Discuss: Side with the Living

To HHH: 

I am so glad you are such an expert. I certainly appreciate and am grateful for your brilliant and illuminating counsel.  Shame on me for being so foolish, O Great One!

Sandy Krolick,

Your cynicism and sarcasm is wasted effort, but to be expected from one who cannot see the forest for the trees.

On your website, you declare “It is not a spiritual crisis at all.  The true challenge, social-cultural in nature, has less to do with religion, spirituality or transcendence, and more to do with coming back to our senses, back from the disembodied existence we have been living since the foundations of history.”

You get most of it right, but fail to appreciate that every indigenous culture, living in the fullness and harmony of the sensate moment, has expressed a profound spirituality that we have supplanted with mere religion.

All the cultural dead-ends that you so well describe on your site, are but ramifications of the primal loss of spiritual connection with All-That-Is.

Those who have re-membered this visceral connection have no need of sarcasm nor cynicism.

Robert

Sorry you are so unhappy with your life.  Stop criticizing everyone, and get on with your rehabilitation :))))

If it wasn’t for Derrick Jensen’s column I probably would have never resubscribed to Orion. Thank you to the Orion staff for publishing his work.

I used to be a big fan of Derrick Jensen’s, but this article is a massive disappointment.  The real moral of mass extinctions is a positive one, namely that (so far) they always result in greater speciation.  Even the mass extinction that humans are now exacting on the planet will likely end well for the world, but of course none of us will be here to witness it. And that’s OK. For me, this essay is a drag - it just waffles around in a romantic and wholly unconstructive manner. Bemoaning the snails that get squished is silly - moose squish them too, and always have. Is it somehow better when moose do it than when humans do? More broadly, the fact is that all life must kill to survive. That’s what life is. Some killing is direct (for food), and some killing is indirect (for space). Of course Jensen knows all of this, but he seems to have gone soft in his celebrity. I was particularly let down by the smarmy and preachy ending to this essay: “our task is clear: to help life live”. I completely disagree. Our task, as Robert Riversong says correctly, is to let life live. This starts with recognizing and valuing all species (genotypes, not phenotypes) and their survival needs. A few people get this, but the vast majority don’t, and thoroughly don’t care. Non-human life doesn’t need man’s help, we have already “helped” too much already.  Our task must be to first help ourselves, to: achieve zero population growth; find less destructive means to clothe, feed, power and entertain everybody; and eliminate poverty and needless human suffering. Only then will man be in any position to help anything.  Right now humanity is just the bull in the china shop, all of us, including the formerly radical Derrick Jensen. The mantra “Helping life live” smacks of slogans we get from the Pro-Life movement, the Nature Conservancy, and Monsanto - groups connected by their mutually vicious and arrogant desire to control and dominate the planet. Count me out.

My whole being feels both lighter and frustrated after reading Jensen.  He writes and unravels a very deep truth that gets buried beneath the endless illusion we buy into and find so hard to break through. 
I personally need writers like Jensen to help keep me from drowning in the sea of conformity and indoctrination that is everywhere(but in untouched wilderness).  Frustration, grief and sorrow are a blessing.

Thanks you Derrick and Orion.

I can’t describe how hilarious it is to see someone accuse others of not being able to see the forest for the trees when they and others continually make remarks showing they confused examples for the point of the article, and clearly inferred meaning of their own into Derrick’s writing and acted as if it was fact or some huge revelation.

The collection of the three “upping the stakes” articles is very good I think.  It is a little bit like a series of great paintings that each are different, but were painted around a similar time.