“Does anybody believe this culture will voluntarily change in order to live in a sane and sustainable fashion?” Jensen asked the audience. “We’re losing badly on all fronts; right now ExxonMobil is winning and hammerhead sharks are losing.”

An award-winning author, teacher and long-time environmental activist, Derrick Jensen spoke to a packed audience April 23 in the Wisconsin Room of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He urged attendants to take action against an occupying culture he said is destroying the planet.

Recently named Press Action Person of the Year, and the author of such books as “The Culture of Make Believe” and “A Language Older than Words,” Jensen has been working for environmental rights for the past 18 years. He also taught creative writing in Pelican Bay State Prison.

Despite the intense subject matter, Jensen kept the audience laughing throughout the evening with humorous anecdotes and scenarios. This included an alternate “Star Wars” script in which environmentalists sent letters to Darth Vader, imploring him not too blow up any more planets.

The story would serve as an ironic metaphor for Jensen’s militant stance on steering our planet off of its present course of catastrophe, something he said will not happen unless drastic actions are taken.

“Does anybody believe this culture will voluntarily change in order to live in a sane and sustainable fashion?” Jensen asked the audience outright. “We’re losing badly on all fronts; right now ExxonMobil is winning and hammerhead sharks are losing.”

Jensen laid out a series of premises throughout the evening, the first one being that industrial civilization is not and can never be sustainable. Any way of living based on non-renewable resources cannot sustain itself. The reason certain species have been able to exist on this planet for millions of years is because they improve the habitat around them.

Jensen bemoaned the impact human civilization has had on the earth’s habitats and the violent culture it has produced.

“Civilization is characterized by the growth of cities, with cities requiring the importation of resources,” Jensen explained. “Two things happen because of this: Your way of life is never sustainable, and your way of life is based on violence.”

Violence was a common theme running throughout Jensen’s premises. These included his contention that our way of living would collapse without it being widespread, and that our culture is based on a clearly defined hierarchy, in which violence from a lower level to a higher one is unthinkable.

“The property of those higher in the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below,” Jensen concluded.

Jensen stressed the inevitability of a cultural collapse. The longer we wait for it to happen, he said, the messier it will be for all species on this planet, including humans. In a related premise, Jensen said the needs of nature far outweigh the needs of our civilization’s economic system, and that all people will care about in the future is if they can breathe the air and drink the water.

“Ninety percent of the water used by humans is used for agriculture and industry,” Jensen said. “It’s being taken by Coca-Cola.”

Although Jensen said that humans have exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet, he added that consumption is still more of a problem than overpopulation. After stating that people in Canada use more resources per capita than anyone else in the world, Jensen asked, “Who causes more damage, a subsistence farmer in India or a Canadian?”

The author said his main goal was the de-industrializing of our culture, where the rich would be deterred from stealing from the poor, and the powerful would be stopped from destroying the planet. Jensen defended his advocacy of the use of violence if necessary, recalling a man who could have significantly altered history, had his attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler been successful.

Jensen compared rising up against seemingly insurmountable odds to a situation in which a mouse attacked him while defending her babies, and the revolts of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“Those who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a higher rate of survival than those who went along,” Jensen repeated three times in a row for effect.

While this worldview may seem bleak to some, Jensen said that despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation. He wrapped up his presentation by speaking about the futility of hope. False hopes allow people to continue to live in unlivable environments.

“Hope is a longing for a future for which you have no agency,” Jensen explained. “I’m not interested in hope, I’m interested in agency.”

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