Our Industrial Culture is Unsustainable

End of Civilization: Derrick Jensen’s Endgame

http://endciv.com
This piece breaks down the first premise of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame.  Derrick Jensen is a brilliant author and environmental/cultural activist.  His message:  “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.” This is especially true for industrial civilization.  I don’t think the problem is “civilization” itself, it’s consumerism and endless production of things people don’t really need.  So, I would substitute “capitalistic, industrial civilization for just “industrial”.  The biggest question is, what to do about it?  While my crazy Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann is yelling in Washington, D.C., about “freedom”, her country is falling to pieces around her, and not from lack of freedom, but from too much of what she mistakes for freedom — take no prisoners capitalism.  It didn’t take me more than 10 minutes in Minneapolis today to spot my first homeless person, and since then I have been seeing them here and there, all day long.  I suppose you could call homelessness a form of “freedom” but I don’t think that is what Bachmann and her Tea Bagger followers have in mind.  (Especially not with winter coming.)  It seems like Bachmann and the Baggers really mean unbridled capitalism and consumerism as their brand of “freedom”.   In any case, none of it is sustainable, and it’s not just destroying lives, it’s destroying our planet.  These videos Feature interviews with Ward Churchill, John Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Michael Becker.

ENDGAME CIVILIZATION – Clear Cuts

Related information, see

A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction by Chris Hedges

Derrick Jensen: Star Wars – The Environmentalists Version

from the archives:

Industrial capitalism is a given and the natural world is secondary (Interview with Derrick Jensen)