Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It
Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It
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Overview
“This disturbing but very important book makes clear we must dig deeper than the normal solutions we are offered.”—Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia Works
"Bright Green Lies exposes the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of leading environmental groups and their most prominent cheerleaders. The best-known environmentalists are not in the business of speaking truth, or even holding up rational solutions to blunt the impending ecocide, but instead indulge in a mendacious and self-serving delusion that provides comfort at the expense of reality. They fail to state the obvious: We cannot continue to wallow in hedonistic consumption and industrial expansion and survive as a species. The environmental debate, Derrick Jensen and his coauthors argue, has been distorted by hubris and the childish desire by those in industrialized nations to sustain the unsustainable. All debates about environmental policy need to begin with honoring and protecting, not the desires of the human species, but with the sanctity of the Earth itself. We refuse to ask the right questions because these questions expose a stark truth—we cannot continue to live as we are living. To do so is suicidal folly. ‘Tell me how you seek, and I will tell you what you are seeking,’ the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said. This is the power of Bright Green Lies: It asks the questions most refuse to ask, and in that questioning, that seeking, uncovers profound truths we ignore at our peril.”—Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of America: The Farewell Tour
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948626408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Monkfish Book Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2021 |
| Series: | Politics of the Living |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Derrick Jensen is the acclaimed author of more than twenty-five books, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. Author, teacher, activist, small farmer, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, he has been hailed as the philosopher poet of the environmental movement. Writes Publishers Weekly, “Jensen paints on a huge canvas an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structure of Western culture.”
His premise is as profound as it is persistent: industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable. It will always require violence to biotic and human communities. And it will create a culture where trauma is normalized, where living beings become objects, and where the only relationship left is one of domination.
Jensen weaves together history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology to produce a powerful argument and a passionate call for action. He guides us toward concrete solutions by focusing on our most primal human desire: to live on a healthy earth overflowing with uncut forests, clean rivers, and thriving oceans that are not under the constant threat of being destroyed.
Jensen’s writing has been described as “breaking and mending the reader’s heart” (Publishers Weekly). He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun, and has a regular column in Orion. He 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. He has packed university auditoriums, conferences, and bookstores across the nation, stirring them with revolutionary spirit.
Lierre Keith is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of six books including, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She is also coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. She’s been arrested six times for acts of political resistance. She lives in northern California where she shares 20 acres with giant trees and giant dogs. (www.lierrekeith.com)
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle.
Max has been part of grassroots political work for nearly 20 years. He has been involved in fighting the Canadian “tar sands” megaproject and combating tar sands mining in Utah, in resisting industrial-scale water extraction and deforestation in Nevada, in advocating for the last remaining wild buffalo in Yellowstone, in solidarity work with indigenous communities in British Columbia, and in campaigns against police brutality and sexual violence.
Max serves on the Board of Directors of Deep Green Resistance and Fertile Ground Institute for Social and Ecological Justice. He co-founded the Pinyon-Juniper Alliance, a group dedicated to protecting forests in the Intermountain West. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service, and produces a podcast called The Green Flame.
Max’s essays have been published in Earth Island Journal, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, DGR News Service, and elsewhere, and have been translated into several languages. Bright Green Lies is Max’s second book. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018 in Germany by Babylon Apocalypse press as Voices of Resistance Vol. 2. He also wrote the introduction to a French-language translation of the Earth First! Direct Action Manual, published by Editions Libre in 2019.
Max lives near Eugene, Oregon, where he is involved in a communal living project. His website is https://maxwilbert.org.
Read an Excerpt
Preface
The American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period.[1]
—George Herbert Walker Bush
Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. Over the years, environmentalism has undergone the same cooptation that turns so many social movements for justice and sanity into yet more tools for supporting ever more injustice and insanity, until by now too much environmentalism has become not about helping the real world to “sustain” in the face of this culture’s incessant omnicide, but rather about finding ways to “sustain” this destructive culture a little bit longer, no matter the costs to the real world.
This is how we end up with mainstream environmentalists who overwhelmingly prioritize saving this way of life over saving life on the planet. For example, Lester Brown, labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement,”[2] writes books like Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (which at least one university has made required reading for all incoming freshman) and ran an organization called Earth Policy Institute: Providing a Plan to Save Civilization. He routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet. Those of us working on environmental issues have been talking about the need to save the planet for some time. But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” This was written in an article entitled (in case we hadn’t already gotten the point), “The Race to Save Civilization.”[3]
When two hundred species went extinct today; when the oceans are being killed; when wildlife around the world has declined by 50 percent in the last forty years’ when insect, frog, fish, mussel, songbird, shorebird populations are collapsing; when the world is being killed because of civilization; what he says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization.
He’s certainly not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of [human] people. . . . Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to [human] people.” [4]
Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called by The Boston Globe “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”[5] or with quotes like, “Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989 . . . I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”[6]
I’ll bet polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.
Or there’s the statement signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration concludes, “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”[7] Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. This entire declaration signed by these “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentioned harm to the natural world. In fact it never mentioned the natural world at all.
Or there’s this instruction from the 350.org style guide for designing their public arguments: “Focus on people. Whenever possible, use visuals to emphasise [sic] that climate is a real, tangible human problem—not an abstract [sic] ecological issue.”[8]
Are leatherback turtles, American pikas, and flying foxes “abstract ecological issues,” or are they our kin, each imbued with their own “wild and precious life”?[9]
Or there’s this, from yet another climate activist who states, “I’m not an environmentalist. Most of the people in the climate movement that I know are not environmentalists. They are young people who didn’t necessarily come up through the environmental movement, so they don’t think of themselves as environmentalists. They think of themselves as climate activists and as human rights activists. The terms ‘environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ carry baggage historically and culturally. It has been more about protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places than it has been about the welfare of human beings. I come at from the opposite direction. It’s first and foremost about human beings.”[10]
Note that he called “protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places” baggage.
There’s Naomi Klein, who states explicitly in the film This Changes Everything: “I’ve been to more climate rallies than I can count, but the polar bears? They still don’t do it for me. I wish them well, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.”
And then there’s this from Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace International: “The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving.”[11].
The day he said this, it was fifty degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal at the North Pole, above freezing in the middle of the winter.
I cannot bear how invisible life on this planet is to these people.
This is the priority—and the willful blindness—of so much modern environmentalism. The real world just “doesn’t do it for us.” The real world doesn’t need our help. It’s about us. It’s always “about us.”
But something infinitely more important than civilization is at stake.
#Decades ago, I[12] was one of a group of grassroots environmental activists planning a campaign. Before the meeting started, we went around the table saying why we were doing this work. The answers were consistent, and exemplified by one woman who said, simply, “For the critters,” and by another who got up from the table, walked to her desk, and brought back a picture. At first, the picture looked like a high-up part of the trunk of an old growth Doug fir, but when I looked more closely I saw a small spotted owl sticking her camouflaged head out of a hole in the center of the trunk. The activist said, “I’m doing it for her.”
#Calling yourself an environmentalist as you prioritize saving this omnicidal culture over saving the real world is only part of the process of coopting environmentalism toward nature-destroying ends. The next step is simple: collapse the distinction and pretend sustaining this omnicidal culture is saving the planet.
Table of Contents
A Note from the Authors on Language xi
Preface xiii
Prologue Lierre Keith xvii
The Spectrum of Environmentalism xxi
Chapter 1 The Problem 1
Chapter 2 Solving for the Wrong Variable 20
Chapter 3 The Solar Lie: Part 1 29
Chapter 4 The Solar Lie; Part 2 92
Chapter 5 The Wind Lie 108
Chapter 6 The Lie of Green Energy Storage 156
Chapter 7 Efficiency 206
Chapter 8 Recycling 253
Chapter 9 The Green City Lie 301
Chapter 10 The Green Grid Lie 365
Chapter 11 The Hydropower Lie 379
Chapter 12 Other Lies 402
Chapter 13 More Solutions That Won't Work 422
Chapter 14 Real Solutions 432
Chapter 15 Conclusion 461
Afterword Derrick Jensen 469
Resources Guide 475
About the Authors 477
What People are Saying About This
“Bright Green Lies dismantles the illusion of ‘green’ technology in breathtaking, comprehensive detail, revealing a fantasy that must perish if there is to be any hope of preserving what remains of life on Earth. From solar panels to wind turbines, from LED light bulbs to electric cars, no green fantasy escapes Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert’s revealing peak behind the green curtain. Bright Green Lies is a must-read for all who cherish life on Earth.” —Jeff Gibbs, writer, director, and producer of the film Planet of the Humans “Bright Green Lies lays out in heartbreaking and sometimes disgusting detail the simple fact that to maintain the growth of techno-industrial civilization by replacing fossil fuels with solar panels, wind turbines, hydro-power, electric cars, and whatever other green machines we might construct still requires the continuing rape of Mother Earth and the poisoning of her water, air, soil, wildlife, and human populations. The authors tell us unequivocally: Green growth is a doomed enterprise, and there is no future for humankind living in harmony with nature in which we fail to recognize that unlimited economic and population growth on a finite planet is ecological suicide. Environmental groups that blithely refuse to question the industrial growth paradigm should be fearful of this book, as it exposes with a sword point their hypocrisies and falsehoods. I suggest they seek the immediate burning of all copies.” —Christopher Ketcham, author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West “Bright Green Lies is a tour de force. The authors expose many of the fallacies of mainstream environmentalism and economics. Their main thesis is that much of what passes for environmental concern today is geared primarily toward sustaining an unsustainable ‘lifestyle.’ Most so-called ‘sustainable’ practices are just a slower way to degrade the Earth’s ecosystems. For years, I have been harping on the fact that society needs to do a full accounting of the real costs of our lifestyles. This book exposes much of what is missing in our flawed accounting system, and the genuine costs of this failure. I thought I knew a lot about the environmental impacts of the consumer society, but Jensen and his co-authors have shown me that I, like many people, only had a superficial appreciation of these costs. Bright Green Lies takes off where William Catton’s book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change left off and provides a stimulating roadmap of how to think about our environmental crisis. It makes a powerful case for what society needs to do to reevaluate its present an unsustainable pathway. Hopefully, Bright Green Lies will result in more thoughtful, insightful, and ultimately productive environmental activism.” —George Wuerthner, ecologist, wildlands activist, photographer, and author of 38 books, including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy “Bright Green Lies is a book I’ve been keenly awaiting, a book made of numbers, clear thinking, wit, and love. Bright Green Lies urges the protection of the natural world in all its sacred and manifest diversity. Arm yourself with the precision and honesty that this book fiercely inspires and demands; recognize that life itself is the sole bearer of effective solutions, that organic, ecological, elemental, and biomic life can indeed save the planet from catastrophe.” —Suprabha Seshan, rainforest conservationist at India’s Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary “Bright Green Lies is a much needed wakeup call if we are to avoid sleepwalking to extinction— joining 200 of our fellow creatures and relatives that are being driven to extinction per day by an extractivist, colonizing money machine that is lubricated by limitless greed, and guided by the mechanical mind of industrialism. This destructive machine is labelled ‘civilization,’ and its violent and brutal imposition on indigenous cultures and communities is legitimized as the ‘civilizing mission’ for which exterminations of the rich cultural and biological diversity of the Earth is necessary for the linear, blind rush to progress. Religions change, extermination continues. But there are other ways: the ways of indigenous cultures to whom we must turn to learn how to walk lightly on the Earth.” —Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of NAVDANYA and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology; author of Earth Democracy and Making Peace with the Earth “Bright Green Lies is the book we’ve all been waiting for. Jensen and his co-authors explode the myth that we can somehow grow our way out of the mess that we’ve created by using ‘renewable’ energies to prop up the lie that endless growth is possible without continuing to destroy the planet and the life-support systems that it provides. May Bright Green Lies be the first step toward shifting us to a different future—one which doesn’t continue to borrow from the future to give us an unlivable planet.” —Thomas Linzey, senior counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and co-founder of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
About Derrick Jensen:
"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 Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
“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 gifted and lyrical writer on a wide range of critical issues. He is unrelenting in his commitment to the environment and justice.” —Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth
“Jensen… has a deserved reputation as a writer of consequence and conscience”—Booklist
For A Language Older Than Words:
"Singular, compelling and courageously honest, this book is more than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood. It relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet's . . . His visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: 'Things don't have to be the way they are.'"—Publishers Weekly
For The Myth of Human Supremacy:
"Derrick Jensen's ferocious love of this earth and all her living beings has ignited and crafted a genius work that has the potential to shift human consciousness. The Myth of Human Supremacy must be read and reread and read again. It will shatter and rearrange your beliefs, call up your sorrow and rage. It will humble you and inspire you to fight with every bit of your being for the end of hierarchy, dominance and destruction." —Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and In the Body of the World
“In the hottest year we've ever recorded, perhaps people of all persuasions should take a moment to grapple with Derrick Jensen's anger and love. This is a necessary provocation—it's clearly time to think anew about who and what we are.” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
"Derrick Jensen's Myth of Human Supremacy brilliantly challenges our fatal belief in 'progress,' our inability to absorb the looming ecocide around us, and the deadly consequences of our hubris. Jensen has never fled from hard truths. This book is no exception. Jensen's work is vital to our understanding of the suicidal impulses that exist within human society." —Chris Hedges
"True environmentalists don’t buy into The Green New Deal. They think all the encouraging words from other environmentalists are bright green lies. Because at bottom, all the positive noises are simply a sop to industrialized society and the giant industries that run it. And according to Bright Green Lies, the book, it’s all about maintaining the current opulent lifestyle, and continuing to destroy the planet. No sacrifices will be made that might slow the consumer economy. This dramatic, sane and passionate book lays out the lies with evidence like simple math and direct observation." —Medium
"[S]ubstantial...detailed and exhaustive...a thorough critique of the environmental protection movement and its reliance on renewable resources." —Publishers Weekly