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Book Review - Endgame: Volume 1; the Problem of Civilization By Derrick Jensen

While it didn't take a former US vice president for me to see the inconvenient truths of the ecological-apocalyptic handwriting on the wall, I am relatively new to the study of climate change and the seemingly unstoppable environmental collapse upon the horizon. For the last two years I have gorged myself on a steady diet of books, articles, and documentaries on this greatest of modern global predicaments facing all life on Earth. This has been a rather jarring two-year academic journey for me, provoking an activist-existential crisis that demanded from me more than the self-satisfactory meaning in my actions, but tangible signs of any efficacy; signs that Derrick Jensen in his latest tome Endgame: Volume 1; the Problem of Civilization quite effortlessly points out do not exist for me, or from any of us "activists."

Perhaps it's because I read Endgame during the summer malaise of my house arrest (I awaiting the start of my six year prison sentence for my simply vocal role in the US anti-vivisection campaign against the notorious Huntingdon Life Sciences), but I found it to be one of those times in life when you read just the right book at the just the right moment and the implications are profoundly life-changing. For some it was The Jungle, other's Silent Spring, and for many in the animal rights movement it's Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. Perversely enough I found Derrick Jensen's message of an impending environmental doom and industrial collapse almost oddly vindicating, if not slightly discomforting, and provocative for me as an activist and a human animal.

The world is being destroyed, despite our "best" activist efforts. It is that simple and Jensen re-iterates this point over and over again by peppering in a collage of troubling studies, findings, facts, figures, and anecdotes to support his conclusion that industrial civilization has not been, is not now, nor will ever be sustainable or compatible with life on this planet.

In twenty succinctly stated premises, exhaustively argued and researched throughout the book, Jensen draws an arc from the civilized pretension that human animals do not have to live naturally, as the animals we are, to how this socially indoctrinated and narcissistic notion births the institutions of mass exploitation, hierarchies of violence, and enculturated myths that define our priorities and principles. It's a message frustratingly lost on most "liberals" and one that desperately needs to gain traction within the animal protection/rights movement.

The animal rights movement seems to think it can have its vegan cake and eat it too. We want all the luxuries and indulgences of our Western civilized lives without recognizing the global and environmental price tag of our choices. It's a sin of hypocrisy greater for the vegan advocate because we know that our lifestyle and most particularly dietary choices do carry consequences. Yet we are all too happy to ignore the foreign policy atrocities, land-base degradation, and (typically) racist human exploitation that all came together so we can sit down for an extravagant dinner at the newest vegetarian restaurant and feel so smugly self-confident in our moral superiority to others simply because we are choosing non-meat based entrees.

To me, Jensen exposes a crime of speciesism committed by most so called adherents of animal rights philosophy with Endgame. We claim to recognize equality amongst sentient species and reject hierarchies of importance, but somehow believe that we human animals are different than other animals and exempt from the rules of nature and need not live in accordance with our surroundings as the animals we are. Jensen goes to great pains to articulate that the only way "we" humans and most life on this planet can survive is if we get this message and do live and breed sustainably.

To further exacerbate this form of speciesism many animal activists, myself included, rationalize this disconnect with a rather misanthropic worldview. People just suck, right? We are a cancer that just keeps multiplying and consuming and killing and that is just the way we are. Jensen offers an interesting response and tackles this as a self-aggrandizing cop-out. It buys into the abusive logic created by civilization that this is "just the way the world works" and must be accepted. It's that same speciousist logic that pretends human animals are somehow so unique as to be beyond the ability to live naturally. Jensen posits that human animals have lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years and it is only relatively recently with the advent of industrial civilization have we taken to destroying the natural world around us. Why do we think we can not return to a way of living naturally as animals as we once did?

It is this question that makes many an animal-rights activist recoil and reject the idea of neo-primitivism outright because it would envision a world where-in a hunter-gatherer type of life would be necessary for survival. Hunting does not fit into our vegan utopian schema, therefore somehow eating strawberries in January, driving SUVs, and typing up vegetarian literature on our apple notebooks is more "compassionate" (or hopefully as "compassionate" as the meat our movement is marketing for Whole Foods).

I am about as far from being a neo-primitivist as one can be as every stitch of clothing I wear comes from J. Crew and I have got to have my morning cup of coffee and evening bottle of wine (neither of which is grown in Minnesota). Jensen's book isn't a guilt-trip though, and he is not preaching a particular path of redemption in Volume 1, but instead simply asking the reader to be honest and to at least start to recognize that this little civilized world humans have created for themselves is absolutely insane.

While Endgame's message can be personally tough, his prose is extremely accessible. The writing is intimate and almost conversational, drawing the reader in closely only to get walloped again and again with examples of just how serious this predicament is. To be crystal clear Jensen uses very descriptive examples of the not-so-hidden costs of our culture - from the grisly mutations in the children exposed to the 96,000 depleted uranium shells dropped in Iraq, to how the US bomb the "daisy-cutter" incinerates any form of life within a couple hundred yards of where it is detonated and kills anyone within a range of three miles, to actual descriptions from CIA torture manuals. If you were not concerned about the environment and our losing battle to save it before, Jensen makes sure you know that every stream in the US is polluted with toxic chemicals, that every day 200,000 acres of rainforest disappear, that over 100 species of life go extinct every day, and that the air is so polluted in cities like Los Angeles that a child born there will breath in more carcinogens in the first two weeks of life than the EPA says is safe for a whole life time. Endgame does not paint a pretty picture and will likely the leave reader initially depressed and hopeless; this one of Jensen's goals with the book.

Animals are not left out of the equation and you can see that Jensen does embrace an ethic that puts the lives of non-humans on an equal footing as humans. Throughout the book many examples decry the abuses of factory farming, extirpation due to overdevelopment, the horror dams are to salmon runs (a running obsession of Jensen's through the whole book), and he got me with his special condemnation of Huntingdon Life Sciences. He does diverge though from a "rightist" perspective though and mentions in passing that he will eat animal flesh, but with the caveat that there is a difference between eating another and exploiting them. To him, "when you take the life of someone to eat or otherwise use so you can survive, you become responsible for the survival - and dignity - of that other's community."

In all honesty I had to sit with this idea for a while before I came to peace with it. Like so many humans, and the particularly ideological rigid ones which many animal rights activists are, I had an intense negative reaction to this section of the book. Many of the animal rights activists I spoke to about this were ready to seize it as the reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater and discredit his other premises. Taking into account the rest of what Jensen lays out through his twenty premises and endless examples of civilization follies I can't say I disagree with him though. From where he is coming from you could hear him make the same argument for taking the life of a human for survival, and he does denote that the taking of life is for survival. In this way, humans are again acting as an animal, and a part of the food chain. I am still trying to grapple with how this is done with dignity, but Jensen aptly offers Native American cultures as an example. I think in this way Jensen does fetishize indigenous cultures much like many other "liberal" thinkers, but admittedly Native American stewardship of this land we human "Americans" now occupy is utopian in comparison.

Jensen is intellectually honest, and fairly states that all morality is particular, and what may be moral in one circumstance may not be in another. He applies this most poignantly to what we, as humans and activists, are doing about the disease that is civilization; next to nothing. This book was apparently started as a frustrated rebuke of those "non-violent" and "pacifist" activists who would rather have their so-called personal moral purity than make an actual difference for the principles they profess to hold. Throughout Endgame Jensen takes to task all those who look down their pious noses at illegal and violent forms of activism, Gandhian and Buddhist proponents alike. Jensen states that "our perception of morality of every particular act must be informed by the certainty that to fail to effectively act to stop the grotesque and ultimately absolute violence of civilization is by far the most immoral path any of us can choose. We are, after all, talking about the killing of the planet."

While critical of the theater all forms of activists seem to play roles in, (that is we abide by the rules of the system to voice or mollified dissent to a particular policy, let the police guide the terms of the debate set by the lawmakers who represent the controlling corporate interests, and go home at the end of the day feeling good about ourselves all the while knowing we made not a damn bit of difference or "threatened" the corporate policy we are in opposition too) Jensen does advocate an inclusive approach to social change that include otherwise silly and useless options like voting, writing congress people, and holding signs. What Jensen has no tolerance for though is dogmatism that condemns forms of agitation that fall outside the law or boundaries of non-violence.

Throughout Endgame Jensen makes short work of dismissing the illogical and dangerous ramblings of those holding up what he calls the "Gandhian shield&qout; to actually achieving something. The kind of scrutiny Jensen holds up to his own tactical detractors and hypothetical arrangements is warranted as well to the politically palatable rhetoric spun by the animal rights movement's own "leaders" and organizations. You don't need to read Endgame to know that everything environmental and animal rights activists are fighting for each year gets worse and worse, we know this because the organizations "fighting" to change this tell you about it in their fundraising solicitations. The Wayne Pacelle's and Peter Singer's are all too happy to proclaim their moral purity in denouncing "radical" activism of others, but are not ready to confront the moral quagmire that is their continuing failed activist policies and philosophies. I agree with Jensen when he states that this form of non-violence is not nonviolence at all, but a silent approval of the abysmal status quo. Jensen states "when our lifestyle is predicated on the violent theft of resources, to advocate nonviolence without advocating the immediate dismantling of the entire system is not, in fact, to advocate nonviolence at all, but to tacitly countenance the violence on which the system is based."

Jensen does offer not a blueprint in Endgame Volume 1 of how activists should go about bringing down civilization, but just his own musings. In one rather comical chapter he tells a rather Quixotic tale of when he went out "tilting" at cell-phone towers whilst investigating the best way to bring down these bird-killing, cancer causing, phallic structures of death. The chapter seems to illustrate that the problems our "times" face are complex and so must our solutions be. Jensen predicts that regardless of what "we" activists do the earth is on course for a dramatic "environmental correction" that will strip civilization back down to only a sustainable size and structure. In any event Endgame Volume 2 promises a more practical hands-on direction of what can be done in the mean time.

Two years ago in Satya I penned an essay entitled "Apocalypse Now" about the elephant in our animal rights movement's living room that is this impending ecological collapse. (It seems the only elephant our movement is willing to acknowledge though is that of the GOP politicians. Groups like the HSUS have given $5000 to likes of the bigot Rick Santorum). Since then I have been convicted of several federal offenses related to verbal activism, seen this once liberation-based movement hijacked towards a corporate-welfare agenda (see Satya's September issue), and have given up hope. Derrick Jensen's Endgame hasn't given me a reason to believe that success against governmental, corporate, human, or "civilized" oppression is on the horizon, but it has given me a new lens through which to view my life, my principles, and my priorities. I think it should be mandatory reading for all activists, or if nothing else, I intend to use as a weapon and physically beat people over the head with it.