Deep Green Resistance (an equally deep ambiguity there) is a book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith & Aric McBay. Derrick is [the] leading voice of uncompromising dissent, Lierre is a radical feminist activist from California who has been arrested six times, and Aric has off–the–grid skills he wants to share. I have been reading an essay-excerpt from the book on ClimateStoryTellers.org. Somehow I do not think that I’m going to migrate to the real thing, but if you’re made of stronger stuff, you can buy it at Amazon at a modestly discounted price. An oddity of this search was that it also brought up the chance to buy Hammerite Dark Green paint – which is almost as expensive as the book, but promises to last longer. Actually, I thought the idea of a hammer was quite apt (smart work Amazon), as I feel battered and bruised from just reading the essay – and my towel has already been thrown in, and can only hope that a beer will revive me.
Let me give you a taste (though sadly, not of the beer):
We are living in a period of mass extinction. What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? The numbers stand at 120 species a day. That’s 50,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news. We already have a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There’s no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman’s (sic) excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We’ve all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong? ...
By definition, nonrenewable means it will eventually run out. Once you’ve grasped that intellectual complexity, you can move on to the next level. “Any culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable.” Trees are renewable. But if we use them faster than they can grow, the forest will turn to desert. Which is precisely what civilization has been doing for its 10,000 year campaign, running through soil, rivers, and forests as well as metal, coal, and oil. The oceans are almost dead, 90 percent of the large fish devoured, and the plankton populations are collapsing, populations which both feed the life of the oceans and create oxygen for the planet. What will we fill our lungs with when they are gone? The plastics with which that industrial civilization is replacing them? Because in parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 48 to 1.7. Imagine your blood, your heart, crammed with toxic materials — not just chemicals but physical gunk — until there was ten times more of it than you. What metaphor would be adequate to the dying oceans? Cancer? Suffocation? Crucifixion?
Wham bam thank you sirs and madam. Too heavy.
Responses
What do you mean by heavy?