This story is about a conversation I’ve been having with revolutionary environmental activist / thinker / talker / writer Derrick Jensen. The conversation started about two years ago. It’s not a real one — the closest I’ve come to actually meeting the man was this past week when he spoke from his home in northern California to a half-full university auditorium in Regina, Saskatchewan through a choppy live video feed. Derrick sat in his study, an overflowing bookshelf in the background, his cat meowing from atop his lap and frogs singing from the cedar, pine and redwood forest outside. For two hours, he talked to us about everything from denial and despair to joy and love. Completely captivated, I let his garbled audio, pixilated image and crystal-clear ideas about our culture flood over me.
At home afterwards, I was ravenously hungry and barely able to string together a sentence — as though being so totally engaged had sapped me of every bit of energy I had. But I noticed something strange about it: despite my exhaustion, a surplus of emotional energy bubbled up. My body and mind were drained, but my heart was (and remains) alive and awake.
My emotional alertness surprised me. There’s just no getting around the fact that Derrick’s work is profoundly threatening, and I’d prepared myself going in for the very real possibility that his talk might devastate me. His purpose is not to cajole or sugarcoat, but to do whatever he must to save the salmon and trees and planet he loves. He speaks openly about the need to bring down civilization in order to stop the inherently unsustainable dominant culture, and he uses such words as “apocalypse” and “killing the planet” and “despair” — the kind of language that remains essentially taboo despite the physical realities we currently face. Anyone who attempts to engage with his work must be ready to question their entire worldview and all the assumptions they hold about the culture we live in.
For a long time I wasn’t ready to do this. I’ve visited Derrick’s website, had numerous conversations about his ideas, skimmed interviews with him — but somehow A Language Older Than Words has sat on my bedside table for the better part of a year and a half, and I’m still less than 100 pages in. It’s not that I disagree with him or am in denial; it’s actually just the opposite. I agree with Derrick that our culture is going in a fundamentally unsustainable direction. One day my eyes opened to the realization that no matter how much I will it or what action I take, it is distinctly possible that the world will be in worse shape when I leave it than when I arrived. This realization came unbidden, and when it happened despair flooded in. Hope drowned. I panicked and flailed.
That was nearly three years ago, and I’ve been managing despair ever since. Part of that has meant being careful about the amount and kinds of information I expose myself to. It doesn’t mean I don’t still think about the situation we face, because I do — pretty well constantly. But I don’t read a lot of books or watch a lot of TV or go to a lot of talks, because taking in more information hasn’t seemed to help me cope. If anything, it makes me more anxious about not knowing how to appropriately respond in my own life. Instead, I’ve struggled away on my own in survival mode, doing whatever I can to protect myself enough to just keep going and figure out what comes after despair.
All that said, coming away from Derrick’s talk feeling so emotionally robust left me very curious about what might have shifted. Nothing he said was anything I hadn’t heard before or didn’t understand, at least intellectually. But it was as if his words settled overtop all the questions I’ve been battling for the last three years, and the knowledge finally synched up in a way that I could hold and not break. In my heart we had this conversation:
me Derrick, this work is so heartbreaking. At a certain point my hope just went away, and I hit a wall of despair. I felt desperate, and all I could think to do was to try anything and everything to manage it — to medicate it. Meditation, yoga, living at an ashram, traveling, taking a sabbatical, overworking, being with family, being with friends, gardening, writing and reflection, community involvement, crushes. It was as though I was compulsively trying everything I could think of to escape the despair.
I’ve actually found it quite liberating to simply feel despair. Despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation.
One day I was just sobbing, and I called up a friend of mine, Jeanette Armstrong, who is an Okanagan Indian, writer and activist. I said to her, “This work is just killing me. It’s breaking my heart.” And she said, “Yeah, it’ll do that.” And I said, “The dominant culture hates everything, doesn’t it?” And she said, “Yeah, it does. Even itself.” And I said, “It has a death urge, doesn’t it?” And she said, “Yeah, it does.” And I said, “Unless it’s stopped it’s going to kill everything on the planet, isn’t it?” And she said, “Yeah, it is. Unless it’s stopped.” And then I said, “We’re not going to make it to some great new glorious tomorrow, are we?” And she thought for a moment and then she said the best thing she could possibly say, which was, “I’ve been waiting for you to say that.”
The reason it was the best thing she could say was that it normalized my despair. It let me know that despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation; the sorrow is just sorrow and the pain is just pain. It’s not so much the sorrow or even the pain that hurts, as it is my resistance to it. It let me know that I can feel all those things and it wouldn’t kill me. There’s this idea that if you really recognize how bad things are you have to go around being miserable all the time. But the truth is I’m really happy, and I am full of rage and sorrow and joy and happiness and contentment and discontent. I’m full of all those things. It’s okay to feel more than one thing at the same time.
me I can get there on an intellectual level, but despair wants to eat the joy and happiness up. My mind does acrobatics trying to talk myself through it. My favourite is this one: I feel despair. Despair is not a sustainable state. If despair is not sustainable, then it must end. The possible ends I can perceive are 1) hope returning; 2) voluntarily or involuntarily ending my participation (i.e., death) or 3) waiting out despair until I figure out what comes after. Therefore, if I sit with the despair for long enough it will morph into something beyond despair (I just don’t know what!). Lesson: Stay with it and don’t panic!
Some people say, if things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself? Part of the answer is that I’m having a lot of fun. It’s tremendous fun to fight back. What a gas.
The other thing that happened when I was talking to my friend Jeanette was I realized that not only could I feel all those things and it wouldn’t kill me; even better, I could feel all those things and it would kill me. There’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that once you’re dead they can’t touch you anymore. Not through threats or violence or promises or buying you off. You can still sing and dance and make love and fight like hell, but they can’t touch you.
My father was extremely violent. One of the reasons my mother stayed with him was that there weren’t battered women’s shelters in the 1950s and ’60s. But another reason was because of the false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations and they blind us to real possibilities. We need to eradicate them ruthlessly. That’s one of the things that happens when you die like that — you have all your illusions stripped away.
The problem is not only false hope, but hope itself. I was doing a talk in Colorado several years ago and I was bashing hope. Someone in the audience shouted out, “What’s your definition of hope?” And I thought, Oh my god, I’ve been bashing hope for years, I have no idea. So I asked what their definition of hope was, and they came up with, “Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.” That’s how we use it in everyday language. I’m going to commit to you right now, in public, that I’m going to eat something later tonight. On the other hand, the next time I get on a plane, I hope it doesn’t crash, because that’s out of my control. I have no agency. But what I’m really interested in is the agency. I don’t hope that coho salmon survive. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure they survive. I don’t have to hope.
me The hardest thing about despair has been not knowing how to talk about it. It feels taboo to admit to not having hope. It’s held up as this grand, unassailable human quality. At times I’ve felt very isolated, because when I try to broach despair, it’s like people don’t want to hear it — or maybe that they can’t even hear it. Half the time I feel insane.
In my own family structure, we could talk about anything we wanted, except for the violence we had to pretend wasn’t happening. You can see this in dysfunctional families all the time. In the larger scale, it means that we can talk about anything we want except for that the culture is killing the planet. So we can talk about sustainable development, March Madness, baseball, Brad and Angelina. We can talk about all these things, but we can never talk about the fact that this culture has never been and will never be sustainable.
It’s like a lot of my American Indian friends tell me, that the first thing you have to do is decolonize your hearts and minds. Part of that is to break through the denial that this culture is based on.
What’s really important is to have a loving community around you that will support you in that process, so that every time you talk to them about something you don’t have to revisit Civilization is Bad 101. That’s so important. If you’re surrounded by a community that also cares about those things, then yes, it’s a huge process to go through — incredibly painful, but absolutely worth it.
me I see people like you doing your work, and it seems so clear to me that the answer in my own life is to find my most authentic voice and then just use it to sing, holler, laugh and cry as long and hard as I need to. If I find my voice, I feel like I’ll be able to be most effective, joyful, sane. But then I feel guilty, like it’s never going to be the right thing, or it’s never going to be enough. What does the change we need look like?
It’s a billion different acts by a billion different people — a bazillion different people, including non-human people.
First off, it’s about aligning ourselves with the real world, and redefining ourselves as human animals that need habitat. That includes putting the planet first. It’s embarrassing to have to say that the real world comes first.
So that’s the first part. After that, my definition of bringing down civilization, which is still abstract, is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor, and to deprive the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. What does that look like on a practical level? It looks like everything, from writing books to filing timber sale appeals, to fighting like hell against the transnational oil corporations, to using any means necessary to stop them, whether that is courts or public opinion or any other means. It involves people acting individually and in organizations. It involves fighting for your lives, because that’s what we’re talking about at this point.
I get sort of annoyed when people call me the “violence guy.” I’m not the “violence guy” — I’m the “we need it all guy.” We desperately need it all. So what bringing civilization down looks like is people fighting to defend the places they love. It looks like doing everything.
The point is that the split is not between violence and non-violence, or fighting back or not fighting back, or whatever. The split is between action and non-action.
me So what action do I take?
What I always say is that I don’t want you to listen to me, because I don’t live there, and I don’t know how to live sustainably, here or there. What I want you to do is to go to the nearest forest and ask it what it needs. Go to the nearest river and ask it what it needs. Go to the nearest soil and ask it what it needs. Go to the nearest indigenous nation and ask them what they need. Just be of service. If you ask the land there what it needs, it will tell you. Then really the only question is: Are you willing to do it?
I am right in the middle of trying to answer that question. I want to make a difference, but to do that I have to stay sane, and find ways to hold joy and despair simultaneously. I must keep learning how to ask and listen for answers, and to know what actions I can take that will be most effective and keep me most alive.
And I think I am learning. The fact that I could come away from Derrick’s talk with eyes wide open but with a light heart seems to point to possibilities I couldn’t imagine even three months ago. So I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing — tending my garden and doing yoga and volunteering in my community and making art and building relationships and sitting in meditation. I’m going to keep doing these things — and I’m going to keep asking and keep listening, and keep feeling the whole beautiful mess of emotions that I am complicated enough to bear. And through it all, I’m going to keep asking myself what more I am willing to do.
Derrick’s portion of the conversation is drawn from the talk he gave via video conference at the University of Regina on March 27, 2008.
