The Derrick Jensen Reader

Book excerpt: In an age marked by seemingly unstoppable environmental collapse and the urgent quest for solutions, environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen, the voice of the growing deep ecology movement, reveals for us new seeds of hope. Here for the first time in The Derrick Jensen Reader are collected generous selections from his prescient, unflinching books on the problem of civilization and the path to true resistance. In the acclaimed A Language Older Than Words, Jensen dissects his own abusive childhood to examine the pathology of Western culture and shares with us the power and beauty of an alliance with the natural world. He continues to use the lens of his own experience as well as the wisdom of philosophers, activists, and teachers to expose oppression and call us to action in his other early works, Listening to the Land, A Culture of Make Believe, Strangely Like War, and Walking on Water. We see his analysis deepen when he asks us to accept that the only moral response to biocide is resistance in the two-volume Endgame, a truth he explores further in Thought to Exist in the Wild, What We Leave Behind, the graphic novel As The World Burns, and in his two novels, Songs of the Dead and Lives Less Valuable. And in Dreams, Jensen's latest work, he leads us still further toward his vision for a healed planet, freeing us to see beyond the limits of our present culture to a future luminous with meaning.