Discuss: Forget Shorter Showers

I have been a fan of Derrick Jensen’s for a long time.  In this article “Forget Shorter Showers”  I took it as a rhetorical question and attention-getting device when he asked “…why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into…entirely personal “solutions”?  What solution is ever “entirely” personal, and who among those who are taking shorter showers, growing organic gardens, limiting families and participating in Earth rituals limits their activities to the personal?  In my experience these are the people who ARE voting, organizing, protesting – at least when they aren’t working full time and raising families and taking care of babies, children, the elderly, the disabled and all the other work done mostly by women.

I think Jensen does answer the question himself when he says “I’m not saying we shouldn’t act simply,” and that he frames his question for the sake of emphasis.  He’s a good journalist and writer.  But I agree it’s not either/or.  Personal and symbolic acts are not simply feel good gestures but meaningful forms of community formation and communication among ourselves and between us and other species.  They have ripple effects and serve as role models.  Most of all they generate the feelings and connections with nature that help motivate the brainstorming, networking, institution changing and forming that are the activism Jensen advocates.  They reinforce our vision that a dead planet is not an option by helping us to notice that it IS a living planet in the first place.

Interesting rhetorical device here aimed to catch our attention and focus our energy, but not, I think, a real dichotomy.

I’d also like to take issue with the argument that “the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide” suggesting that any argument that ends this way can be reduced to the absurd.  It is precisely suicide – or some version of accepting death in its time, that must stand against the technologization of our civilization – and perhaps lies at the heart of it.  I think of the Hindus or Jains who in old age retire to the forest eating less and less until they die and compare that to the resources we pour into not only deflecting death but even old age.  It’s all related.

I’m not totally sure I could explain what solipsism is, but I think this article is an excellent vacuous example of it.  I can’t believe that Orion published it!

Excellent, thought-provoking iconoclastic article which the environmental “movement” needs more of. As a college professor, I often ask my students who are up in arms about the state of the world, “how many of you aim to go into politics, corporate work, or finance?” I am lucky if 1-2 raise their hands in a room of 50. We obviously cannot ignore personal choices and lifestyles but the real action on the climate change front is in policy—something we have yet to galvanize public action toward. Remember, the Civil Rights Era was as much about policy and legal action as it was marches and protests.

I want to thank Derrick Jensen for writing another wise and honest column.  Also, I’m pleased to see the serious engagement with Mr. Jensen’s ideas by the readership of Orion.  I’d like to respond to a few of the earlier posters.  Having read most of Jensen’s published work and being someone who largely shares his perspective on social, ecological, and political issues, I think I may be able to offer a useful counterpoint to a few of the criticisms.

Joel (#1) and Chris (#4), your critiques seem to take as a given that we have a truly free-market economy in this society.  Noam Chomsky and many others on the left have, I think, effectively debunked this idea.  The largest heavy industry in America (also the largest polluter) is the weapons industry, and the military uses more oil than any other industry.  Clearly, neither my consumption choices nor my vote plays a factor in these.  The government funnels endless billions (ultimately, probably trillions) of dollars into military R&D (also NASA and other agencies), and then, oftentimes, they bring these technologies to the market (as microwaves, cell phones, personal computers, the internet, etc.) as a means of privatizing and concentrating that massive public investment, while externalizing (laying on the public, humans and non-humans) as many costs as possible.  Not exactly Smithian capitalism.  More like sheer plunder.  Actually, Adam Smith warned explicitly against such abuses, and supported strong unions to prevent them.  Moreover, as Jensen showed in his book Strangely Like War (on the timber industry, co-authored with George Draffan), paper mills continually churn out far more paper than the economy calls for.  Likewise, the federally subsidized, biotech, pesticide laden, fossil fuel fertilized corn, soy, cotton, etc. is being produced at levels beyond what the market can bear.  Hence all the crazy, energy intensive, unhealthy innovations for dumping it (HFCS, lecithin, TVP, corn oil, soy oil, inappropriate animal feed, and now, of course, biofuels).  Monsanto didn’t invent Posilac (rBGH) to meet a public demand for slightly cheaper milk, loaded with puss, hormones, anti-biotics, etc, at the expense of sick and dying cattle and people (themselves).  They did it simply because they knew their boys in Washington would approve it and that their propaganda would sell it to farmers, and that Monsanto would make a fortune.  Major corporations are not out there trying to meet public needs.  Major industries do not produce less (or destroy less) when demand falls off (which it does almost exclusively for economic reasons, very rarely for political reasons… even less so ecological ones).  They turn to the government for bailouts, and they use their massive propaganda industry (PR) to manufacture new demand.  Look, I, like Jensen, compost, recycle, drive very little, buy almost only ethically produced local foods, buy only used clothes, occasionally dumpster dive, pee outside, bring tupperware to restaurants, and do many other little, tiny things to reduce my impact.  Is it worth it?  Absolutely.  Does it pose any threat whatsoever to those who are destroying the planet?  No, and that is Jensen’s point.  We need lifestyle changes in order to sleep at night and be able to look at ourselves in the mirror, but we also need to stop kidding ourselves that these changes will suffice to save the profoundly imperiled community of life on this planet.  Moreover, to refuse to fight back as effectively as possible is to value my luxuries, my relative freedom, my so-called life over future generations, over the planet, over my own dignity.  I’ll choose to resist.

Wes (#3), you may be interested to know that Derrick is working on a book explicitly about dreams, and based on dreams.  I know him, and he speaks of his dreams more than anyone I’ve met except indigenous people, Sufis, or Jungians.  And, as Chris (#4) noted, he definitely offers a clear vision, whether or not you agree with it.  He is saying to resist by all means necessary.  People understood what that meant when Malcolm X said it. 

Amanda (#6), it is really good that you (like me) bring tupperware for your leftovers at restaurants.  Hey, I’ve gotten my parents to (on rare occasion when they remember) do the same.  Yet I taught for four years at a very liberal private school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of the most staunchly liberal neighborhoods in the country.  Hell, the school building is named for Andrew Goodman, an alum who fought and died for civil rights.  And yet I was appalled on my first day when I saw every single student, teacher, administrator, and staff member throwing away disposable utensils, plates, bowls, cups, napkins, and a lot of food, with every meal.  I pretty much always eat what I buy (or forage), and I compost the rest.  I never, ever use disposables.  I brought in a set of dishes and utensils the next day.  For the next four years, I established myself as, frankly, a widely liked and respected member of the community, one of a couple of leaders on ecological issues.  After four years (and innumerable statements like, “Oh man, I’m going to start bringing my own stuff, too,” and “Gee, we really need to get the school to switch away from disposables”), the school has not budged an inch on waste (despite a little greenwashing) and all of two other faculty members have brought in and regularly use non-disposable stuff.  A few others, including some students, brought in mugs and sometimes use them.  And this is one of the most liberal communities you will find, where everyone talks about ecological issues daily.  This is a rich community, where we could easily afford to change our behavior.  This is a community where I was not strictly a peer to most, but in a clearly defined authority position, and I was widely liked, even loved by many, yet almost no one followed my lead on this one, tiny, easy issue.  If you’re going to do the right thing in these tiny ways, do it because it’s the right thing to do.  Not because you’re changing the people around you, because with very few and pretty much negligible exceptions, you’re not.  And we have far, far, bigger levers to use in our fight against global ecocide.  And we must use them, if we truly value life.  By all means, compost too. 

Stephen (#11), fair enough.  I’m just like Jensen, in this sense.  In my history classes, I am constantly making parallels to Hitler and the Nazis.  Also to slavery.  I do so, as I suspect Jensen does, because these are two of the only historical atrocities with which we, as a society, have any degree of both familiarity and moral clarity.  I’d love to change it up more, and I do with my students who have been in my classes for a while and have developed both familiarity and moral clarity about the Vietnam war, about the genocide of the indigenous Americans, about the genocide in East Timor, about the Crusades, about the Opium Wars, about the US sponsored horrors in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc.  But I always start with the Nazis, because we all already know they’re bad.  So it’s a useful reference point.  And what happens if we apply the justice at Nuremberg to the Reagan administration?  Or the Clinton administration?  Or Obama?  Or, of course, Monsanto, Rio Tinto, Weyerhauser, Shell, ExxonMobil, Raytheon, Halliburton, etc?  Or, given the fate of Julius Streicher, to the willing propagandists of the corporate-imperial omnicide, propagandists widely read/seen/heard in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox, CNN, The Economist, and so on?

Geektronica (#12), I’ll address your post last.

Harry (#18), I hear you, and I think you make a valid editorial critique, but I think it’s ultimately superficial.  Jensen says over and over, including in this column, that we should make those tiny, eensy-weensy changes, and that he does so himself.  He also says that we must rid ourselves of the delusion that doing so will suffice to stop the omnicide.  So taken in context, I think it’s pretty clear that Jensen means “forget that things like taking shorter showers will lead to a sane and sustainable culture.”  Also, Derrick is ALL ABOUT local action.  Read his work.  He’s done a ton of local organizing to stop deforesters, to stop “developers,” etc.  He does not rule out engagement in the political process.  He also says, very clearly and forcefully in his new book (What We Leave Behind, co-authored with Aric McBay) that these must be done in the context of a culture of resistance.  So environmental activists who run for public office, or focus on permaculture, or focus on urban gardening, or focus on education (like me), or focus on writing books (like him), etc, must see not only each other as allies to be supported but also people doing the crucial front-line work of confronting and dismantling the systems and infrastructures through which the dominant culture oppresses and destroys all living beings.  Be in politics, as the Sinn Fein leaders were in politics.  Not as the current Democrats or even Greens are, who are clearly opposed to militant action against the destroyers (Democrats because they are, themselves, corporatist destroyers, and Greens because they’re stuck in the futile and self-defeating pathology of pacifism… and/or they’re also corporatists destroyers, just “green” corporatist destroyers).  You want to run for office?  I’ll vote for you… if I know you have the back of the resistance movement, including those who will do the most dangerous and important work.

Flaneuse (#20), I don’t see him stopping short.  I see him tailoring his message to his audience.  If you have not read Endgame, I strongly suggest you (and everyone) do so.  It will leave little question about Derrick’s commitment to revolution.  BUT, it should also be clear that Derrick is not proposing some grand political program for us all to follow, like Lenin or even Bakunin.  The revolution he supports is to dismantle empire and replace it with thousands of small, local cultures that are inextricable from their landbases.  Which is to say, indigenous cultures.  Which are, by virtue of their size, their technics, and their oneness with the broader community of life, highly democratic, egalitarian, and most importantly, sustainable.

Now, back to Geektronica (#12).  You write, “...but a Luddite one.”  Yeah?  So?  OK, Derrick Jensen is a Luddite.  And then some.  Because the Luddites only opposed industrial technology.  Jensen goes further, to the dawn of agriculture (as in, the dawn of ecocidal monocropping of annuals, not the dawn of putting seeds in the ground, which has always been done, including by non-humans).  He is opposed to all civilized technology.  Including metallurgy.  Including the plow.  But he is most opposed to industrial technology because it is so much more extreme and rapid in its destructiveness than pre-industrial civilized technology.  And yes, he, and I, and many others “really think we’d be better off abandoning modern technology (‘industrial society’).”  That’s the whole point.  Industrial society, despite the myths and propaganda we’ve ben fed since birth, is based, on the most physically real level, on the converting of the living to the dead.  Living forests into junk mail and toilet paper.  Living rivers into hydro-electricity, canned salmon, and bottles of wine from irrigated vineyards.  Living prairies into stockpiles of grain.  Living mountains into beer cans (using hydro-electricity from murdered rivers), jewelry, and whole ecosystems laid waste by toxic tailings.  And so forth.  And this is in contrast to wild animals, including wild human cultures, who obviously also consume the lives and bodies of others (while honoring them), but enhance and protect the communities from which those individuals come.  That is the crucial difference.  In industrial society, salmon are a commodity, a resource.  That is, when they’re not merely a political impediment to dam-building, waste dumping, or irrigation.  And how does one treat a resource, a commodity?  How does this compare to how an indigenous Klamath human, or Tolowa, or Salish, or Pomo, or Aleut, or Ainu, or Nikvh, or, on the Atlantic, Lenape, Abenaki, Innu, Inuit, Celt, etc, behaves in relation to the salmon, which s/he also eats, but sees as a living, unique, spiritual being, who must be honored and whose community must be honored, for their own sake and for the sake of the human and non-human communities that depend on them, have always depended on them, and will always depend on them?  It’s the difference between, as Jensen sometimes says/writes, seeing a woman as a resource for sexual release and/or conquest (as so many men in this culture clearly do) versus seeing each individual woman as a unique, spiritual being with intrinsic value and an independent will and identity.  It’s the difference between abuse and relationship.  No surprise that the culture that sees land as a resource, that sees trees, salmon, rivers, mountains, indeed the whole Earth as resources, also treats women, children, foreigners, minorities, the laboring classes, and so forth as resources.  It, civilization (in its most fully realized and pathological form, industrial civilization), is a culture based on objectification and exploitation.  It rewards objectification and exploitation, and those who objectify and exploit most thoroughly, effectively, and “profitably” wind up as the elite (they’re usually born into the elite, anyhow).  Not all human cultures are like this.  Indeed, ONLY civilized cultures are like this.  It is a pathology that is literally consuming the planet, and if it is not stopped, there will be very little, if anything, left of the community of life by the time it has collapsed and its impact has been fully absorbed.

Further, the Abenaki lived where I now sit for thousands of years, and they did not deplete the forests, the cod (now locally extirpated), the passenger pigeons (fully extinct), the lobsters, the aquifers, the topsoil, and so on.  They did not leave the land despoiled with waste and toxins.  The only “waste” they produced was food for other beings.  They took no more than the land could willingly and healthily give.  For thousands of years.  And they did not oppress women.  And they did not invent money, or slavery.  And they did not commit genocide against their human neighbors.  And they did not expand beyond the land’s carrying capacity.  Same goes for the Mohawks who lived for eons where I grew up.  Same goes for the Lenape who lived for eons where I spent my 20’s.  Same goes for the paleolithic predecessors of the Etruscans who lived for eons where I lived for a year in Italy.  Same goes for the Tolowa who lived for eons where Jensen now lives.  Same goes for the San in Namibia, living much like their ancestors from hundreds of thousands of years ago: sustainably, peacefully, profoundly, democratically.  The qualities of civilization are not the qualities of the human.  Indeed, they are starkly at odds with the qualities of the human, which is why life in civilized society produces so many discontents (as noted by Freud and Jung), so many schizophrenics (as noted by Joseph Campbell and Stanley Diamond), so many depressives, addicts, sociopaths, and so forth (as should be obvious to anyone).  We are still wild beings, tamed into a highly imperfect submission, under which we rankle.  But all that aside, civilization has already wiped out 90% of the large fish in the oceans, 95% of the original forests in this country, roughly a third of all the wildlife on Earth just since 1970 (not including the vastly more lost before 1970).  There is now far more plastic than plankton in the oceans.  Amphibians are dying off en masse, worldwide.  The major agricultural regions are being thoroughly denuded of topsoil, which will leave them deserts, jut like the “Fertile Crescent,” the original cradle of agriculture.  The whole planet is on a horrific, anthropogenic warming cycle that will surely take an extremely heavy toll and even threatens the continuation of life itself.  This culture is omnicidal, and it will collapse by virtue of the fact that it destroys the basis for its own survival, along with everyone else’s.  The question is whether or not much of the still surviving community of life will make it long enough to weather that collapse and begin restoring health to this planet, so we might all have a future.

As for the current human population level, it is grossly, absurdly beyond carrying capacity, and that is a major product of the dominant culture (indigenous cultures maintained stable population levels).  The population is coming down, sooner or later, more or less horrifically.  Should we continue assaulting and damaging and destroying the foundations upon which life is built in order to forestall (and intensify) the eventual collapse for another day, or week, or year?  It won’t be more than, at most, a couple decades.  If it takes that long, how much worse will the collapse be?  Will there be nine billion people?  Will we have lost 50% of all remaining species?  Will the Great Plains be the new Sahara?  Will there be any vertebrates left on the oceans?  Will there be any indigenous human cultures left?  Will not only Greenland but Antacrtica meltdown in whole or in large part, raising sea levels by around 150 ft?  Will all the methane in the permafrost and the oceanic clathrates release and spiral the planet toward irreversible warming and a Venus effect?  Do you want to wait and see?  I don’t.  I want to fight like hell on the side of life, and bring down the death culture before it plays out to its own apocalyptic endgame (and one need only look at the civilized myths to see that it’s always known it was driving toward apocalypse).  I hope you’ll fight on the side of life, too.  I hope we all will, but I recognize that most people won’t.  And we can’t wait until they will, or it will be too late for much of, even all of, the community of life on Earth.

David

A very good article indeed, apart from this bit: “We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.” (admittedly a requote)—which I disagree with because, in fact, it contradicts Derrick’s own dictum that you *can* used the master’s tools to bring down the master’s house. Just because we are not individually the cause of the problem doesn’t mean we cannot, as individuals or collective groups, bring down the system in a variety of ways - what about the one person who might bring down a large financial computer system; or the small collective that might block various broadcasting hubs for a commercial radio network?

There is not so much difference between these people, and those Derrick mentions in his last paragraph.

Hey Jim Bier (#26), I can define solipsism for you.  It is the extreme pathology of viewing everyone/everything outside of you as not truly real.  The consequences are that no one else has a will, feelings, spirit and so forth, and that therefore there are no true moral implications to doing whatever one pleases with them or to them.  Descartes’ parable of the “brain in a vat” is the classic example.  And Descartes actually operated on these principles toward non-humans.  Of course, the dominant culture operates in this fundamentally objectifying, abusive, destructive, insane way on every possible level.  And Derrick Jensen says we should do all we can to stop the dominant culture from obliterating the community of life.  He is against patriarchy, against the concept of “resources,” against denying others their own unique will (except in defense of others when an individual, notably a civilized human, is wreaking havoc).  Jensen recognizes that all beings, not just humans, not just organic life forms, value their own existence, probably no less than we do.  He literally listens to and speaks to non-humans, as have indigenous people and many poets throughout time.  So no, you are dead wrong.  Jensen is the absolute opposite (and worst nightmare) of solipsists.

I have gone back and forth on this issue of what can I do, etc etc. especially with regard to water. Sometimes I am convinced that I should be saving water, because it is the right thing to do. Other times I want to NOT save it because then they can’t use it for development and therefore I am banking it for the fish. Seriously, in our area, they tell us to conserve water but there is no mechanism to know that I am leaving the water in the river. It just gets alloted out to the next subdivision because it is available. I appreciate Jensen’s comments on how we are now consumers instead of citizens and that has limited our options for action. So well put. Also, I too am sick of being blamed for a lack of water because I like a bath once in a while. Why am I being asked to change my little habits when it is just a drop in the bucket when industry isn’t asked to change at all when it can make such a difference? It is to keep us complacent. We need to change our industrial culture. I know, people will want some sort of concrete answer from anyone saying this, well, it’s not that easy. Every community has a different answer that only that community can figure out and hopefully it all leads to the same result.

Good points about water. That’s why we need to focus more on securing water efficiency measures in our businesses, farms, and communities, as opposed to telling people to stop showering, plant cacti, etc.

American Rivers released a report called “Hidden Reservoir” that lists 8 steps communities should take to save water (and money)—like updating development codes, metering all water users, and pricing water appropriately. Read about it here:

http://www.americanrivers.org/newsroom/press-releases/2008/water-efficiency-can-save-the.html