“Let's be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet. Even if we confine ourselves merely to humans, these activities are causing an unprecedented privation, as hundreds of millions of people-and today more than yesterday,… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
“I have heard people suggest that because humans are natural that everything humans do or create is natural. Chainsaws are natural. Nuclear bombs are natural. Our economics is natural. Sex slavery is natural. Asphalt is natural. Cars are natural. Polluted… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
“In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
“I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.” — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
“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… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share
If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world. — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
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… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
“ISOLATION DOES STRANGE THINGS to a person’s mind. This is true for any social creature, human or otherwise. Monkeys taken from their mothers at birth, placed alone in stainless-steel chambers, and deprived of contact with other animals (“human and subhuman” alike, according to the researchers), develop irreversible mental illnesses. As one of the experts in this field, Harry Harlow, put… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share
My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
Where will you drive your own picket stake? Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share Image
“So often, environmentalists and others working to slow the destruction are capable of plainly describing the problems (Who wouldn’t be? The problems are neither subtle nor cognitively challenging), yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response to these clear and clearly insoluble problems, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination. Gandhi wrote a letter… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share
“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”… — Derrick Jensen Copy Share
