Derrick Jensen - Endgame (2006)

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It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

Derrick Jensen
We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

Derrick Jensen
Where will you drive your own picket stake? Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at which you will finally stop running, at which you will finally fight back.

Derrick Jensen
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Derrick Jensen
From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

Derrick Jensen
A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.

Derrick Jensen
When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.

Derrick Jensen
So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.

Derrick Jensen
To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

Derrick Jensen
We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

Derrick Jensen
A real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves

Derrick Jensen
Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

Derrick Jensen
Casey Maddox wrote that when philosophy dies, action begins. I would say in addition that when we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly free - to honestly start working to thoroughly resolve it. I would say when hope dies, action begins.

Derrick Jensen
But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here's the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

Derrick Jensen
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Derrick Jensen
Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

Derrick Jensen
Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Derrick Jensen