THE ORIGIN OF DERRICK JENSEN’S BOOK “BRIGHT GREEN LIES”
Derrick discovered that you have to put your arguments in writing. Otherwise people will just make things up and get away with it.
My guest is Derrick Jensen, author of 30 books, including A Language Older Than Words, End Game (Volume 1, The Problem of Civilization) and Deep Green Resistance.
HART HAGAN: Your latest book is “Bright Green Lies” with co-authors Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert. The subtitle is How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It.
Why did you, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert feel the need to write this book?
DERRICK JENSEN: Well, the book really started when I was writing columns for a magazine called Orien. One of the editors there wanted me to debate someone. This person had coined the term “Bright Green.” Our fundamental disagreement was this: He thought you can make minor tweaks to the system and it will still be sustainable. I think civilization is inherently unsustainable and is destroying life on the planet.
One of my conditions for doing the debate was that it be written, for reasons I'll get into in a moment. And we started it that way. But then he said he didn't want to do it in written form. He would only do it by phone. So I said, okay I'll do it by phone on the condition that both of us have to agree before this thing gets published. We never agreed, so it never got published.
“BRIGHT GREEN” ENVIRONMENTALISTS CAN JUST MAKE THINGS UP AND NOT BE ACCOUNTABLE
One of the problems I have with the oral debate format is that somebody can just make stuff up. And you don’t know what they’re going to make up, so you have to have every fact ready to rebut it. Otherwise you end up going back and forth, saying, “No, it isn’t.” “Yes, it is.” Which is exactly what happened with the debate. When we got off the phone I did five minutes of research and found that many of the claims he was making were simply false.
One of the ways that we can talk about civilization being inherently unsustainable is to do full cost accounting. So, for example, we're both wearing reading glasses. Where did the plastics come from? Where did the glass come from? Where does the energy come from to fabricate it?
I was talking about how mines are inherently unsustainable. Every hard rock mine on the planet pollutes the groundwater.
And he said, well, it's possible to have our current way of living without mining simply by disassembling and recycling.
It took me about five minutes after this debate to look up to discover that, for example, copper is one of the most easily recyclable metals in the world. But something like 70% of copper used is new copper because of increasing demand.
So I started thinking, wow, there's all these claims people are making about wind and solar energy and not enough people are rebutting it.
So, that's how the book developed.
There’s another reason.
ENVIRONMENTALISM USED TO BE ABOUT SAVING WILD PLACES
At one point, environmentalism was about saving wild places and wild beings and there's been a transformation. Mainstream environmentalism is no longer about saving wild places and wild beings. It’s about finding new ways to fuel this destructive culture.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE BEEN TURNED INTO A LOBBYING ARM OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
So, for example, you can have a million people march in the cities of New York or Washington DC or Paris or London. And if you ask them why they're marching, they'll say to protect the planet but if you ask them for their specific demands they say: We want more subsidies for the wind and solar industries. So they've been basically turned into a lobbying arm of industrial capitalism.
That’s horrifying.
What you'll find is that a lot of mainstream environmental organizations are actually lobbying for destructive activities like various forms of mining. And so we wanted to reclaim the environmental movement back to what it was when we were young activists, where it was about protecting wild nature. So those are the motivations for writing the book.