Quotes by Derrick Jensen

About Derrick Jensen:

Derrick Jensen is an American author and radical environmentalist (and prominent critic of mainstream environmentalism) living in Crescent City, California. According to Democracy Now!, Jensen "has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearin...

Derrick Jensen

Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over ...

Derrick Jensen

What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every la...

Derrick Jensen

The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an eco...

Derrick Jensen

This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living...

Derrick Jensen

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration c...

Derrick Jensen

John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason governm...

Derrick Jensen

Intimacy requires a slow, cumulative build of safety between people who agree to a relationship, an ongoing connection of care and concern. The performance of pain is essentially a form of bonding over trauma, and people can get addicted to their end...

Derrick Jensen

This is the moment when we have to decide: does a world exist outside ourselves and is that world worth fighting for? Another 200 species went extinct today. They were my kin. They were yours, too. If we know them as such, why aren't we fighting to s...

Derrick Jensen

No successes we might have are guaranteed to last as long as industrial civilization stands. Conversely, most of our losses are effectively permanent. Extinct species cannot be resurrected. Overdrawn aquifers or clear-cut forests will not return to t...

Derrick Jensen

Humans are only one species of millions. To kill millions of species for the benefit of one is insane, just as killing millions of people for the benefit of one person would be insane. And since unimpeded ecological collapse would kill off humans any...

Derrick Jensen

The ultimate goal of the resistance movement is a planet not just living, but in recovery, growing more alive and more diverse year after year. A planet on which humans live in equitable and sustainable communities without exploiting the planet or ea...

Derrick Jensen

This culture destroys landbases. That's what it does. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing that comes to mind cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground? One of the first written myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh defor...

Derrick Jensen

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don...

Derrick Jensen

Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven ti...

Derrick Jensen

This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an...

Derrick Jensen

A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.

Derrick Jensen

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You ...

Derrick Jensen

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

Derrick Jensen

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Derrick Jensen

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedd...

Derrick Jensen

Author Bio

  • NameDerrick Jensen
  • DescriptionAmerican environmentalist
  • BornDecember 19, 1960
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist
  • WorksEndgame; The Culture Of Make Believe; A Language Older Than Words