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Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance

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Endgame is a book for our time. It is an important contribution to radial environmentalism, direct action and understanding the underlying subterranean currents that transpire to make up western culture as we know it today.

Endgame asks the question and then attempts to solve it: Do you believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living? If the answer is no what then is to be done about it?

Willing or not, ready or not the human species is involved in an all-out, no holds barred war against the dominant culture, western culture. Most people are not competitors, they are the stakes. The spoils, no less, is every living, beating heart and every soul of sentient life upon the planet. The effects of the dominant culture are obvious in every polluted river, the devastation of wildlife, destruction of habitat, the loss of the Coho salmon, dioxin in every mother's breast milk and the habitat of great grizzly bear to name but a few examples from the book. Derrick Jensen wants that turned around. No one can be exempted from the dominant cultures effects. No sector of our lives remains untouched. No sector of any non-humans life remains untouched. Endgame invites us to fight back.

From the standpoint of the traditional left, the vices of contemporary culture - the Machine - what Derrick Jensen uncovers might be all too easily explained away to that old devil capitalism. Another mundane interpretation might centre around the evils stemming from the unrestricted pursuit of profit and the manipulative deceptions of the few profiteers as a major corrupting influence. Endgame isn't like that thankfully.

Sure, Jensen recognises that to ensure the bone and marrow of the dominant cultures value system, the central mechanism must exclusively fixate on human worth and human values exclusively and to achieve this end, indoctrination or "education" from womb to tomb is mandatory. On one hand there must be a constant reinforcement of the dominant cultures ideals with an emphasis on each individuals total dependence on a system that has a death urge and is killing us, the land, the non-human animal kingdom and sentient life all at once.

Endgame's piece de resistance is in exploring this death urge and then finding ways to resist it. The author has gone there before us and saw that mid-wifed by the entrepreneur, the banker, the technocrat, the scientists and ultimately the lawyer of the dominant culture, this sane and sustainable way of living can not, will not, be born from between the printed sheets of pacts and agreements; joint ventures and mergers; contracts and covenants and international treatises signed and countersigned by the political bureaucrat.

Endgame neither lacks cultural resonance or political closure. It engulfs both.

In the Abolitionist's interview with the author, Derrick Jensen notes that even when our best efforts are applied, both eco and animal activists always seem to lose. Although emancipatory promises are possible, they are not being realised by activists around the globe today and the problem is on this battleground, this landscape, the contenders are not prepared to fight the culture itself as a whole. Localised actions, no matter how noble and while still important, do not seek to address the power structures already in place from the dominant culture. The dominant culture itself knows as surely as any lethal cancer that to "win" all you need to do is plughole the power base, the essentials for life such as the utilities, electricity or oil for example, and then what is extraneous to that kind of control is allowed to wither and die or if resisted, is then politically sought out for extermination. In short, western culture's agenda is a ruthless form of materialist monopoly playing itself out.
Jensen's genius is such that he is capable of providing a spiritual dimension to the ecological project. The Machine's lifeblood sets anonymous abstractions like `productivity' and `efficiency' far above human, non-human and planetary needs and it's this the kind of culture Jensen seeks not to reform but to demolish.
Endgame identifies vested interests which survive by controlling the state, the western "productive" apparatus and the institutions of "civilized" life that are by their very nature parasitic and predatory. This in turn plays upon the consciousness of the individual that sets up expectations with strategies of repressive normalization that imposes false needs on individuals. True needs are clean water, air, food and lodgings at some ecologically sustainable level of culture.

The world is on the brink of a human catastrophe of unprecedented proportions and the critical mass, the western intellectuals, along with activists working within the system have fallen prey to malaise and inaction. An unspoken theme running throughout Derrick Jensen's work is how to connect the microcosm with the macrocosm. In this he articulates a type of spirituality that is not transcendent as such, but is based squarely on our connection with the land and defending that same land-base and the ones we love. His work fosters biodiversity, respect and responsibility for the land and for indigenous people. He knows that indigenous peoples demands for rights to their biodiverse environments are direct challenges to the way in which hegemonic political discourse of the Machine and traditional critiques of capitalism are framed today.

Endgame recognises the living force of new ideas or a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living incarnated into political culture, as it now stands, is impossible. What Endgame proposes is the antithesis of the dominant cultures political structure and therefore has to be worked at from outside the system.
In fact an influx of living ideas, such as Endgame has produced, into the existing political structure is a direct threat to that structure. Derrick Jensen has said that what he wants is the fall of civilization and he's not kidding. He's not interested in "democratic egalitarianism" or a style of "liberal democracy". He's called for a revolution but who, the next question is asked, has heard the call?
Endgame knows that the dominant culture has no moral base and never did have, as a mooring point for any system of government, because it does not require it for its specific functioning. What currently passes for a moral base is nothing more than pressing needs calling for immediate action that are responded to on a situation by situation basis. Jensen makes a convincing case for its opposite - a relationship that is symbiotic, constant and intimate with the earth, others and living nature.
If not we are left with competing systems and the inexorable paradox of humans deprived of an essential dimension of their being as market forces alone determine the price of what's good and what's valuable.

Nothing short of the rudest shock of ultimate reality - of life and death - will change the mindset. Jensen asks where is our wrath in all of this? Why ask for mercy on a system-the Machine- that shows no mercy? And then he offers us a robust challenge of our time.

Anarchists and existentialists both know that if the dominant culture has made the world confused, ambitious, greedy by seeking power, position and prestige and if the dominant culture is aggressive, brutal, competitive and has built a culture that is equally competitive, brutal and violent then our responsibility lies in understanding ourselves first and then to act dynamically from out of that knowledge source.

The dominant culture is a malignancy that will keep devouring new resources even if that means undermining the very body - nature herself - upon which it depends. How are the specifics of that to be best understood?

Endgame Volume 2 Resistance

Derrick Jensen wondered, "What resistance would look like and what it would accomplish - what the world would look like - if those of us who care about life on the planet leveled the playing field?"
He goes on to say, "What if we said, "In the war you are waging against the world, you will kill some of us, but mark my words, we shall destroy all of this civilization that is destroying the planet"".
I'll bet money on it that the author gets a lot of flak for that statement alone. Destroying civilization?
However, I'll also bet equal money that holocaust survivors and those who are living or have lived in the extreme know exactly what he is talking about. Docile acquiescence and abdication of will and judgment can be found well beyond the concentration camps; they are everyday behaviours. The young rabbinical student who stood at the door to an Auschwitz gas chamber and cried, "We must submit to the inevitable" did nothing shameful. Obviously today however, the radical eco-environmental and animal liberation movement has a choice to make. What side are you on?

This is an exceptional book that is potent enough to change lives and revolutionise within. Essential reading.

Derrick Jensen is one of those authors that people love or hate. As for myself, I have mixed feelings about the guy and his message. Despite these mixed feelings, though, I never fail to read his books when they come out - and Endgame was by far an away the most anticipated and climactic one yet due to its highly controversial subject: taking down civilization. That's right, taking down civilization.

But why would anyone want to take down civilization, you might ask? At this point, I should say that if you have not already had the pleasure of receiving a formal introduction to the man and his work, you might want to start with one of his earlier publications, such as Listening to the Land, A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Strangely Like War and Welcome or the Machine. In fact, I would recommend reading them all. They lay the groundwork from which Endgame both springs and builds upon: specifically, that civilization is F-U-B-A-R and doomed to collapse in the near but not too distant future, if not from climate change, then from resource depletion, soil erosion, toxic buildup or any other of the common environmental factors outlined in Jared Diamond's Collapse or the Worldwatch Institute's annual State of the World reports.

Or you might want to just dive right in, since in Volume I of Endgame Jensen outlines many of the fundamental flaws of our cherished civilization. And although each page reads with the power and relevance of an anarcho-primitiveist manifesto, Endgame, the two-volume summation of Jensen's writing career, amounts to nearly 1,000 pages in total - a lot of lumber for a strident call to arms. In fact, under the right circumstances, the book itself is large enough to be used as a blunt instrument to aid the deconstruction of civilization. All jokes aside, though, the net result is a rather awkward flow: a seemingly never-ending concatenation of ideas that, although related by theme, often contradict each other - by the author's own admission:

"Why do you think I laid out the premises explicitly for you, put you in a position of actively choosing to agree or disagree with them? Whey do you think I've approached this form so many directions? Why do you think I've expressed my own fears, expressed my own confusion? Why do you think I've made points, undercut or contradicted them, and then made them again? ... The point is the process I am trying to model. The point is that you puzzle your own way through, and figure out for yourself what, if anything, you need to do." (p 886)

Although I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and often recommend it to friends, Jensen does not come off as being genuine here. By this, I don't mean that he is purposefully deceiving the readers so much as himself. Along with all the interesting environmental science, psychology and poetry the book contains, the underlying current of rage and despair that makes his writing so profound reaches an all time high in Endgame - to the point where he calls upon the reader to "go on the offensive," imploring us to blow up dams, tear up concrete and knock down cell phone towers. Just "don't get sloppy," he advises. "Don't tell anyone who doesn't need to know. Don't get caught" (Dams: Part IV).

Of course, the minute some 16-year-old kid is locked up for taking Jensen's advice and demolishing a dam - or worse - I am sure Jensen will quote something from the 2-page chapter entitled "Responsibility" in his defense - a chapter which, remarkably enough, is little more than an apology for doing such things as blowing up dams to protect your "land base". Or perhaps he will quote one of the many disclaimers ("but don't listen to me, follow your heart") he so sparingly peppers throughout a book predominately dedicated to inspiring illegal activities. Considering the average age of his readership is probably around twenty-four, devoting only two pages to responsibility in a book of this nature is, in my opinion, an abominable abrogation of balance. But, hey, like most geniuses, Jensen is not known for his emotional balance.

All books have weaknesses, just as all authors have weaknesses, and having met Jensen on more than one occasion and sat in on many of his lectures around the country, I am very much aware that the overall importance of his thought far outweighs the single-minded, dam-demolition-obsessed demagogic carelessness of his presentation. In conclusion, I highly recommend that you read this book - but be careful not to leave it lying around where one of your curious, trigger-happy kids might find it unattended. The content is dangerous enough to require parental discretion - which I advise.

Some books you might also want to check out of a similar theme: Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism, Against Civilization, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, and Igniting a Revolution.

j.w.k.

This seems to be Jensen's ultimate manifesto. It is basically a declaration of war against agricultural and industrial civilization.

But Jensen's point is not only that ultimately humans will have to surrender all their jazzy tech toys (including indoor plumbing) due to inevitable general collapse of industrial civilization, but that we should be glad to surrender them, and we should do so as early as possible to prevent what bit of species extinction we still can. But even more important than any individual "personal lifestyle" type of remediation is to actively fight industrial civilization's more destructive artifacts with explosives.

What's really interesting and surprising about Jensen is his essential optimism! Yes, despite 2,000 pages or so of griping and groaning about how bad it all is, Jensen still seems to think that some small number of humans, living in just the right way (as originally exemplified by North American indigenous peoples) are compatible with the survival of the rest of the biosphere. But I do have to wonder whether humans in the long term are genetically programmed to destroy as much as they can whenever they get the chance. Or at least, some humans will have this tendency, and then the bad will drive out the good - as we have seen with the 500 year European domination of the planet. So I tend to think that long term, humans and the earth biosphere are incompatible. It is a deadend species, and as long as we are building castles in the air, and wishing on a star, I guess I'd throw in my lot more with the Voluntary Human Extinction crowd.

But Jensen would VEHEMENTLY disagree with the above paragraph, and say that any such talk of genetic programming is at best nothing but scientistic gooblygook serving the master power Matrix, and at worst just one more excuse to put off the work that is crying out to be done (blowing up Columbia river dams to restore naturally spawning salmon).

In any case, once you have read this or any other Jensen book, you'll be in the mental grip of his moral absolutism - forever. (Of course, in Jensen's view, you already are in its grip, as you need clean water, don't you?) I don't mean his moral absolutism is necessarily bad or good. I'm still pondering that question. Nor do I mean that you'll necessarily accept his unrelenting assertion that the triumvirate of naturally clean water, freely spawning salmon, and reciprocally sustained landbase trump all other conceivable human values. I mean it literally - in that Jensen poses a moral and practical absolute principle that is so starkly opposed to every other activity, relationship, possession, plan, "hope", or value in your "normal" human life as you conceive it within the existent Matrix of industrial civilization - the Culture of Empire - that you will be unable to mentally reconcile the two. If Jensen is right, your whole "live long and prosper" mindset - as conceived and instantiated within the current paradigm - is flat wrong and must be jettisoned.

Thus you'll need to either accept Jensenism (then prove it by blowing up a dam), or reject it (implicitly rejecting clean water and allying yourself with child rapists), or descend to the intellectual purgatory of pure 24 carat Doublethink - forever. None of your quasi-religious New Age blathering will cut any ice with this guy.

So this book is a carry vector that will infect you with the above mental virus, and once infected you'll never be free of it. The shadow of the dead or never-spawned salmon will dog all the rest of your days on this earth.

I want to like Derrick Jensen, I really do. I like where he's coming from. I'd probably like to be his neighbor. But, oh, are these books frustrating. (I should note that I'm reviewing both books together, which is how they should be reviewed.)

His book jacket describes Jensen as "author, teacher, activist, small farmer, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, he regularly stirs auditoriums across the country with revolutionary spirit." I'll have more to say about his "uncompromising dissent" and "revolutionary spirit" later on, but just ponder those phrases for a moment. Think too about how much time he has for each of those activities, if he's serious about any of them. This matters here because a lack of editing mars these books.

These books consist of a bunch of essays, though they're presented as something more. After a while, they read like second drafts of what Jensen writes in his daily journal. As you'd expect in a journal, they often revisits themes, adding a new perspective on old themes or tying together two or more themes that were treated separately before. That's all fine, up to a point, but it ultimately becomes repetitive. Repetition is deadly in a book of 891 pages of text, or 929 pages including end matter.

In the end, Jensen needed to rework this material more extensively than he did. He's a brilliant writer, and it's oh-so-easy to let him take you along on a ride. He is passionate about the environment and provides trenchant criticisms of economic development, civilization, and other matters. But the lack of editing means that he doesn't really have a strong argument overall, and in fact he shrunk back from where I thought he was going. Indeed, he never came back to a number of issues that he had promised earlier that he would return to. These issues, unfortunately, are the hard issues that I really wanted him to address.

Another measure of the unnecessary repetition in these volumes is, I think, the fact that there are a lot more Amazon reviews of Volume I than Volume II - - apparently a lot of people don't feel they need to read the second book even if they liked the first one.

What do his essays concern? Well, Jensen is particularly impassioned about dams and salmon runs. Many (most?) dams are completely uneconomic and survive only because of large government subsidies to the businesses that build them and maintain them. Yet these dams destroy rivers and riparian habitats, and have devastated salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest (where Jensen lives).

Jensen is also a strong critic of civilization. He's right that civilization is ultimately unsustainable. Though it's not often recognized, Jensen *has* to be right that economic growth is unsustainable because we will ultimately run up against the energy constraints provided by the sunlight hitting the earth's surface. Technology cannot escape those constraints, though it can postpone the day of reckoning.

Though Jensen is right about the ultimate problem, he wrongly sees things changing now. For example, he predicts a violent revolution, leading to a new, localized form of human living within our generation. That's not right. Why not? Jensen is a neo-Malthusian but doesn't consider critiques of original Malthusians, in particular the role of technology. He doesn't consider that a post-industrial civilization might still use technology to increase living standards and carrying capacity. For good or ill, technology will postpone the revolution for a long time.

After the revolution, would small-scale communities living off the land make the world a better place? Think of the small-scale communities in farming and ranching that you may know. Are these the leftists utopias that Jensen would like, or are they deeply conservative places? Be careful what you wish for, Derrick Jensen.

There are various other problems with his overall themes. Jensen romanticizes indigenous peoples, and treats them as an undifferentiated whole, and "Good," while civilized peoples are similarly undifferentiated and "Bad." This doesn't treat indigenous peoples as real people with both virtues and faults, but as cardboard cutouts. Indeed, this romanticization of the indigenous is every bit as racist as the mainstream colonial/imperialist perspective.

Jensen is highly critical of trade because he dislikes globalization. However, he hasn't thought through the issues - - he accepts the notion of a division of labor between writers such as himself and small farmers, artisans, and other people. Presumably these people live by trading things. Even the indigenous peoples whom Jensen so loves traded, often at long distance - - trade between coastal peoples and inland peoples being an obvious example. The logic of this trade is no different at the global level, and by improving efficiency trade can *lower* our impact on the environment. It's possible to argue that trade can be bad for the environment too, but Jensen doesn't want to address these questions with his head, preferring an emotional reaction against excesses of development.

His heart also makes Jensen come across as intolerant, not only of his enemies but of his potential allies. For example, he provides superficial but biting criticisms of Krech's _Myth of the Ecological Indian_ and Mann's _1491_, both of which I've reviewed on Amazon if you're interested. Taken as a whole, these are both *pro*-indigenous books (indeed, I criticized Mann for being a bit too uncritically supportive). Both are politically on the Left, like Jensen. But Jensen dismisses them in offensive terms, apparently because they are not as uncritically pro-indigenous as he is.

Finally, it must be said that, by the end of the book, Jensen comes across as possibly hypocritical. He advocates violence but doesn't put himself on the line. He advocates blowing up dams but doesn't do it himself. In fairness, he's honest about being a coward. He also believes that he can do more good as a writer, and he may be right. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Whew! My overly-long review probably also needs editing, but it reflects the fact that Jensen is nothing if not thought-provoking. I'll give the first volume four stars for the ideas and the writing, and the second volume only three stars because the lack of editing wears the reader down by then. Save a tree and borrow it from the library.

Derrick Jensen has compiled a tremendous amount of passion and information into these two stupendous volumes, one of which provides a stunning critique of what we like to call by the name of civilization, with the second discussing the nature of effective resistance.

One value of this work has been its punching through of the denial and wishful thinking that keep so many environmentalists and thoughtful critics locked into fantasies that turn into failures. The term "spiritual bypass" has been used to describe the flight into contemplations of goodness and light that leap over the hard work of understanding the darkness now gripping the entire globe. I'm reminded of the Jungian analysts who wrote to George W. Bush and suggested that he take up a contemplative practice so he wouldn't be so destructive. The critique of taking too much responsibility--e.g., "We're all part of the destruction"--also goes straight home. To my ears this inappropriate shouldering of accountability sounds like abuse victims blaming themselves for the perpetrator's misbehavior. As Murray Bookchin pointed out long ago, the role of a poor black kid in Harlem hardly compares to that of the CEO of an oil multinational.

On the other hand, the author's dismissal of both hope and the usual activist methods ignores some crucial facts. One is that the environmental movement, which stretches back well before Rachel Carson, has proven one of the most successful in history. We shouldn't be blinded by how seldom the mainstream media dwell on this fact. For examples the reader might look over Rebecca Solnit's book HOPE IN THE DARK.

Secondly, there are plenty of social science studies that demonstrate the ineffectiveness of shock tactics and scaring people who might otherwise be willing to take a deeper look at the growing planetary crisis. The perpetrators of it should certainly be held accountable, but for the person in the street, such tactics are no more convincing than the photographs of destroyed fetuses displayed by anti-abortion stalkers at Earth Day festivals. People generally respond to attacks on their defenses by going numb and turning away. We can't afford the luxury of that.

It also seems to me that the analogy to Star Wars is in some ways false. I've spoken with many people at various levels of the corporate hierarchy, and not all of them are Darth Vaders (a psychoanalytically unfortunate choice, alas) or Vader slaves. Many, including executives and board members, find what they do repellant but feel caught up in a capitalistic system that requires them to behave destructively. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, these people are actually hoping for alternatives; declaring war on them shuts down any possibility of dialoguing about how they could do business differently.

What the SW analogy also neglects is that the Empire was beaten not by the Rebel Alliance, whose valiant efforts did set the stage, but by a single man who surrendered his weapon and refused combat with the Dark Father. Why did he do this? Because he realized that behind the mask of the opponent he demonized hid a fearful human being like himself. He was able to move beyond seeing his enemy as an inhuman monster and to feel such compassion for him that balance was restored to the Force after all when Vader turned against the Emperor. Luke neither backed down nor continued to retaliate; he evolved into the kind of warrior who does no violence and yet cannot be beaten. As a result, the day was saved, as was the planet the battle station threatened to pulverize. One could even argue that the Death Star's destruction was unnecessary. When stripped of its armaments it would have made a fine museum to the history of tyranny: a permanent memorial of what we should not build, and why we should not build it. I've been wishing for years that some Native Californians would push their way into the missions of California and create their own more honest displays as remembrances of the terrible consequences of unbridled genocide and greed.

Incidentally, six years of steady work with domestic violence perpetrators, murderers, rapists, and berserk soldiers has only strengthened my conviction of two things with regard to the destroyers around us: 1. They must be unfailingly and unflinchingly held accountable for their actions, and 2. They are only irredeemable to the degree we give up on them and turn away from their humanity just as they already have.

I would also like to recommend Jensen's other books, particularly LISTENING TO THE LAND, a very fine selection of interviews with many key thinkers and activists in the environmental movement. I earnestly hope their author can stay out of jail long enough to give us more of these admirable examples of speaking on behalf of landscapes under siege.

This book arrived and I was somewhat disappointed because it was somewhat beat up. I do not normally have this problem when I buy from Amazon.

Very well done, an eye opener, it's so sad to come to understand the damage we have and are doing to our planet.

Service by this seller - very good. birthe

Why did it take me so long to discover this author ,it's like he says everything I've thought for years

A sequel to volume I, volume II deals with the nitty gritty of bringing civilization down. Jensen has already convinced me in volume I that we need to bring civilization down, violently (because civilization itself is so violent), and the sooner the better. Volume II is a rather digressive discussion of how to go about it. Jensen offers two possible approaches, blowing up dams and blowing up cell towers. In one chapter he parks beneath a cell tower and thinks about blowing it up and the steps he would need to take (such as learning how to handle explosives). These leads to thoughts as to why he doesn't go study explosives.

This, in essence, is the meat of the book. Jensen's ambivalence over the steps he knows absolutely must be taken to preserve the human species. He proposes some possible ways out of his dilemma. Maybe if he had a group to help him blow up the cell tower instead of doing it by himself. This seems to be the major motivation of both volumes - to convince a large group of people of the absolute urgency of doing SOMETHING right now, while there is still hope of saving the human species. However part of his discussion revolves around a need to anticipate how his actions will play out - around an innate need not to hurt more people with his actions than absolutely necessary.

Although he doesn't say so directly, much of the philosophical discussion reiterates the battle Marx, Engels and Lenin had with contemporary anarchists. Marx, Engels and Lenin were quite insistent that it wasn't enough to destroy the state - that careful organization was needed prior to dismantling the it - to ensure there was some type of social organization to replace it.

Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE

Let me start with the things I love about this book.
What I love about Derrick's writing is the personal style of it all. It's free flowing, conversational and personal in a way that you feel like you're having these conversations with him. One of the things I have always enjoyed about his writing is his personal style.

What I also love about this book is that he takes no prisoners in exposing the environmental destruction, objectification and insanity that is fueled by this civilization and the powers that be. Rarely has anyone had the guts to really put the smack down on the people that actively profit from the destruction of the planet. He does not mince words, and rightly so given the grave state of things today. This alone makes this a great read for any environmentalist or friend of the earth.

There are however some issues I take with his work, and indeed with the entire primitivism line of thought in general, which is why my review for this book is only 3 stars.

One of the big issues of primitivism is that a return to the stone age, by necessity would require the mass die-off of more than 6 billion people, men women and children. To most people this is appallingly heartless and unacceptable. Derrick absolves himself of the murderous notion with his belief that civilization will fall anyway, so no matter his ideas or politics, nothing will stop the nasty crash and subsequent die-off. To the contrary Derrick argues, the sooner civilization falls, the more of the planet will be salvageable, less people will die.

This is where my big issue comes in:
Civilizations, do fall. And a civilization as ours currently is, I agree is entirely unsustainable. But to me, the idea that as an absolute matter of fact we cannot create a sustainable civilization is intellectually dishonest and naïve.

Before primitivists start flagging this review, let me state a few things that give me reason for this thought.

-Studies have shown that with the implementation of super grids (which we have the technology for currently) we could power the entire world on solar and wind energy alone.

- Buildings have been designed that create more energy than they use. (Recall Derrick's definition of sustainability: giving back more than you take.)

-There are today hundreds of products, and more being created every day, that are certified "cradle to cradle technology" meaning they are made in such a way that they can either be disassembled and used again in a new product, or (because they contain no harmful chemicals) can be returned safely to the earth to bio-degrade.

Imagine a civilization that used 100% renewable electricity, used products that were either 100% up-cyclable or biodegradable, and lived in homes/buildings that gave more than they used. Now all these things are not yet being done on a wide scale, but that's not my point. My point is these things, almost by definition, shatter the premise that a crash is inevitable and the death of billions a necessary genocide. Furthermore, we don't know what technology in the future awaits us. Yes I read the book, and I agree that faith in technology (faith in anything really) can be a fatal flaw. Agreed. But look at human history: it's just a giant litany of unprecedented technological advancements. Agriculture, electricity, the internet, the microchip, and on and on. Watch old science fiction movies and you can see them using computers the size of rooms, and slide rules in the year "2050." Nobody could've predicted then that we would have "Ipads" or mobile phones.

And that's my point, the definition of technology is "the use of knowledge to solve practical problems." Who's to say we can't use technology to solve the issue of a sustainable civilization, or ecological crises? Civilization has wrought destruction on our planet, to humans and nonhumans alike. We have become disconnected from each other and our planet in our boom of technological innovations. And given this, Derrick would rather us just trash the whole experiment. Instead of seeing if there is a solution, if there is a way to create an eco-civilization, Derrick would rather we stop while we're ahead and bring it all down, 6 billion deaths and all. And therein lies our disagreement. I'm not so ready to sign the death certificates for 6 billion human beings.

I have other disagreements as well, but those apply to all primitivism philosophers not just Derrick Jensen (John Zerzan anyone?) I don't believe the idea of the noble savage is entirely accurate. I don't think that a world where asthma, child birth or an infected blister mean certain death is entirely appealing. I don't think our world complete with religion, nuclear waste and weaponry out the ears can ever really just fall back to a primitive state of bliss. And I don't think that the humanity would welcome it. I fully believe that the day civilization crashes would just be the day before people begin to build it back up, in whatever form it takes. Technology is "the use of knowledge to solve practical problems" and given that I don't the world will ever stay in the stone age as Derrick might hope. There always be a desire to solve the problems that the wild presents (food supplies, the weather, death) and given that humanity will always seek a practical answer: agriculture, shelter, and medicine. And so it goes.

I recommend this book for its depth, it's analysis and it's wonderful style. It truly is a worthy read. But word to the wise, don't put all your eggs (or salmon) in the Jensen basket.