I also wanted to point out that it seems like many of the commenters have never read anything that Derrick Jensen has written besides the quotes in this review.
To my knowledge, Jensen has never implied, in any of his work, that individual actions themselves would save the planet. He’s also never advocated “going back to the land” as a solution or suggestion for all people. In fact, in the book reviewed in this article, there are numerous pages devoted to why an attitude like ” the magical-thinking of ‘gee, if we could just get enough individuals interested in Going Back to the Land, the Planet would heal’” (as La Lubu claimed he was advocating) is, well, magical thinking. There’s an entire chapter of this book called ‘Magical Thinking’.

And in many of his books (especially ‘Endgame’, and in his interviews with activists in ‘Listening to the Land’), Jensen talks about “looking for critical mass not through collective, systemic methods of addressing and resolving environmental problems”.

I’m not trying to defend the parts of Jensen’s work that could be interpreted as racist and/or sexist, and besides that he really does have some issues with self-importance. I do think he’s written some really valuable and insightful work, however. All I’m trying to say is that in general, I think it’s pretty ridiculous and lazy to write paragraphs-long comments criticizing an author you’ve never even read!

Also, just because a bad thing does good things for many people, that doesn’t mean that we should defend its goodness to the death. Why aren’t we asking more questoins about the Pill, and seeking out other options until a better, more healthy, more earth-conscious alternative becomes available? Why only get mad when people criticize it? That’s not only counter-productive; it’s incredibly dangerous.

My body has zero tolerance for hormones related to pregnancy, which the Pill provides. I can carry a pregnancy, but it throws my entire endocrine system off-kilter. I started out in my adult life at 5’6″ and about 135 pounds. Went on the Pill and put on ten pounds. Got pregnant twice and each time came out the other end with an extra fifty pounds of cargo. To say nothing of the extreme mood swings each time, Pill or baby. I have no idea what’s going on with my other glands but my pancreas is sure unhappy, and I had autoimmune issues in my second pregnancy to boot. You’ll look at this account and go, “Oh, welcome to reality for most women,” but guess what? It’s not normal, or at least not natural. What possible evolutionary purpose is served by alienating the people who are supposed to help you through labor, delivery, and childrearing?

And you better bet that what we do to the waterways is much, much bigger than any individual woman having a pregnancy scare. Hate to break it to you but the ecosystem’s kind of more important, and if you didn’t believe it was, you wouldn’t be interested in environmentalism in the first place.

Besides, the fact that we have to be scared about pregnancy at all in the first place should give us pause. Framing pregnancy as a bad thing, framing being poor and pregnant as a bad thing, ALSO come from a privileged point of view–the point of view of someone who maybe doesn’t want their share of the pie going to someone who didn’t work hard enough for any pie, period. If you don’t feel that way, then great, but a lot of folks who wring their hands about poor/teen/unmarried mamas sure do, and I’ve caught my share of crap for daring to Breed While Poor from self-identified liberals and socialists.

Jensen has his issues, for sure. I love his books but I do find myself thinking, “So blow up the dams already.” And it’s true that destroying one would mess things up around the former dam site for a while, but it’s ALSO true that building it in the first place caused quite a lot of ecological destruction that is ongoing. Salmon, for instance, are reduced in number significantly thanks to hydroelectric dams, despite the cute little “salmon ladders” they build into the things. It’s not enough. Salmon didn’t evolve with ladders. They expect to encounter undammed rivers and there’s nothing we can do to change that.

It’s not like the response from the state wouldn’t be significant if he went around acting on his words. They wouldn’t just slap him on the wrist and let him go. Any white guy who genuinely works against the domesticated ag-industrial culture and genuinely damages it gets equated with women and people of color and treated accordingly, at least unless he recants. Ask the white guys who were radicals in the Sixties. Hell, ask Ayers, who nearly became political kryptonite for Obama.

Anyway, Jensen’s kind of language isn’t new to me, but then, I’ve read Starhawk. And I think a lot of your critique comes from that post-industrial, over-schooled, hyper-individualist mindset almost incapable of synthesis, that is so endemic among liberal thinkers anymore. I am less interested in arguing how things are “supposed” to be than about how they actually are, because every time we try to remake the world into what it’s “supposed” to be, we fuck up spectacularly–which is why the Jensens and Shivas of the world exist and write at all.

also your call for eliminating antidepressents and other drugs “for the good of the planet” is pretty damned ableist. i think my not committing suicide from uncontrolled depression takes priority here.

Jill: Only Nice Feminists are Real Feminists. Didn’t you get the memo?

Perhaps I shall change my handle to Tactful Kristin just to find out if that will make it so.

It’s a very very bad argument, because we could save “the environment” by committing mass suicide/murder but we actually do have a balance of priorities here….

I believe someone was just pointing out that EVEN IN the author’s silly upside down value world, birth control was still doing more good than harm.

*reading up from the comments, at first I assumed this must be Robert Jensen; it’s depressing to realize that there’s another appropriative Savior Dude out there named Jensen who’s probably even -more- obnoxious.

Please don’t comment on this thread again.