No, We Can't Have It All

Volume 1llllllllllllmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmlll Volume 2
Published in 2006


Note to mods, this excerpt is approved for open distribution.


No, We Can't Have It All
An Excerpt from 'Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization'
by Derrick Jensen

We all face choices. We can have ice caps and polar bears, or we can have automobiles. We can have dams or we can have salmon. We can have irrigated wine from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, or we can have the Russian and Eel Rivers. We can have oil from beneath the oceans, or we can have whales. We can have cardboard boxes or we can have living forests. We can have computers and cancer clusters from the manufacture of those computers, or we can have neither. We can have electricity and a world devastated by mining, or we can have neither (and don't give me any nonsense about solar: you'll need copper for wiring, silicon for photovoltaics, metals and plastics for appliances, which need to be manufactured and then transported to your home, and so on. Even solar electrical energy can never be sustainable because electricity and all its accoutrements require an industrial infrastructure). We can have fruits, vegetables, and coffee brought to the U.S. from Latin America, or we can have at least somewhat intact human and nonhuman communities throughout that region. (I don't think I need to remind readers that, to take one not atypical example among far too many, the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, leading to thirty years of U.S.-backed dictatorships and death squads. Also, a few years ago I asked a member of the revolutionary tupacamaristas what they wanted for the people of Peru, and he said something that cuts to the heart of the current discussion : "We need to produce and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.") We can have international trade, inevitably and by definition as well as by function dominated by distant and huge economic/governmental entities which do not (and cannot) act in the best interest of communities, or we can have local control of local economies, which cannot happen so long as cities require the importation (read: theft) of resources from ever-greater distances. We can have civilization -- too often called the highest form of social organization -- that spreads (I would say metastasizes) to all parts of the globe, or we can have a multiplicity of autonomous cultures each uniquely adapted to the land from which it springs. We can have cities and all they imply, or we can have a livable planet. We can have "progress" and history, or we can have sustainability. We can have civilization, or we can have at least the possibility of a way of life not based on the violent theft of resources.

This is in no way abstract. It is physical. In a finite world, the forced and routine importation of resources is unsustainable. Duh.

Show me how car culture can coexist with wild nature, and more specifically, show me how anthropogenic global warming can coexist with ice caps and polar bears. And any fixes such as solar electric cars would present problems at least equally severe. For example, the electricity still needs to be generated, batteries are extraordinarily toxic, and in any case, driving is not the main way a car pollutes: far more pollution is emitted through its manufacture than through its exhaust pipe. We can perform the same exercise for any product of industrial civilization.

We can't have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we can have it all -- to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth, much less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects (industrial production, at core, is the conversion of the living -- trees or mountains -- into the dead -- two-by-fours and beer cans) -- is grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifests in the pretension that neither limits nor justice exist. 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. And it is to have paid absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years.

One of the reasons we fail to perceive all of this is that we -- the civilized -- have been inculcated to believe that belongings are more important than belonging, and that relationships are based on dominance -- violence and exploitation. Having come to believe that, and having come to believe the acquisition of material possessions is good (or even more abstractly, that the accumulation of money is good) and in fact the primary goal of life, we then have come to perceive ourselves as the primary beneficiaries of all of this insanity and injustice.

Right now I'm sitting in front of a space heater, and all other things being equal, I'd rather my toes were toasty than otherwise. But all other things aren't equal, and destroying runs of salmon by constructing dams for hydropower is a really stupid (and immoral) way to warm my feet. It's an extraordinarily bad trade.

And it's not just space heaters. No amount of comforts or elegancies, what that nineteenth-century slave owner called the characteristics of civilization, are worth killing the planet. What's more, even if we do perceive it in our best interest to take these comforts or elegancies at the expense of the enslavement, impoverishment, or murder of others and their landbases, we have no right to do so. And no amount of rationalization nor overwhelming force -- not even "full-spectrum domination" -- will suffice to give us that right.

Yet we have been systematically taught to ignore these trade-offs, to pretend if we don't see them (even when they're right in front of our faces) they do not exist. Yesterday, I received this email: "We all face the future unsure if our own grandchildren will know what a tree is or ever taste salmon or even know what a clean glass of water tastes like. It is crucial, especially for those of us who see the world as a living being, to remember. I've realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I've met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we'll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life? I think you and I agree that as long as this culture continues with its preferred methods of perception, then it would not be widely known to the majority. I used to think environmental activists would at least get to say, ‘I told you so' to everyone else once civilization finally succeeded in creating a wasteland, but now I'm not convinced that anyone will even remember. Perhaps the worst nightmare visions of activists a few hundred years ago match exactly the world we have outside our windows today, yet nobody is saying, ‘I told you so.'"

I think he's right. I've long had a nightmare/fantasy of standing on a desolate plain with a CEO or politician or capitalist journalist, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting, "Don't you see? Don't you see it was all a waste?" But after ruminating on this fellow's email, the nightmare has gotten even worse. Now I no longer have even the extraordinarily hollow satisfaction of seeing recognition of a massive mistake on this other's face. Now he merely looks at me, his eyes flashing a combination of arrogance, hatred, and willful incomprehension, and says, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

And he isn't even entirely lying.

Except of course to himself.

© 2010 Derrick Jensen



Both volumes, and many others by Derrick Jensen available here: http://derrickjensen.org/purchase.html#endgame1

Other excerpts can be found here: http://www.endgamethebook.org/excerpts.html

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" - Edward Abbey

Everything should be at the service of humanity's long-term and short-term interests. Environment is important because it serves those interests and for no other reason. People are dying of starvation - that is important as well.

Everything is absolutely not for human interests. We are a part of this world and should be exercising stewardship rather than wanton and self interested squeezing of resources.

There was a world full of life before us and we should respect we are but a part of the fabric and are only borrowing this world in our time..

The choices have been made for us. The financial/military industrial complex has organized the world according to it's own self-serving and greedy interests and put the machinery in place to prevent populous uprisings.

I oppose this death of all life in exchange for more so-called civilization.

Humanity is not the be all, end all. What an arrogant attitude. The time will come when reasonable people will recognize that we are on a dead end road and do something about it. I hope it won't be too late.

I favor them because environmental degradation threatens humanity. Putting people first isn't arrogant, in my opinion. I do not advocate killing off endangered species for the fun of it... I think I am misinterpreted here...

If you really meant your title, then you have no understanding of The Humanities or even humanity itself. Your second sentence is either sarcastic and required such a tag or you are a sociopath. The third sentence isn't sarcastic and yet it has no meaningful application to your first two sentences, unless you mean wilderness needs to be destroyed to feed the starving masses. We can have a whole other discussion about that and I would welcome it, but within this context you are so completely wrong as to be jawdroppingly wrong.

I will admit that I am rather deliberately provocative on this particular question, because I DO think that progressives should have a basic anthropocentric instinct. NOT an individualist instinct, but rather one of putting the collective interests of humanity first. We do need to protect and care for the environment, and not just because it sustains us biologically, but also because it fulfills intangible value for humanity. What I reject is the concepts of so-called "deep ecology" that put environmental protection in all cases first, or values all species equally in terms of advocacy of public policy. I am a humanist.

That's the problem with this medium. Now that you've explained it, I get it. And no, what you've called humanism isn't sociopathy. The way you phrased it sounded like it to me, but with the restrictions of the media, these misunderstandings can happen.

If humanism only means that I'm anthropocentric, then I'm not a humanist. But having had a magnificent person in my past who considered himself a humanist, I suspect it means more than that. I'm about to head to bed or I would do the research on that (love those oil fueled intenetz).

The humans are the ones who over bred on Earth and who over consumed and we did it by using oil - oil that is now hitting peak. We are just another species, albeit, the one currently at the top of the food chain. In the microcosm, I am very human supportive. I have family I love, a child I adore and I work with preterm babies, whom I also adore. In the macrocosm, humans are destroying their home at an ever increasing speed. Most of the other species either inherently didn't do that or they faced a quick and dirty end to their overreach. James Lovelock thinks we will be down to about 200,000 humans by the end of the century. I wonder if he's being overly optimistic.

When I wake up, I will do some research on humanism, but my first response is that humanists and gaians have very different world views.

Human's long-term interests include retaining as much wilderness as possible. You can't simply plow the world and plant wheat and expect the scheme to work, after all.

Oh, well, besides the Dust Bowl problem. And it's working fine in the Amazon......................


:sarcasm:

But the question is not merely a semantic one. I see environmental protection as a human interest fundamentally. We cannot sustain humanity be short-sightedly exploiting resources in a harmful way - at least not indefinitely. We should definitely make it our goal to sustain humanity and sustain and transform the world in we live in our interests.

Harming Nature is self-harm.

If everyone followed suit we'd have massive disorganization, sprawl, and chaos, given the numbers on this planet. What we need is ecological sanity.

Personally I'm more or less convinced human nature being what it is we're destined to undermine our own support systems until we crash.

Another apex predator, the sabre tooth, is believed to have gone extinct six times (it's a very simple mutation apparently) anyway they breed too fast and hunt too efficiently and suffer collapse and extinction, an evolutionary dead end due to being too efficient at consumption..

Other species deserve to live on this planet as well. And humanity is better off with them.

Thanks for posting stuff like that. There are many people of great thoughts.

And we can not have it all that is a deception or delusion to get someone to make mistakes, or do things they would not do without that unjust delusion.

"Car culture" is so laughable as something to blame.

So is our voracious appetite for flesh, so is our overpopulation, so is the military industrial complex, so are many corporations and not a few countries. To refuse to discuss this based on a person's individual choices which may, or may not differ from your own, leads me to suspect you have little to say on this topic. It would be more honest to say that.

I can say it. This topic is so huge and so apparently unsolvable that the only reason I don't crawl under my desk and curl into a ball at the utter impossibility of making a difference is that I hold a personal set of ethics that says I have to keep fighting what I consider the good fight, even knowing that we're losing, that we will probably lose everything. So I do the things I can and try to stretch to do more because I have integrity.

If you look back on some of my posts, you'll see that I can do snark and wit with the best of them but if that was your intent here, it landed wrong.

until asked to make the simplest, most direct, single most effective pro-environment lifestyle change. Their concern for the environment ends at their dinner plate.

It's the same painful irony I pointed out when I wrote an email to DU talking about how we are all culpable for the Gulf oil spill and all the other blood that's been spilled for oil. The author states:

Yesterday, I received this email: "We all face the future unsure if our own grandchildren will know what a tree is or ever taste salmon or even know what a clean glass of water tastes like. It is crucial, especially for those of us who see the world as a living being, to remember. I've realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I've met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we'll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life? I think you and I agree that as long as this culture continues with its preferred methods of perception, then it would not be widely known to the majority. I used to think environmental activists would at least get to say, ‘I told you so' to everyone else once civilization finally succeeded in creating a wasteland, but now I'm not convinced that anyone will even remember. Perhaps the worst nightmare visions of activists a few hundred years ago match exactly the world we have outside our windows today, yet nobody is saying, ‘I told you so.'"

Email.

DU.

Everything we touch.

It really is almost incomprehensible and yet, it is the future. That's not unknowable for anyone who cares to think about it. What's unknowable is when all of this ends and perhaps some of the details.

and I've said more than once, that, while we may be the mind of Gaia, we are also her cancer. That dovetails well with Edward Abbey's quote.

http://www.gaiatheory.org/

The offspring will be Humanity's colonization of other planets, spreading Earth Life to lifeless worlds. Unfortunately we are having some complications with the pregnancy. :yoiks:

I believe what is being said. We can't "have it all". But we have come a long ways and we can still have a very sustainable and yes, somewhat convenient and prosperous life. We just have to redefine what that means. It does not mean unlimited. It means that purposeful building of societies that coexist and use progress with wisdom.

It is one thing to say that we need to live in our environs, realize we are part of the environs and do so wisely, but that is NOT what this fellow advocates. He is against civilization as a whole, solar, computers, the WHOLE thing. Where his utopia fails is that a society without tech will have to be done with LOTS of domination, for that is the only way a society without tech survives.

Doubt me?, let me ask you this, in a world that fits Jensen, a world without mass transit, without machines, most labor would have to be devoted to the growing of food. It would be organic allright, which is to say, unreliable and labor intensive. The only way society could live off that type of argiculture is by making sure all people were stuck in very defined roles: serfs/peasants/etc. People who did not fit into this role would need to be punished, for the good of all. People romanticize such life as something pure, but truth to tell, we all know that life in those days was short, hard, brutish, and not at ALL egalitarian. We take for granted that the common person can read and have access to medicine, but up until very recently in history, all but a chose few were denied those things; we lived short lives, mostly filled with toil and pain. This goes double for Women, who could not risk havign a child without dying, much less have career options.

I can understand the need for restraint, to not make tech a fetish, and to realize we are mortal, like the rest of the creatures on this ball of mud. Huxley said that once we realize we have something in common "with the very worms", we will be better off, especially as we would stop trying to be gods. However, Jensen is but a move in an opposite direction, a move towards a fetishized understanding of "indigenous cultures"; sorry, as a Latino whose father survived horrid conditions, I do resent Anglo-Saxons getting off on "indians" as some sort of "noble savage" Myth.

We cannot go back to Eden folks. Eden never was. If we want to survive, we will have to do it the same way we always have: by THINKING.

That, or starting a third world war, which with the nuclear arsenals at our beck and call, is a really, really stupid idea.

This is really complex. I think we need to move to smaller self sustained communities. In the sixties, they were called communes, these days they are called communities, same idea. And an idea well worth looking into.

http://www.ic.org/

what a bleak and grinding hell they'd create if they had their way.

Go ahead, read his work; what you will find very quickly is a push for something beyond even traditional methods of birth and population control: Jensen believes that millions of human beings need to die in order for the planet to survive. He constantly wishes for large-scale natural disasters to "reset the balance" and even advocates -- in one of the books you detail in your post -- little tricks "eco-activists" can pull to help it along, like ruining water supplies, engaging in sabotage, etc.

Don't be fooled by his readable style and moderately affable authorial voice: Derrick Jensen would be happy if we lived in a new Dark Age.

I'm planning on reading the book. I will keep your caveat in mind. The thing is, I don't see how we sustain the kind of population that has exploded on this world and I don't see any parity happening between, for instance, Africa and America or Australia and Pakistan and so on. I think every human has a base value just by virtue of being born and I'm a total hypocrite because I'm a relatively well off American. And the life choices I have made make running off to Africa to offer humanitarian aid, a generally fruitless effort without massive backing that just isn't there, really quite impossible. I don't think a lottery will work, but we need negative population control unless we can find a way to provide energy and food with parity to all. And no, the world won't get the American standard and Americans shouldn't be allowed it either (she writes from her computer in her warm house, hypocrisy nipping at her toes).

Jensen may see it that way...

But the far larger problem we have are those who promote war. You do know that the non-Jensens have propagated a system whereby all humans, in the blink of an eye, can be wiped clean off the face of this planet?

Ah yes, of course you do, you are no idiot. So who do I fear the most? Those who would like to see a world with humans and more natural, or those who would drop the bomb and get rid of us all?

There can be no middle ground here. You are either for or against. I know which side I shall be. The Jensens of the world are not a problem.

to be exterminated to restore the balance if people act on the thoughts he has espoused?

when you put it that way, I would volunteer you. <grin>

Do you support the BOMB? Would you volunteer to be in the army and learn to kill people?

Eh? I bet you can't/won't even answer the questions with a simple yes or no.

"Do you support the BOMB?"

a simple No,

but we don't need the Bomb to have computers, medicine or mass transit, things jensen wants to get rid of.

Would you volunteer to be in the army and learn to kill people?

Again a simple NO

...but if people were active;ly trying to kill ME, like jensen wants to, I would learn to survive, not even kill, just live. If I had my druthers, I would keep them far away from me, but then again, that defines NOT volunteering to kill them.

As far as this quote
I would volunteer you. <grin>

First off, who gave YOU that right.
Second, if you wondered why i said that, it is because jensen would gladly volunteer me, you, and several million all in the name of his Utopia. He does not try to hide that fact, and indeed, wears that on his sleeve should you care to read him. He is really no different than Charles manson that said "if I could kill about 50 million of you, I could have my water back."


You have your simple nos, and in the process, you exposed the fact that you would volunteer other people, despite the fact that mr Jensen would probably ensure he killed you too, that and several million others.

I loved some of his books but when he went off the deep end with Endgame. Definitely dangerous.

Oh...I'm sure you'll hissy fit tell me why you are the beautiful human with the exemption...to actually use electricity to tell the rest of us bipeds why we are all damned.

Go ahead.

It'll be entertaining.

Use that bandwidth.

Some people are just as bad and eternally more annoying than those Westboro Baptist freaks,

Yeah. We are all destroying the planet/doomed to HELL.

Bring it on.

At least we will be rid of freaks.

Srzly.

Do you think I had a point when I mentioned that a lot of the eco-types forget what women went through before technology?

For one

Yeah...I gotcha ya.

Viewpoints like those in the OP disgust me to no end.

Those who think there are too many people on the planet should do us a favor and take a walk off the narrow side of a tall bridge. Too many people you say? Rid us of your existence at least...Won't do that? Then they are a hypocritical, worthless, little FUCK!!!

We've already seen mass extermination of millions of humans within recent memory assholes.

I am a male, but I really find it odd that so many females support radical environmentalism without realizing that they are slitting their own throat.

I can't imagine the world without people like you either. I'm sure someone, somewhere will miss you.

Unless we learn to fit in we will become one of those evolutionary experiments that failed, and failed quickly.

100,000 years from now, which is but an instant on nature's clock, the earth will be rich with life again and nothing will be left of the common ape, pan vulgaris, humanity, but our fossilized remains and the remarkable amount of trash we produced.

We protect the earth because this is the environment we are part of, this is the environment we live in. Without this environment we are nothing. We cannot survive when the air and the water and the land itself turns toxic and pathogenic and inhospitable to our kind of life.

We are already creating a hellish world for our children. Our great great... grandchildren simply won't exist, won't be around to complain, and nature will go on, in her usual way, without us, evolving wonderful new kinds of life to fill the holes we left in the ecosphere.

We must protect the environment not because we can destroy it, but because we are utterly insignificant in the normal scales of time and the depths of space. If we don't protect this environment our survival depends upon then nobody's gonna care when we are gone. Our gods will be dead and our libraries lost. We will be forgotten.

Thanks for posting this.

nt

That is what I hate about attitudes like this. Technology is not good nor is it bad, it is a TOOL, a tool that can be used for good end or for bad ends. Indeed, high technology is necessary for a society that is truly sustainable, pre-modern peasants are not the paragons of sustainability the romantics make them out to be.

The problem is NOT Technology, the problem is CAPITALISM and the CONSUMERIST IDEOLOGY that sustains it.

Of course, half the people who Idolize Jensen do not realize that they would be the first on the chopping block. They would also be the first to see all the primtive tribes rummaging through the forest, crappign in rivers, and think "what a mess these people are making" as suppoed to sewers that clean water, and high rises that ensure we do not need as much land to live.

High-density urban areas like NYC or the old cities of Europe are actually very, very Green, and yet they are "evil" to the Luddites. The "Back-to-the-Land" ideology, which actually started among snotty upper and middle class "reformers" during the Progressive Era 110 years ago, actually encourages unsustainable sprawl and the car culture. Hell, HENRY FORD was one of those early "back-to-the-land" idiots and advertised his cars as a way to get people out of the "evil, decadent cities". It's basically nothing more than reactionary romanticism.

It's just human nature.

And I assume that we all want to be here...unless some people are willing to take a hike from their lives for the sake of the rest of us..?






Didn't think so.

Technological or otherwise.

We're changing the interactions of all the different variables of our existence. There is no perfect state to it. Just because we call it sustainable, be it going back to living in caves, or downloading our collective intelligence onto a computer, doesn't mean that it's sustainable, because we created the word, and defined it. Just because we call something clean, or green, doesn't mean that it is.

If technology were sustainable, then we would be more sustainable today than we've ever been, but we're not. Not according to our definition of it. We alter our environment more than we ever have, and on ever smaller and larger levels. It's chaotic more than anything. Can there be a point in time somewhere in the future where we stop advancing technologically?

As many problems that accompany our advancing technology, we'd have the same number of problems if we went the other way. How much chaos would be associated with that?

We're stuck in the old damned if you do, damned if you don't. We define something as a problem, and attempt to solve it. We may solve that particular problem, but then we have to live with the results. Inevitably we find another problem within those results. It almost seems like we can't help but to do so. Someone has less over here, someone has more over there, this changed that, that made this not work like it used to, not enough progress, too much regression, etc. We're trapped in that circle.