JHK’s Three-Act Play
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Derrick Jensen is an author, teacher, activist, and small farmer. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He was named “the Poet Philosopher of the Ecological Movement” by Democracy Now! and one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” He is the co-author of the new book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. He lives in Northern California
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This is a terrific interview. I have followed Derrick on Facebook and he’s amazing.
Thank you for the clarification of the ridiculous claims of the sustainability tecnofascists, when they definitely know better.
And we are addicted to our lifestyle. I’m ready to trade up for one that takes more labor but is more satisfying, and more one with nature.
There never was and will never be something like positive EROEI.
If humans were able to expend one unit of energy and extract 100, 14 or 2, as the story goes, why the steam engine has been invented, in the first place?
Inventing it is a demonstration that humans burn colossal amount of energy to get one more unit of energy.
This is what the Environmental Movement has missed out all along – since Huxley, Orwell and earlier, where both have failed to identify from where the energy will come to make all Huxley’s test tubes, and Orwell’s relentless, never going-away Control!
Is it the only Environmental Movement that has missed and missing out on the root issue?
No, Sadi Carnot, seeding for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics back in 1824, failing to correlate the sum useful energy his heat engine will ever produce to the total energy put into constructing it.
Economics, Science have loved this feel-good, short-sighting and the Environmental Movement is no exception.
Wailing.
Jackson Browne summed this all up pretty succinctly in “Before the Deluge” .
The anecdote about the Marxist was hilarious!
“You’ve gone from purely voluntary exchanges to genocide in less than a minute so you can have a bus.”
I just have one short anecdote as well. Kunstler has made the point in the past that Americans are not only addicted to their lifestyles, but they get downright angry when you also suggest that their technofantasies for the future are nonsensical. I was talking with my sister and she was fantasizing about a new amusement park of sorts. I can’t remember what she wanted it to be, but I got really firm with her and tried to explain the fallacy of techno-utopianism. Predictably, she simply got angry with me that I would even suggest that there is such a thing as resource constraints and that we should probably turn down such ideas as new amusement parks in favor of a more constrained lifestyle. Whatever Americans dream up in their heads is reality to them. Trips to Mars are baked into their conciousness, and they deny that it ever WON’T be a reality. It’s a sad indictment of our culture.
man i learn a lot from your podcasts Kunstler, i wish you did more of em. thanks for doing what you do.
keep it up
Thanks for this interview, Jim. Jensen was the one who woke me up to the ecological disaster happening from his book Endgame. I had always been aware of the impending financial implosion, but to that point the ecological suffering had been below my radar.
He said something I’ve thought for a long while: we have to save every inch of wild space left because our grandchildren will need it so desperately. True “conservatives” will want all the oil pipelines shut, the timber companies run out of town, just to maintain what little wilderness we have left. And they shouldn’t be saved just because those kids will need them, but because the forests and animals have their own right to live, that they contribute in millions of ways to the whole planet’s beauty.
I just re-watched the last Mad Max movie, Fury Road. And Miller often has a character say something that puts the whole story in perspective. This time, he had one of the breeding girls say “Then who killed the world!?” She played the scene well, and you get the sense of suffering that all of these kids are going through. And Max in that scene, being older and having known the “old times” pre-war, is shocked at the desperation the kids are feeling. You look at someone 20 years younger than you and you forget the hopelessness these kids have.
I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with Derrick Jensen in the past but none nowhere near as good as this. It’s either JHK bringing out the best in Derrick or Derrick getting wiser as he gets older or some combo? Either way, great, great interview with a great perspective on where we are and where we’re going. I can’t look at a picture of a big city (think Toronto or L.A.) without shuddering and wondering where the resources and energy will come from to constantly feed these man made monstrocities (I made that word up!!).
Thanks so much James and Derrick.
Pressures on wildlife are mainly due to human overshoot. We just have to conserve the other species as best we can until the overshoot unwinds of its own accord, and I suspect most of the unwind will occur before the end of this century. The most dangerous period for the biosphere may be during the unwind itself, when we humans may be forced to chop down the forests for heating and cooking and expand the acreage under cultivation as per acre yields fall due to declining available inputs. The passage from industrialization to post-industrialization is through the valley of the shadow of death.