By Derrick Jensen
This way of living cannot last. When it’s over, whether in ten or a hundred years, it will be better for humans and nonhumans alike if the world is more rather than less healthy. The most important thing we can do is protect wild nature, put ourselves between the living planet—our only home—and an economic system measured by how quickly it converts the living into the dead, living forests to two-by-fours, schools of fish into fish sticks, living rivers into hydroelectricity.
The humans and nonhumans who come after us won’t care how well we individually prepared for this culture’s collapse, nor whether we voted liberal or conservative, nor whether we powered this destructive system’s activities using oil, coal, wind, or solar. A car’s still a car, a chainsaw’s a chainsaw, a trawler’s a trawler, and this culture is still devastating life on this planet.
The humans and nonhumans who come after are going to care whether they can breathe the air, drink the water. They’ll care whether the lands and waters support them. So long as we continue the way we’re going, so much will they hate us. As Lierre Keith writes, “If there’s anyone alive a hundred years from now, they’re going to ask what the fuck was wrong with us, that we didn’t fight like hell when the world was going down.”
I’m an environmentalist because I love wild places and wild beings, and because I understand that the world was not made just for us, no matter how much we may pretend it was, and because every place we destroy was someone else’s home.
I’m also an environmentalist because I’m not stupid. It’s remarkably stupid to wipe out runs of salmon you might need to eat tomorrow. Yes, salmon are beautiful beings whose right to survive has nothing to do with their utility to us. But when you can no longer buy food at the grocer’s, would you rather live next to an empty stream, or one filled with salmon? Likewise, it’s stupid to put poisons in the stream from which you might drink: would you rather live next to a clean stream or a polluted one? And it’s stupid to toxify the air we breathe, bathe the world in endocrine disrupters, empty the oceans of fish, change the climate, conduct all these open-air experiments.
It’s long past time we recognized basic truths about the unsustainability of this way of life and the increasingly impoverished world we’re leaving for those who come after, it’s long past time we made our loyalty not with the economic and social system but with the living planet, and it’s long past time we began fighting like hell to protect every bit of wild nature, from the largest tract to the smallest scrap.
Derrick Jensen can be found at https://derrickjensen.org/
