Quotes from Derrick Jensen

Here's another definition I like, for different reasons: "An act of violence would be any act that inflicts physical or psychological harm on another."388 I like this one because its inclusiveness reminds us of the ubiquity of violence, and thus I think demystifies violence a bit. So, you say you oppose violence? Well, in that case you oppose life. You oppose all change. The important question becomes: What types of violence do you oppose?

Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Our lawns manifest our cultural desire: they are static, they are artificial, and they are kept sexually immature.

Green cars could be made of pure refined nonsense and fueled by bright green hot air combined with the broken and destroyed dreams of every nonhuman on earth, and they'd still be destructive.

a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.

When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It's not even secondary or tertiary. First, there's the question of resource consumption […]. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms.

Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet.

We can talk all we want about conservation biology and about the use of science to measure biodiversity,45 but in the real, physical world the real, physical effects of science on real, living nonhumans has been nothing short of atrocious.

Other double binds are false. This is one of the latter. There is an unspoken premise of the argument in favor of wind turbines: that harvesting energy is more important than birds and bats. That some sacrifices (billions of sacrifices, in this case) are justifiable to provide industrial humans with energy. This is, of course, the usual human supremacist assumption. The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. That's what we must do.

One planter in Georgia argued that a former slave had shown himself "certainly unfit for freedom" because, "impudently," he didn't allow himself to be whipped.

In South Carolina, a man was murdered and his stepdaughter whipped because she'd had the insolence to "embarrass" a white family by bearing the child of one of its members.

Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, "Power. If I've got power or authority over someone, it's my responsibility to use that only to help them. It's my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are.

We've had a long time to get used to the screams. Just as our civilizations expansion is marked by a widening circle of genocide, so too forests and all of their inhabitants precede us. Deserts dog our heels.

White [...] "Indian wannabees" or as those who mine indiginous traditions the way multinationals mine their land.

Well, even if we had the money, and even if solar power were a social good, it's not a planetary good. And that's the point. Industrial solar energy doesn't help the world. It's just another way to power industrial capitalism. At root, it's an industrial product designed and built in the global capitalist marketplace to make a profit. Like other products, it leaves behind the wreckage of destroyed land, poisoned water, and devastated communities.

And there is also this fact: The only people who want a nuclear power plant, or a solar panel, or a wind turbine, are people who demand industrial levels of energy. Those levels are needed for a single purpose: the wholesale conversion of the living to the dead, the longest war ever. And our choice is now very stark: Stand with the living or go down with the dead.

Twelve thousand years ago, the war against the earth began. In nine places,2 people started to destroy the world by taking up agriculture. Understand what agriculture is: In blunt terms, you take a piece of land, clear every living thing off it—ultimately, down to the bacteria—and then plant it for human use. Make no mistake: agriculture is biotic cleansing.

We've been making love these past two days by talking and I want for our bodies to join the conversation.

Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.

The industrial economy is based on systematic theft from land bases, and the conversion of these living communities into dead products. That's what an industrial economy is. The economy does not create value for the real world: It destroys the real world.

Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent.

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.