Discuss: World at Gunpoint

As a longtime reader of Orion, I feel intrigued and very curious to see where Derrick Jensen’s column will take the magazine. His writing is compelling, haunting, provocative—and ultimately, frustrating to read because there are no real solutions here. He snubs those who “fantasize” about a great turning, while promoting a fantasy about bringing down civilization. I applaud Orion for its focus on artful and positive change, and look forward to more lively discussions including the one “how do we live our lives now”?

Brilliant article; Derrick Jensen, always a good read; this article could and should serve as the basis for classroom discussion,research, essays and forums in schools across our country.

What an extraordinary article! Yes, we can and have been able to answer many of the questions that have been presented to us concerning the changes to this little planet that allows us to exist. I totally agree that the right questions have not been asked. If we do not learn to ask the right questions, there is absolutely no way we can expect to get the right answers! Beautifully written piece! Nice job! ;-)

I read this article on the ‘plane on my way to a professional meeting; it stopped me in my tracks.  At the meeting, one of the organizers had set up a session on “Green <our profession>”.  After presetting the distressing findings of the IPCC, he ended with a recruiting add from the great war: “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”

What are we going to tell our children and grandchildren, if there are any, when they ask: what did you do to help solve the great climate crisis?  That we recycled our newspapers and replaced our light bulbs?  Jensen has it exactly right: its’ not that these things are bad, it’s that they are irrelevant to solving the real problem.  Until, as Fullerton says, we can honestly start asking the right questions, we are all doomed, and we are taking the planet down with us.

I hope that in subsequent articles, Jensen asks some of the hard questions.

Jensen writes “If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?”
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Willing to do what, exactly? I don’t disagree with the way you frame the problem.  But here once again I see something that I’ve seen in previous pieces by Jensen: cryptic comments about being “willing to do what is necessary.”  Shades of the movie Body Heat. 

What are you driving at?  Blowing up developments? Violence?  If that’s really what you mean and you don’t want to say so openly—which I’d understand—you’re mistaken.  That method won’t work.  The bad guys have more guns than you do and you’ll immediately lose what you really need in order to win environmental victories—public support.

The ugly, tedious truth about saving the environment is that somehow you have to get huge numbers of Americans to do pedestrian stuff like organize and vote and demand change.  Maybe even by taking to the streets in large numbers like what happened in the 1960s.  But more than once now I’ve seen these same cryptic references in Jensen pieces in Orion.  And if what you’re doing is calling for ELF type tactics—as a matter of winning strategy, you are wrong. 

Maybe I misread you, and if so I’m sorry, but you give such little information that I can’t imagine how anyone could know what you’re calling for.  Cryptic is the word.

Since I first read Derrick’s book ” A Launguage Older Than Words” His writing has deeply moved me.  Not that it matters, not that anything really matters. Intuitively I know his words ring true. I will indeed ask the earth what are we to do, and wait for the answer I know will come, for me.  Thank you.

I, like others, am intrigued to see where this new column takes the magazine.  This first submission seems, well, incredibly dark.  It frames a potential pitfall in focus well - in that perhaps we are asking the wrong questions - but it also perpetuates a type of fuzzy logic.  We are not in any danger of killing the planet.  Its been through several mass extinctions and environmental catastrophes and has continued to orbit around the sun.  Life itself has continued on. If the worst of global climate change occurs and humans - along with thousands of other species - vanish tomorrow the planet will still be here.  Someday in the future it’ll harbor life again, despite our worst efforts to the contrary with all the current threats and impacts we’ve created. 

What we should be afraid of is creating a toxic environment that no longer supports human life.  One where we have no clean air to breathe, no fish to eat, no grain to grow.  Yes, we want to save and conserve the species that share our current world, the “nonhuman people” as you put it, but we do so out of a deep recognition that saving fellow species serves to stabilize ecosystems that make human life possible. 

I hope that future columns will not be so dark (nearly misanthropic) and will probe the important questions with important answers, or at least intelligent written amblings that might lead to broader discussion.

“Do what exactly?”

Derrick Jensen makes it very clear in his books that he is recruiting people to blow up dams and cell phone towers, while he writes books, of course.

As the comments accumulate for this article, I think we should all go back and revisit the pair of articles by Curtis White (Ecology of Work and The Idols of Environmentalism) published in Orion a while ago.  I think they are similarly provocative to this one but much better.  Anyone who has read anything by Jensen knew exactly what he was going to write one sentence in.