What We Leave Behind (Paperback)

~ Derrick Jensen (Author), Aric McBay (Author)
Key Phrases: oxygen revolution, garbage patch, authoritarian technics, United States, Elk Creek, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Industrial civilization is incompatible with life.... Unless it's stopped... it will kill every living being, begin environmental activists Jensen (A Language Older than Words) and McBay (Peak Oil Survival), introducing the recurring theme and thesis of this radical report on the state of Earth and call to action. The book contrasts natural systems of growth and decay, in which soil and life forms feed each other, with industrial civilization: essentially a complicated way of turning land into waste: garbage patches cover more than 40% of oceans and multitudes of fish and birds are being killed by plastic waste, now more abundant in the seas than phytoplankton. Jensen and McBay trash sustainability stars like William McDonough, who designs green buildings without questioning their unsustainable uses (truck factories and airports); the authors argue that we value our culture more than the planet that sustains it. The book is flawed by lapses into rants and rages, but Jensen and McBay's message that we need to grow up and put away the childish notion that we have the right to take whatever we want from nonhumans is eminently reasonable. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

“This culture is killing the planet,” declares Jensen, a radically holistic thinker and a passionate and persuasive writer both revered and reviled for his candor. Together with his environmentalist coauthor McBay, Jensen seeks to break the habits of mind that induce us to deny the severity of our environmental predicament and point the way to significant change. To that end, Jensen and McBay conduct an in-depth analysis of waste and wastefulness, from what passes through our bodies, including hazardous pharmaceuticals, to the planetary plagues of plastic and toxic chemicals. Combining arresting personal stories with unnerving facts about our throwaway society, the authors rigorously define genuine sustainability and warn us away from “pseudo-solutions.” Some may bridle at Jensen and McBay’s bluntness, urgency, and bold vision, but their demand for the end of wishful thinking and the beginning of environmental transformation is rooted in meticulously constructed arguments, striking psychological insights, and a profound love of life. It’s time, they declare, to “build a culture of resistance,” reject the status quo, and ask, “What do you want to leave behind?” --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583228675
• ISBN-13: 978-1583228678
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #75,412 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The right book at the right time, April 23, 2009

By	Matt Hannah (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

It sounds funny but I've been really waiting for a book about garbage. Anybody's who done a little bit of roadside clean up and wondered what the world will eventually look like if this continues will be discomforted to learn that we are creating the equivalent of several Manhattan's stacked end to end with garbage filled World Trade Centers a year and then some. This country alone.

Anybody's who's been smacking his or her head in the last year or two about eco-chic weddings, hybrid cars and biofuel will also be in good company. What's so incredible about this book is that the authors unmask not only the usual propagandists at work, but more importantly our own desires to delude ourselves.

This book also analyzes our relationship to the earth via decay and decomposition. I had never thought so much about these processes on such a microscopic scale. Anyone who's marveled at the collaboration happening in nature will be enthralled by this book's window into some of life's less savory collaborations (the conversion of the dead into food, of our own waste into food).

This book is not cheery reading but it's good medicine.

If you've read _Endgame_ by the way, this book goes into some new and very interesting places and I would say is ultimately more motivating. I also whole-heartedly recommend "How Shall I Live My Life?" which despite the overearnest title is the best collection of interviews I've ever read on the subject of not just environmentalism but also on living a full and beautiful life.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A passionate polemic against industrial civilization, September 1, 2009

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

While I'm going to disagree with a lot of what Derrick Jensen and his co-author Aric McBay have to say, I am in substantial agreement with their central thesis which is that industrial civilization is not sustainable as it currently exists. Whether industrial civilization can be altered to make it sustainable is what is arguable. Personally I believe it can be. Jensen does not.

I'm giving five stars to this book because it is passionately written and full of insights and knowledge that I wish were more widely known and appreciated. Jensen is an extremely knowledgeable and brilliant man. He is also a bitter and angry man. This book is a long polemic against what he sees as the on-going destruction of this planet by an unsustainable industrial society, a society willfully ignorant of what it is doing.

Where I part company with Jensen is in the identification of the underlying problem, which to me is too many people on the planet. For some reason, although he obliquely acknowledges that we have too many people, Jensen deemphasizes the crucial importance of this fact and even ignores it to concentrate on mostly industrial pollution and the destruction of the planet's ecosystems by the industrial machine. Implicit and central to Jensen's understanding is the idea that if you are spending 10 calories of energy for every one calorie of food produced (see pages 339 and 361 for this claim, which I suspect is close to correct) you have a situation that is headed for collapse in a world with 6.5-billion people. If however the same ratio were applied to a world with say half a billion people, it might be sustainable since there would be a surplus of energy available. Of course it would be much better if we were to both reduce our numbers and to employ more economic and sustainable means of subsistence.

"What We Leave Behind" are the waste products of industrialized society. Jensen makes a distinction between the natural wastes from our bodies--including our bodies!--which help to sustain the planet's ecosystems, and the wastes from our industrial machines which mostly do not. These wastes include everything from toxic metals to rank poisons to plastics to spent nuclear materials. He seems to believe that we cannot keep these wastes from harming the planet whereas I believe we can. It is a question of the proper use of technology and a political willingness to do things in a non-polluting and sustainable manner. In part Jensen's cynicism stems from his observation that corporations which account for most of the pollution are psychopathic entities that exist to maximize profits while externalizing costs. That is their nature: they cannot behave otherwise. Externalizing costs means dumping wastes onto somebody else's backyard or onto the laps of future generations. Make no mistake about it: that is what our giant corporations are doing today and have been doing since their inception.

Let me jump ahead to Jensen's solution. He has a five point plan for resistance in the pen-ultimate chapter, "Fighting Back." I won't outline it here except to mention that for Jensen the goal does indeed justify the means. He wants the culture to be "dismantled completely" (p. 381) and he wants to employ and disrupt the "centralized industrial and economic systems" themselves. (p. 382). He believes that fighting back "means not using violence when it's appropriate to not use violence..." and "using violence when it is appropriate to use violence." (p. 383) Jensen justifies his extreme position with this rationale: "Do you think that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been so successful if the government hadn't been afraid of Malcolm X?" (p. 397)

Jensen's argument rests on two presumptions, one, that things really are so bad and the planet's situation really so desperate that an overthrow of the system is imperative--now. And two, it is impossible for the system to change by its own accord. Like a junkie, industrial civilization must crash and burn before it has even a glimmer that change is necessary. After rejecting the possibility of a sustainable "technotopia"--a society in which technology is used in a sustainable way--Jensen comes to what he considers is most likely to happen: collapse. He recalls that Rome collapsed because it ran out of people and resources to exploit. He sees the same thing happening to industrial civilization. In this I think he may very well be correct because of the short-sightedness of our leaders and our institutions that are unable to look much past the next quarter's economic numbers.

Jensen argues that it is not enough to conserve energy and recycle wastes as individuals. Most of the waste and pollution comes from industry itself, as Jensen points out, not from individuals. His clarion call is nothing less than a call to revolution. I think this is correct (and probably inevitable) when the situation is truly desperate. But to take arms against the system when one's belly is full one must have the true believer's mentality, which in this case is the system will not change without the use of force. If there is a revolution against industrial civilization I suspect it will come from without, from those people in the exploited world who may very well be going to bed hungry and who have little to lose. In fact we may be seeing the scattered, disconnected and sporadic beginnings of a planetary revolution in the acts of terrorism that are today instigated by religious extremists. When the Vandals crash through the gates, we'll know. Until then it's unlikely that people in the industrialized world are going to heed Jensen's call to arms.

What I hope happens is that we have enough far-sighted, aware and educated people to bring about a change without having to go through the horrors of collapse or revolution. History suggests however that I am wrong and that Jensen is right.

Read or not read this extraordinary book at your peril.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars scariest book I've ever read, June 1, 2009

By	D. Wagner "black sheep" (Maryland US) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It's easily the most depressing book I could read . . .on the other hand, Jensen has ideas for remediation of the mess we're making. Read, weep, and learn.