Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen (born December 19, 1960) is an American author and radical environmentalist (and prominent critic of mainstream environmentalism) living in Crescent City, California. According to Democracy Now!, Jensen "has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement." Jensen has published several books, including The Culture of Make Believe and Endgame, that question and critique civilization as an entire social system, exploring its inherent values, hidden premises, and modern links to supremacism, oppression, and genocide, as well as corporate, domestic, and worldwide ecological abuse. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University. 2Education He holds a B.S. in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, which he attended on a scholarship, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington. 2Career 3Philosophy Derrick Jensen is primarily an advocate for indigenous peoples and wild nature, and an opponent of civilization, rejecting the notion that it can ever be an ethical or sustainable model for human society. He describes the linguistically and historically defensible definition of civilization as "a culture — that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts — that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning state or city)," and the definition of city as a group of "people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life." He explains that, by such definitions, civilizations and cities are both unsustainable: Two things happen as soon as you require the importation of resources. One of them is that your way of living can never be sustainable, because, if you require the importation of resources, it means you've denuded the landscape of that particular resource, and, as your city grows, you’ll denude an ever-larger area. [...] And the other thing it means is that your way of life must be based on violence, because if you require the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable because, if you require the importation of resources and the people in the next watershed over aren't going to trade you for it, you're going to take it. An outspoken critic of human supremacy, Jensen advocates non-anthropocentrism, or ecocentrism, according to which humans should first of all actively support the flourishing of entire natural communities and their many individual species, rather than the flourishing of humans alone; and second, that they should extend the status of personhood to all organisms and ecosystems, including non-human animals and plants. For example, in an article on water management, he refers to "both human people and fish people