derrick jensen
Derrick Jensen
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Male
48 years old
Crescent City, CALIFORNIA
United States
Last Login: 11/27/2009
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derrick jensen's Interests
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| General | Check out this Dropping Knowledge clip on YouTube.
Listen to this talk I gave in Santa Cruz .
Click here
to read an excerpt about hope from Endgame published in Orion Magazine.
Excerpt from an interview with Jay Babcock in Issue #23 of Arthur Magazine:
ARTHUR: Why does civilization need to be brought down now?
DERRICK JENSEN: A few years ago, I began to feel pretty apocalyptic but I didn’t want to use that word because it’s so loaded. And then a friend, George Draffan, said, ‘So Derrick, what’s it gonna take for you to finally use that word? Give me a specific threshold, Derrick, a specific point at which you’ll finally use that word. Will it take global warming? The ozone hole? The reduction of krill populations off Antarctica by 90 percent? How about the end of the great coral reefs? The extirpation of 200 species per day? 400? 600? Will it take the death of the salmon?’ And I thought about that. Salmon were once so thick around here that you couldn’t see the bottom of the river. You could hear the runs coming from miles before you’d see them. People were afraid to put their boats in the water for fear they’d capsize. And now, when I go out to Mill Creek, I start crying because I see two salmon spawning.
This civilization is killing the planet. They say that one sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. I’m gonna lay out a pattern here and let’s see if we can recognize it in less than 6,000 years. When you think of the hills and plains of Iraq, do you normally think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was before. The first written myth of this culture is that of Gilgamesh deforesting that area to make cities. Plato complained that deforestation was drying up springs and destroying the water quality in Greece. The forests of North Africa went down to make the Phoencian and Egyptian navies. We can go north and ask, Where are the lions who were in Greece? Where are the indigenous of Europe? They’ve been massacred, or assimilated—in any case, genocide was perpetrated against them by definition because they’re no longer there.
If you start asking questions, the questions just keep moving back and back and back. This is a pattern that’s been going on for a long, long time. This culture has been unsustainable from the beginning. On a finite planet, you would think that we would think about that. You can’t exploit a planet and live on it too. At this stage, since there are no new frontiers to exploit, the planet’s falling apart.
| | Books | Here's a link to some of my favorite books: www.derrickjensen.org.
Click here for information on joining my reading club. |
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derrick jensen's Details
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| Status: | In a Relationship | | Zodiac Sign: | Sagittarius | | Occupation: | Writer/Philosopher/Activist |
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derrick jensen's Schools
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Eastern Washington University
Cheney,WA
Graduated: 1991
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Master's Degree
Major: creative writing
Minor: playwriting
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1989 to 1991 |
Colorado School Of Mines
Golden,CO
Graduated: 1983
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Bachelor's Degree
Major: mineral engineering physics
Minor: solar heating and cooling
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1979 to 1983 |
Fairview High School
Boulder,CO
Graduated: 1979
Student status: Alumni
Degree: High School Diploma
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1976 to 1979 |
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derrick jensen's Networking
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derrick jensen's Latest Blog Entry
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derrick jensen's Blurbs |
About me:
My latest work:
AS THE WORLD BURNS: 50 SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO STAY IN DENIAL
A graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan
 Two of America’s most talented activists team up to deliver a bold and hilarious satire of modern environmental policy in this fully illustrated graphic novel. The U.S. government gives robot machines from space permission to eat the earth in exchange for bricks of gold. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from a corporate animal-testing laboratory. And two little girls figure out the secret to saving the world from both of its enemies (and it isn’t by using energy-efficient light bulbs or biodiesel fuel). As the World Burns will inspire you to do whatever it takes to stop ecocide before it’s too late.
"We think our simple solutions to the Earth's problems are helping, but As The World Burns shows that they're just distracting us from the terrifying truth. Jensen and McMillan unflinchingly confront these pressing issues, and their book is really funny, too....To a wild future!"
--Andy Hurley, drummer for Fall Out Boy
"Visionary and honest, As the World Burns offers a compelling yet brutal assessment of the state of the planet--and the state of mind of its most destructive tenants. It is a great read, a groundbreaking volume of graphic literature and a political polemic of the first order."
-- Ted Rall, Silk Road to Ruin
"We are drowning in phony green this and sustainable that nonsense. Liberals, avoid Jensen and McMillan! It may simply destroy your illusions and avoidance! Delicious and severely needed - not for those of delicate, ostrich-like constitutions."
-- John Zerzan, Against Civilization, Running on Emptiness
ENDGAME
Volume One: The Problem of Civilization
Volume Two: Resistance
 "Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds.
 (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.)As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed."
Endgame is the long-awaited companion piece to Derrick Jensen’s immensely popular and highly acclaimed works A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Accepting the increasingly widespread belief that industrialized culture inevitably erodes the natural world, Endgame sets out to explore how this relationship impels us towards a revolutionary and as-yet undiscovered shift in strategy. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself.
Author, teacher, activist, small farmer, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent,Derrick Jensen regularly stirs auditoriums across the country with revolutionary spirit. jensen holds a degree in creative writing from Eastern Washington University, a degree in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines, and has taught at Eastern Washington University and Pelican Bay State Prison. For more information visit www.derrickjensen.org and www.sevenstories.com.
Derrick Jensen's MySpace site is operated by Seven Stories Press, publisher of Endgame.
***NEW***
Talk to Derrick by telephone or webcam
So many people have written to Derrick to ask if he can come to talk to their group in Valdosta, Georgia or Vancouver, British Columbia, or many other places across the United States, Canada, and the rest of the world. Many of these groups can't afford to pay his fees and expenses to fly all the way there and back, and he normally can't afford the time and expense to do it for free (he, too, has to pay rent).
So he's trying something new, which is that he's now available at a greatly reduced rate to talk by telephone or webcam with your book club, activist group, or other organization. It's a great way to meet like-minded people in your area, to ask questions, to explore, without the time (for him) and expense (for you) of flying him in for a lecture. He's also available for similar discussions at public venues like local/anarchist cafes, locally-owned, progressive restaurants or coffee houses, or other community spaces.
The fee for this is $100/hour, no matter the group size. If you're interested, send Derrick a note at derrick@derrickjensen.org and the two of you can discuss details like when you'd like for this to happen and how it would work.
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Who I'd like to meet:
“‘At the risk of sounding ridiculous,’ Che Guevarra once and rather famously declaimed, ‘let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.’ To my mind, he might well have been describing Derrick Jensen. No other writer has so clearly and consistently captured the essense of Guevarra's intent, illuminating it in ways of which Che himself never dreamed. That Endgame embodies Jensen's finest work to date says all that needs saying about why it simply MUST be read.”
— Ward Churchill, author of Since Predator Came and Struggle for the Land
“Derrick Jensen is a rare and original voice of sanity in a chaotic world. He has wisdom and wit, grace and style, and is a wonderful guide to a good life beautifully lived.”
—Howard Zinn
“Derrick Jensen is a force for the common good. His books are mandatory reading in the study of culture and social change. Derrick Jensen is a contemporary philosopher with his feet firmly on the ground.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy
“[Endgame is] remarkable in its consideration of the present system of exploitation, destruction of the natural world, and indeed, self-destruction…. Jensen raises vital questions that must be asked, and moreover, that must be answered. In this mad venture, we are all complicit, if only in our silence. Jensen shatters this silence.”
—Mumia Abu-Jamal
“Jensen has proven himself a formidable thinker unafraid of showing us, with unsettling precision, the countless ways we are allowing ourselves and our planet to be killed.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Derrick Jensen's meditation on the state of the human and other species…opens windows in the mind to thinking about familiar problems in new and hopeful ways, calling for urgent action.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“Jensen paints on a huge canvas…an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structure of Western culture…that demands attention.”
—Publishers Weekly
“...intelligent, in-depth, even-keeled musings on the inherent dysfunction of mass society that, through savage honesty, guide us to the brink of our ability to tolerate."
—Chellis Glendinning
“Derrick Jensen is a gifted and lyrical writer on a wide range of critical issues. He is unrelenting in his commitment to the environment and justice.”
—Winona LaDuke
“Endgame has the power to rock the foundations of even the most grizzled activist veteran. Don’t take my word for it, buy the book or steal the book or borrow it from your library and see for yourself. Do it now...it’s later than you think.”
—Mickey Z.
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