Back in America

If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.

I'm Stan Bertolot, the host of Back in America, a podcast exploring America's culture, values, and identity. My guest is an American author, eco-philosopher, radical environmentalist, and anti-civilization advocate. He once said that we are going to watch the end of the world on television until the TV goes out. The solution, according to him, is to go back to the Stone Age. It's ridiculous, you think? Well, his movement, the Deep Green Resistance, is gaining traction in Europe and in the US. And people side with him in thinking that whether you want it or not, the civilization is on the brink of extinction. Welcome to Back in America, Derek Jensen. Oh, thank you for having me. Can you please introduce yourself?

I'm a long-time grassroots environmentalist and the author of more than 25 books. So Derek, let's be honest. As a value proposition, going back to the Stone Age isn't going to be very popular with most people, is it? Not particularly. The point, though, is that popularity isn't what's really important. What's important is reality. 30 years ago now, I was riding in a car with a friend of mine and we were stuck in traffic. And I was just making conversation to pass the time. And I said, so George, if you could live at any level of technology that you wanted, what would it be? And he said, that's a really stupid question, Derek. We can fantasize whatever we want, but the truth is there's only one level

of technology that's sustainable, and that's the Stone Age. Whether we want to or not, we will be living there again someday. And the only question really is what's left of the world when we get there. So that's the story. And then if I could summarize my work in one sentence, it would be this culture will not last forever. And when it's over, I would prefer that there is more of the world left rather than less. I was really wondering how do you sell this idea to developing countries? I mean, people that are trying to reach the level we live in in the West. Surely telling them, stay where you are and even go back to the Stone Age is not really going to work with them. It depends on which groups of people you're talking about. Several years ago,

I asked both Anuradha Mittal, who's a former director of Food First and Vandana Shiva, if the people of India would be better off if the global economy collapsed tomorrow. And they both laughed and said, of course. And what Anuradha Mittal said was that there are former granaries of India that now export dog food and tulips to Europe. There are subsistence farmers who are being driven off their land so that their land can be used for cash crops. And then what Vandana Shiva said, I said specifically, let's talk about the poor in cities. And she said, well, the reason that the poor people of Mumbai are there is not because they want to live in a ghetto. The reason that the poor people of Mumbai are there is because

they've been driven off their land. And so, yes, once you are brought into the system, then of course you would rather have a higher standard of living rather than less. But that's all based on having destroyed the land base in the first place. I've got a friend who used to be married to a man from Bangladesh. And even in his lifetime, they went from when he was younger, so say in the 80s, his mother would say to him, go down to the river and catch us some fish for lunch. And he would do that. And then by the 90s and later on, they could no longer do that because the river was so polluted that they couldn't catch fish and they had to get their fish from Iceland. So again, once you've been forcibly brought into the system, most of us

would rather have computers than not, if that's the only choice. That's predicated on having been forced into the system in the first place through the destruction of wild food stocks where you live. Well, I was curious to hear what you think of less radical approaches to collapse, such as the resilience movement in the UK or the one advocated by Pablo Servigne. I don't know if you know him in France that calls for group-based acceptance of what's to come. It's a movement which is almost spiritual. It's a spiritual journey to prepare us for the after collapse. I think that that's all fine. And I have no problem with attempting to make one's community resilient. Talk about that in a second. The thing that's missing from all of those, for the most

part, is any care whatsoever for the natural world as itself. They're still based on how are we going to survive this mess, which is a question. But the question that most interests me is how are the salmon going to survive this mess? How are the redwood forests going to survive this mess? Which ultimately leads to people... I write for the salmon, for the prairie dogs, for the oceans, and I also write for the humans 100 years from now. Because the humans 100 years from now, what they're going to care about is whether the land can support them. And ultimately, a biocentric view or an eco-centric view is consistent with a long-term anthropocentric view. The thing that the system itself has done, which is the reason that we're in this mess in the first

place, or one of the reasons, is that we have been tied to a system that for our own survival, we have to rely on a system that is systematically, functionally, based on harming the land base. And that's not a plan really with the future. So anyway, I have no problem with all the resilient stuff. It's just my focus is a bit different. And one of the things I want to say about the resilient stuff is a lot of people have asked me in interviews, so what would you like for everybody to learn from the whole lockdown, the global lockdown? What would you like for people to learn from this? And I first started paying attention to it when Wuhan locked down. Two days later, a Hyundai factory shut down in Korea, which is a couple

of thousand miles away. I found that really fascinating and horrifying that this is how interdependent the global economy is. And so one of the lessons that I would hope that people would learn from this lockdown, and this is a place where I and the resilience people mesh very well together, is we really have to relocalize food systems. I would like you to tell me more about your thought on the critics of our civilization, because your movement is more than environmental, I believe, right? It's also political. How would you separate political and environmental? So most of us have heard in some way or another of the great chain of being, which is la scala naturale of a hierarchy where you have the god or the gods at the top, and then angels,

and then the king, and then regular people, and then I guess regular women, and then and then came indigenous people, then animals, plants, precious metals, rocks, and soil. It basically was a hierarchy from pure mind on top to pure matter on the bottom. And I think that that has been one of the most destructive notions that we have, and that manifests in so many ways. For example, when we think of, and I call myself in this too, when we think of one of the greatest pieces of art in the world, we might think of the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, those are the things we normally think of. We don't normally think of sunset. We don't normally think of the color of trees in the fall. We don't normally think of the song of metal arcs, and those are just natural.

Those are not created. And so it's like, if we make something, it's really special. But if nature makes something, well, it's no big deal. And another way to think about this is think about the greatest inventions of all time. And the first things we're going to think of are the wheel, the lever, the screw, maybe the pump. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of them, but you get the idea. When we think of the greatest inventions of all time, we don't think of, I don't know, metabolism. We don't think of sex. We don't think of proprioception, which is how you know where your hand is, even if you can't see it, how you know where your different body parts are. All of those are considered, again, natural, and they're devalued. And years ago, I was having a

conversation with a friend of mine who's a fisheries biologist. We're sitting at the ocean. He told me that sharks have rough skin, and the rough skin is perfectly adapted to make it so they can swim fast with the least effort possible. And I know that this guy attends church. So I said, that's just extraordinary that nature would come up with that. And do you believe in some sort of God? Do you believe in some sort of design to come up with that design for the shark? And he said this great line, which I've never forgotten, which is, there is great intelligence in time. And what he meant by that is that if you have sharks for tens and hundreds of millions, I don't know how long sharks have been around, but certainly tens of millions of years,

maybe even hundreds, I don't know. If you have them for that long, there are going to be designs that take place that are extremely intelligent. And that sort of, you know, there's a part of me that, I mean, I have a degree in physics, and there's a part of me that rankles at that, because like, that's not intelligence. But that's that hierarchy again, that notion that if we make it up, it's great. But if it just, if it happens in nature, it's nothing. So then let's go back to supremacy that, that let's move forward to a few thousand years ago. So women are different than men. And people from Africa are different than people from Sweden. People from Tanzania are different than people from Sweden. You know, there's the

resistance to malaria. And to take this further, you know, bears are different than humans. Vultures are different than condors. And the problem is not that there are all these differences. That's wonderful. The problem is when you assign a hierarchy to these, so that women being different than men means men are superior. People from Tanzania being somewhat different than people from Sweden means that the people from Sweden or Tanzania, but that's not how it works out in our hierarchy are that the people from Sweden are superior. That's nuts. What it is, is the people from Sweden might be better at living at a Northern climate where you get less sun. And the people from Tanzania might be better at living in places where there is malaria, to take just one example.

And women are better at giving birth. Men are better at, well, we'll just take a real easy one, impregnating women. So part of the problem is we have a culture that is based on perceiving the differences and then projecting a hierarchy onto those differences, whereby those higher on the hierarchy are allowed to violate those lower on the hierarchy. And in fact, their superiority is based on and validated by that violation. So how do we know that we are superior to bears? Well, because we take their habitat, they don't take ours. How do we know that we are superior to salmon? Because we drive them extinct, they don't drive us extinct. And that's a remarkably short-sighted and immoral remark. I should put that the other way, remarkably immoral and short-sighted.

I should reverse the so many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is generally even the most open-minded Westerners perceive listening to the natural world as a metaphor, perceive the world as consisting of resources to be exploited, as opposed to other beings to enter into relationship with, as opposed to perceiving the trees as having lives as valuable to them as yours is to you and mine is to me. And that doesn't mean that I can never kill a salmon needed or I can never kill a lettuce needed. That doesn't mean that nobody ever kills anybody. What it means is that they have lives that are valuable to them. And if you perceive them that way, there's a great line by a Canadian lumberman,

when I look at trees, I see dollar bills. And if when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you treat them one way. How you perceive the world affects how you behave in the world. I think we've been misperceiving the world and it has caused us to do great harm to the world. In your essay, Beyond Hope, you said that that is love that keeps you going. But why even bother trying to save human that in the first place are responsible for getting us in this situation? I don't think humans are innately evil. I don't think that the Tolo Indians lived where I live now for 12,500 years. If you buy carbon dating, you can tell that. And when the Europeans arrived here, the place was still an ecological paradise. The salmon were so thick that the Klamath River

was black and roiling with fish. And the Klamath is the second biggest river on the west coast of the United States. I'm not saying that the Tolo were perfect. This is not some noble savage thing where they never did anything stupid, they never did anything wrong. What I'm saying is that we know they lived here for 12,000 years and didn't destroy the place. So humans can live in place without destroying it. It's just that they can't live an industrialized lifestyle without destroying it. Some people think humans are inherently evil. I don't think we are. I think humans are fundamentally contentious, if anything. So I like humans as well as I like salmon or prairie dogs or anybody else. I don't want to give up on humans. I have given up on this way of life.

This way of life can never be sustainable and leads to these... When a value of a forest is in two-by-fours, when you look at a tree, you see dollar bills, then that's going to inevitably lead to the behavior we see around us. So I want to switch gears and talk about your organization. I would like to hear you tell me how your organization, the Deep Green Resistance Movement, has been evolving over the last few years. In private, a lot of grassroots environmentalists will say that they are just hanging on by their fingernails trying to protect this or that creature, this or that piece of ground, until civilization collapses. They'll say that privately, but they can't say

it in public because then they'll lose credibility. So somebody has to say this in public. So we took on that role. We're going to say in public that civilization is inherently unsustainable, that it has been from the beginning, that when people think of Iraq is the first thing they think of, cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground. The first written myth of Western civilization is Gilgamesh deforesting Iraq to make a great city. That's the story that's been played out over and over. Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula was Oaks Savannah, the Near East was heavily forested, North Africa, those forests were cut down to make the Egyptian and Phoenician navies. Ancient Greek philosophers were complaining that logging was harming water quality. These are

old, old problems. And so we wanted to be grassroots environmentalists who are working to protect specific places. Right now there are people in DGR out at a place in Nevada called Thacker Pass trying to protect it from what would be, I believe, one of the largest lithium mines in the United States. And they're going to destroy an entire valley to put in this mine. So we're defending that as other grassroots organizations will defend places. Or there's one person in Colorado who defends prairie dog villages. And so we do that just like every other grassroots organization. But then in addition, we have the additional analysis of civilization is inherently unsustainable that we talk about alongside doing the grassroots work. And so that's really how the

organization evolved in the first place. And how have we evolved in the last few years? I'm not sure how we've evolved in the last few years. We've gotten bigger. We're still pretty small. But definitely have organizationally become more robust over the past five years.

How many members have you got?

I don't know. I'm going to say 400, 500. It's around the world. We have chapters in France, Germany, etc. And I don't know how many people total. When I hear you talk, Derek, I hear the above ground discourse of the deep green resistance movement. You come across as an educator warning us again the dangers to come. Yet, what can you tell me about the underground techniques that you've described in your Decisive Ecological Warfare? I'm not sure. We are a purely above ground organization. If one is going to advocate for

militant resistance and participate in it at the same time, one may as well go down to the police station for recreational mugshots. There has to be an absolute firewall between above ground and below ground organizations. This is true for all resistance movements. We have taken it upon ourselves to advocate for the end of civilization. It's going to come down.

Maybe you or someone else wrote the Decisive Ecological Warfare. Oh yeah, we're going to get there. One of the ways I've looked at this for a long time is if Delta smelt could take on human manifestation, how long would the pumps on the Sacramento River last? If Coho Salmon could take on human manifestation, how long would the dams on the Klamath River last? Also, if humans from 100 years from now could take on human manifestation now, how would they act? What would they do? Would they want to put in more solar panels? Would they want to put in or would they want to protect the salmon, not only for the salmon's own sake, but so that they can eat tomorrow? Because if somebody were brought down civilization

100 years ago, people in this region could still eat salmon. If somebody were brought down civilization 200 years ago, people in the Eastern United States could still eat passenger pigeons. Every day that passes, that's 200 more species go extinct. Another way to put this is if space aliens had come down from outer space and they were doing to the planet what the dominant culture is doing, if they were changing the very climate, if they were vacuuming the oceans, if they were putting dioxin in every mother's breast milk, we would know what to do. Yes, we advocate for people to build an organized resistance movement that thinks like a resistance movement, that doesn't act and think like vandals. We're not talking about shoplifting. We're not

talking about going and looting a Walmart. We're talking about if you recognize that the dominant culture is waging war on the planet, how do we best fight back? If we had the numbers, we could do this with blockades, with general strikes, with all sorts of tactics, but we don't have those numbers and the salmon don't have that time. Look, in the United States, there are 60,000 dams over 13 feet tall, 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall. If we only took out one of those dams per day, that would take 200 years. Salmon don't have that time. Sturgeon don't have that time. So what I'm saying is that we need to remember that in the 80s, our definition was changed from being citizens to being consumers, and the corporate media started talking about us as consumers.

If you're a consumer, your choices are buy and not buy. If you're a citizen, your choices are buy, not buy, organize, boycott, leaflet, and when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right, or I would say responsibility, of the people to alter or abolish it. That's Declaration of Independence. And there was another transformation that took place several thousand years ago, which is when humans became citizens of states, as opposed to human animals who need habitat and who have teeth and claws. I sometimes get pegged as the violence guy, and I don't really like that because what I am is the everything guy, and what I think we need to do is recognize that, again, scientists, the mainstream newspapers even,

are talking about how the oceans could be devoid of fish in 30 years. And I think we need to have actions commensurate with the threat, and whatever that means is whatever it means.

I'm going to tell you my personal opinion now, and my personal opinion is that environmentalists are prone to become more engaged in either civil disobedience action, like Extinction Rebellion Promote, or sabotage action. I believe that the great Athenberg generation and all those kids that have been marching for climate and are doing school strike for two years now, they are getting tired of government inaction. Some of them are just giving up, and others are looking, as they grow up also, they are looking for other options. What's your take on that situation? Well, thank you for bringing that up because I think that's really important, and part of the problem is, and this is why DGR takes our position on telling the truth, or telling what we perceive to be the

truth about industrial civilization being inherently unsustainable. Because I think it is an incredible disservice to get all of these, to get 100,000 people marching in the streets of Paris or New York or Washington DC, and if you ask them why they're marching, they'll say, we want to protect the planet. But if you ask for their demands, they'll say, we want subsidies for the wind and solar industries. That's been basically turned into a lobbying arm for the wind and solar industries. My point having to do with the people in it is, the best way to get people to lose their enthusiasm and to become burned out is to lie to them, and to tell them, to gaslight them, to say, oh, if we just go to wind and solar, things will be fine. If we just, we need to keep,

you get all these people who want to save the planet, but then the leaders of the mainstream environmental organizations say, we need to, what we're doing, Bill McKibben says this, Lester Brown,

the former head of Greenpeace International, they all say this, that what they're trying to do is to save civilization. And we know in our bones that civilization is inherently unsustainable. I mean, we know that, I mean, I know people who are completely apolitical, not environmental, who will say, I don't see nearly as many birds at the bird feeders as I used to. And I was just talking to a guy two days ago up in kind of Northern Canada. I was up in Northern Canada many years ago, and you couldn't go outside at night because of the mosquitoes. During the day, there's the biting black flies. I mean, it's known for just incredible insects. He says, even there, you can drive for a hundred miles. You don't have to clean your windshield. People know that they aren't

seeing the bugs they used to see. And what would you tell this generation? What would you tell those kids that have been marching for two years and that are becoming disillusioned with what's happening? I would say once you switch your loyalty to the natural world, and once you begin to act for the natural world, everything else is just technical. Once you switch your loyalty to wild nature, and that's the thing, is it's dead easy. Life wants to live. There is, out of the more than 450 dead zones in the ocean, there is one that has recovered, and it's in the Black Sea. And it was the worst dead zone in the world. And it recovered because the Soviet Union collapsed. And after the Soviet Union collapsed, it was no longer economically viable to do industrial agriculture along that

part of the shore of the Black Sea. And it recovered within 20 years enough that they now have industrial fishery there. So people can eat the fish from what was formerly this dead zone. Life wants to come back. We just have to stop stabbing it. And so what I would suggest to these people is if you want to get into resistance, get into resistance. If you want to protect land, protect land. If you want to get into land restoration, that's incredibly important. I just interviewed a guy a few weeks ago who is helping to reintroduce beavers to the UK, to Britain. That's all incredibly important work. And I think another thing that I would say to the young people is ditch large organizations. Large organizations have been almost entirely captured.

There are a few fairly big environmental organizations that are still pretty good. But make sure that their loyalty is to the natural world. And mainly give your energy to smaller organizations. This is not wink wink, give your energy to DGR. Go to local organizations who are absolutely starved for help. And if you live in northern Germany, then there are local issues that local wildlife needs your help. And that's the place to put your energy, I think. And I'm sorry for insisting, but what can you tell me about this booklet that was signed by Deep Green Resistance, the Decisive Ecological Warfare? Well, in there we talk about if we had a large enough resistance movement, which we don't have, but if we had a large enough resistance

movement, and if we were actually serious about bringing industrial civilization to its knees, how would we do it? And the way people generally win wars is not by destroying armies generally. The way people generally win wars is by destroying the enemy's capacity to wage war. If it was waging war on the natural world, then you have to ask yourself, how would you stop industrial civilization's capacity to wage war on the natural world? And really the main thing is oil. So Decisive Ecological Warfare is really a, if we had a significant resistance movement, and we really wanted to bring the global economic system to its knees, how would we do that? And anyway, that's what Decisive Ecological Warfare is about.

If people refuse to give up their lifestyle, if no one blows up the system, what will happen? When will it happen? And how? Well, what will happen is that we will continue to do what we are doing, and the dominant culture will continue to grind away until it collapses under the weight of its own ecological destructiveness. It is easier for us to conceptualize the end of the world, literally, than it is for us to conceptualize the end of civilization. Our identification is so firmly with this way of life that we cannot imagine it ending, but we can, however, imagine and talk about in the newspaper the end of fish in the oceans. What will happen if we don't do anything is that the system will

collapse and there will be very little, and the world will be far more impoverished than it needs to be, and there may be tipping points put into place that could possibly destroy all multi-cellular life on the planet. I don't think that's an impossibility. So I was speaking with John Michael Greer, and he told me that he believed that the collapse has already started. He believed that it will take a long time, but that it has already started. I agree. I mean, the collapse has been ongoing in many places for many years, some would say since the early 70s. In some places like Buffalo, New York, it's been starting in the late 40s. So I think that the collapse will be

what we see around us with increasing numbers of empty storefronts, an economy that increasingly sputters, and then at some point it will accelerate. So I think that there will be

increasing sputtering and then it'll sort of jerk along and then coast down.

The crystal ball is always cloudy, so I don't know when it's going to happen. I'm 60 years old, probably in my lifetime. How do we define the collapse is a question too. Is it the end of the oil age, the end of the automobile age? Is it when the lights no longer turn on? I don't know how you actually define that last moment. To you, Derek, what is America? Okay. I noticed that you said America and not the United States. And what is America to me is the land. It is prairie dog villages in the Great Plains. It is Buffalo. It is the remnants of tall grass prairie, remnants of short grass prairie. It is the few remaining salmon runs. It is Pacific land prey. It is wild forests desperately trying to come back.

What America is, is what used to be the home for the greatest ungulate migration on the planet, which was the bison. And what can be, so long as we don't kill it off, what can be that in return? What is America is the land and the rivers and the coasts and all the beings who live there. Derek Jensen, I want to thank you. Thank you for making time for Back in America today. Oh, thank you for having me.