. All jokes aside, though, the net result is a rather awkward flow: a seemingly never-ending concatenation of ideas that, although related by theme, often contradict each other - by the author's own admission:
"Why do you think I laid out the premises explicitly for you, put you in a position of actively choosing to agree or disagree with them? Whey do you think I've approached this form so many directions? Why do you think I've expressed my own fears, expressed my own confusion? Why do you think I've made points, undercut or contradicted them, and then made them again? ... The point is the process I am trying to model. The point is that you puzzle your own way through, and figure out for yourself what, if anything, you need to do." (p 886)
Although I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and often recommend it to friends, Jensen does not come off as being genuine here. By this, I don't mean that he is purposefully deceiving the readers so much as himself. Along with all the interesting environmental science, psychology and poetry the book contains, the underlying current of rage and despair that makes his writing so profound reaches an all time high in Endgame - to the point where he calls upon the reader to "go on the offensive," imploring us to blow up dams, tear up concrete and knock down cell phone towers. Just "don't get sloppy," he advises. "Don't tell anyone who doesn't need to know. Don't get caught" (Dams: Part IV).
Of course, the minute some 16-year-old kid is locked up for taking Jensen's advice and demolishing a dam - or worse - I am sure Jensen will quote something from the 2-page chapter entitled "Responsibility" in his defense - a chapter which, remarkably enough, is little more than an apology for doing such things as blowing up dams to protect your "land base". Or perhaps he will quote one of the many disclaimers ("but don't listen to me, follow your heart") he so sparingly peppers throughout a book predominately dedicated to inspiring illegal activities. Considering the average age of his readership is probably around twenty-four, devoting only two pages to responsibility in a book of this nature is, in my opinion, an abominable abrogation of balance. But, hey, like most geniuses, Jensen is not known for his emotional balance.
All books have weaknesses, just as all authors have weaknesses, and having met Jensen on more than one occasion and sat in on many of his lectures around the country, I am very much aware that the overall importance of his thought far outweighs the single-minded, dam-demolition-obsessed demagogic carelessness of his presentation. In conclusion, I highly recommend that you read this book - but be careful not to leave it lying around where one of your curious, trigger-happy kids might find it unattended. The content is dangerous enough to require parental discretion - which I advise.
Some books you might also want to check out of a similar theme: Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism, Against Civilization, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, and Igniting a Revolution.
j.w.k.
Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Fredrick Douglass, Derrick Jensen-a call for responsibility beyond fear
It's a daunting task to begin to distill 908 pages (with very funny footnotes)into an online review. Essentially, I think this work takes its place among other great works that are often recognized and revered from a historical distance. We look at history and say, yes, I would have definetely been part of the Underground Railroad, or the German resistance against the Nazis, or the Zapatistas. But what of now and the crisis that we face? Maybe you can't see the clearcuts or the dying salmon. But maybe you teach in the public schools and see children that are destined for prison. Maybe you know someone that's suffered and died of a rare cancer that didn't exist in your grandparent's time. Maybe it's feeling like a whore for a mortgage company. Or maybe you're finding that all the pharmaceuticals in the world can't make up for the lack of a local community.
Jensen begins with the premise that civilization is destroying the planet and that its very nature is to continue to do so. He is relentless in his analysis and use of sources to prove this. What is also shocking is to be reminded that pacifism as a method of real social change is mostly symbolic. "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." (Douglass)
Not only are these two volumes beautifully written and often very humorous, but I believe they are visionary before our time. Our lives are so inundated with messages of corporate compliance and fear of speaking out. But I think these volumes are a necessary call to something beyond ourselves, as members of a certain time in history, and of this planet. Read this book and think about it and think of those who have given themselves for something greater than self preservation.
Warning: these book are very dense,I found it helpful to draw little diagrams so I could keep everything straight.
Landmark work of moral philosophy
This seems to be Jensen's ultimate manifesto. It is basically a declaration of war against agricultural and industrial civilization.
But Jensen's point is not only that ultimately humans will have to surrender all their jazzy tech toys (including indoor plumbing) due to inevitable general collapse of industrial civilization, but that we should be glad to surrender them, and we should do so as early as possible to prevent what bit of species extinction we still can. But even more important than any individual "personal lifestyle" type of remediation is to actively fight industrial civilization's more destructive artifacts with explosives.
What's really interesting and surprising about Jensen is his essential optimism! Yes, despite 2,000 pages or so of griping and groaning about how bad it all is, Jensen still seems to think that some small number of humans, living in just the right way (as originally exemplified by North American indigenous peoples) are compatible with the survival of the rest of the biosphere. But I do have to wonder whether humans in the long term are genetically programmed to destroy as much as they can whenever they get the chance. Or at least, some humans will have this tendency, and then the bad will drive out the good - as we have seen with the 500 year European domination of the planet. So I tend to think that long term, humans and the earth biosphere are incompatible. It is a deadend species, and as long as we are building castles in the air, and wishing on a star, I guess I'd throw in my lot more with the Voluntary Human Extinction crowd.
But Jensen would VEHEMENTLY disagree with the above paragraph, and say that any such talk of genetic programming is at best nothing but scientistic gooblygook serving the master power Matrix, and at worst just one more excuse to put off the work that is crying out to be done (blowing up Columbia river dams to restore naturally spawning salmon).
In any case, once you have read this or any other Jensen book, you'll be in the mental grip of his moral absolutism - forever. (Of course, in Jensen's view, you already are in its grip, as you need clean water, don't you?) I don't mean his moral absolutism is necessarily bad or good. I'm still pondering that question. Nor do I mean that you'll necessarily accept his unrelenting assertion that the triumvirate of naturally clean water, freely spawning salmon, and reciprocally sustained landbase trump all other conceivable human values. I mean it literally - in that Jensen poses a moral and practical absolute principle that is so starkly opposed to every other activity, relationship, possession, plan, "hope", or value in your "normal" human life as you conceive it within the existent Matrix of industrial civilization - the Culture of Empire - that you will be unable to mentally reconcile the two. If Jensen is right, your whole "live long and prosper" mindset - as conceived and instantiated within the current paradigm - is flat wrong and must be jettisoned.
Thus you'll need to either accept Jensenism (then prove it by blowing up a dam), or reject it (implicitly rejecting clean water and allying yourself with child rapists), or descend to the intellectual purgatory of pure 24 carat Doublethink - forever. None of your quasi-religious New Age blathering will cut any ice with this guy.
So this book is a carry vector that will infect you with the above mental virus, and once infected you'll never be free of it. The shadow of the dead or never-spawned salmon will dog all the rest of your days on this earth.
(6 reviews)
