Interview with Derrick Jensen About the Film “Avatar”
Interview by Colin Wolf
In the film “Avatar” so many of the topics that you discuss in your books were presented. What do people you talk to say about “Avatar”?
There were a few who didn’t like it because they felt like it was too much of the White person coming in to save the natives. It’s pretty clear to me that they’ve got to
have a plot device to hook in White audience members. So I didn’t actually have a problem with that.
The way I see that is that you have Jake Sully who is the Sky Person who comes in touch with the native Na’vi people. He becomes a Na’vi person and fights against the human colonizers. You have to be a civilized cunning person and know about war in order to win a war. The Na’vi’s are living their tribal life. The tribal people never realized how violent and evil the people of civilization could be. It’s beyond their understanding. I don’t know if a Na’vi person could be violent or cunning enough to win a war like the one they faced with the Sky people.
I agree 100%. In addition, I remember reading years ago that if you have a vampire story you have to have one character who doesn’t believe in the vampire, that way the audience members have a place to protect their disbelief. They go on a journey with that person as they grow to understand that there really is vampires. It’s similar here. My understanding was that the director was trying to take readers from the position of being in the culture and taking them on a journey as him, which takes them out of the culture. That would work.
In the film Jake Sully is a likeable person, but he’s confused just like everyone in this civilization. Probably a regular White person can relate to him, they can feel like they are Jake Sully. And he does take a good path in the end. He originally goes to the Na’vi as a spy, but he falls in love with the forest and the Na’vi people, and eventually takes their side. James Cameron, the filmmaker, had to come into a deep understanding to create that character as a bridge for the viewer. There are so many beautiful points made in the film, like as soon as Jake goes into his Na’vi body he runs outside and digs his feet into the dirt and wiggles his toes and feels the earth. He runs to connect with the planet. The film touches on a lot of things that you talk about in your books. I know James Cameron is reading Derrick Jensen’s books!
Could be. The stuff’s getting around.
There’s a fan site for the film “Avatar” called naviblue.com where a people post comments and hold discussions. I saw someone had posted there some videos of you speaking. A lot of the members of naviblue.com feel like this system is destructive and coming to an end, but they don’t feel like humans can ever go back to living like tribal people, not even remotely. In your book “Endgame” you say that the only society that is truly sustainable is a stone age society. Most people are scared to imagine living a primitive lifestyle. They’ve been told a million times how miserable and awful it is to live like our ancestors did, which is a lie. Humans lived as hunter/gatherers for millions of years and it worked for them. This civilization we live in is only a few thousand years old.
Right now as you’re talking to me I’m on Tolowa land. The Tolowa lived here for at least 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they’ve lived here since the beginning of time. At the very least, they lived here for 12,500 years. When the dominant culture arrived here 180 years ago or so, the place was a paradise. There were salmon so thick that you couldn’t see the bottom of the rivers. I just learned the other day that even 100 years ago up in Alaska there were runs of salmon that were 12 miles wide and ran for 28 days. The salmon of course are getting absolutely hammered. Everybody’s getting hammered. The same is true all over the world. The San of what is now South Africa or Botswana, they evolved in place for at least a million years. There really is only one way of living that has been sustainable, and that is the tribal way. And we’ve been taught this false mythology that these peoples lived lives that were nasty, brutish and their lifespan was short. But that is not true either. All anthropology suggests that they have much greater leisure time, they spend a lot of time taking naps, they spend a lot of time singing and dancing and telling stories. They’re not working to serve the system. That’s one of the things that started me on this whole journey 30 years ago was I would ask people if they liked their jobs and about 90% of them say no. What that means is the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time doing things they don’t want to do. That didn’t happen with traditional people. Like here the salmon would run up the streams and you’d catch them and eat them. In most places life was much easier than what we know. You didn’t have the elegancies that there are now. Obviously there was no email, no phone, no electricity. But what they had was an ongoing community where they would live with the land base.
People in civilization always feel like the things we have, like dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and other so-called modern conveniences, makes life comfortable. I have lived with different tribes and spent time in the rainforest. When you’re out there you never think of cell phones, TV, books. You don’t miss any of it because all day long you’re feeling so entertained and high on the forest and the mountains and rivers and the people—especially the children. Life is so beautiful there that you never think of those so-called comforts, you are so comfortable and happy living in nature.
Absolutely. A couple of examples. One is that people ask me sometimes what kind of music I listen to. When I lived in Spokane, Washington I used to listen to music all the time at home. But now that I live out in the forest I almost never turn on the stereo. I was wondering why and I realized it’s because when I lived in Spokane I live about 300 yards from the interstate highway. I was listening to music to block out other sounds. Now that I live in the forest I would rather hear the wind in the trees. This is not because I’m some kind of super spiritual person, it’s just that I like that sound. I like listening to the frogs. The only time I really listen to music anymore is when I’m in a car. I remember reading something by Carl Jung many years ago, and he wrote this in the 30’s, that all these newfangled inventions that everybody says are they’re timesavers, actually they take a lot of time and they’re pretty horrible. He talks about the telephone. It’s so funny how much these machines assimilate themselves into our lives. I don’t know about you, but I really hate email.
I hate email too. I hardly know how to type, I have to get somebody to help me do my email.
That’s good. I try to answer the emails I get and it takes me hours every day. And this is hours of my life that are never coming back. It’s just crazy! This is so true. There’s this line that I always remember—I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was writing about the turn of the 20th Century—he said, “In the past the man would be first and in the future the system will be first.” That line is so true, because now we are serving the system and the system isn’t serving us. It reminds me of a lot of addictions. I’ve known a fair number of drug addicts. When they first started the drug was serving them, and by the end they were serving the drug. That’s what the whole system is doing. It’s not serving us. Who was the idiot that came up with the idea of putting pesticides on our food, which is poison?
This whole civilization that everybody upholds as this amazing creation, it should be serving us but instead we are serving that.
Right. And one out of four African American girls, ages 8 or younger, are growing breasts or pubic hair. It’s messing with people on that fundamental and intimate a level. It’s not happening randomly, it’s happening because of all the weird chemicals that are out there. When it is causing little girls to undergo puberty at a very young age, you’d think people would recognize that the system is harming them. If you look at the cancer rate. When I give talks I ask people how many people in the audience have had someone you love die of cancer, and 80% of the people will raise their hand.
You’re talking about in America, But when you go away from the centers of civilization and meet tribal people or people who live in remote villages, none of them have cancer or other modern day sicknesses.
Exactly. These are civilized problems.
You were talking about how tribal people have a lot of leisure time. Most people in this civilization work for a whole year and maybe get 7 days of vacation time. That’s all the vacation time you get in 365 days until you’re 65 years old. A vast segment of your life has been sucked up by this vacuum which we call civilization.
And that’s a crazy way to live. When I was in college I remember a lot of my friends were already looking forward to their retirement.
They’re looking for retirement when they haven’t even started their life yet.
By the time they retire their life is all gone. And who’s life did you live? That was really in some ways where a lot of my questionings started. I didn’t understand a system under which most people would spend most of their time doing stuff they didn’t want to do. That seemed absolutely insane to me. And I have a friend who’s a long time environmental activist who says that a lot of activists begin by wanting to clean up something before them on the ground, and they end up questioning the foundation of Western Civilization. Because they’ll ask, why is this ground being destroyed? And as they ask that question, they start asking questions about the economic system. When they ask questions about the economic system the questions keep pushing their way back, until they get to the foundations of the whole system. It’s the same when you ask: why do people work jobs they don’t like. It’s the same as asking about the police state, or why are one third of African American males between the ages of 18 and 35 under criminal justice supervision? When you start asking questions like that: why do more African Americans end up in prison than at universities? When you start asking those questions the questions end up going back to the very foundations of the culture. We could say the same thing: why is this culture destroying the planet? We can look at the Bible where they’re saying that God gave Man dominion over the Earth. We can start with any one of these problems and then we can take them back and back and back until we start seeing that it’s the mindset of the whole culture that leads to the problems we see.
I know you’ve read the book “Ishmael”. When I read that book I was amazed because I’d never heard anybody talk about prehistory, the Bible myth and agriculture the way Daniel Quinn did. It’s like there’s a program. If you were born as a tribal person in Australia and you’ve never had contact with civilization, the program you know will be the program of existence. Just like how the animals or trees get programmed by existence, you’ll know how to survive in the natural world. That’s our natural program, it’s basically the survival program. What happened with the invention of agriculture and a settled way of living that started in the Fertile Crescent area—the people who lived there came up with a new program, which eventually came to be the civilization we live in and has been introduced to the whole world through force. This program called civilization is a very unnatural and destructive way of living. That’s why we have so many problems in the world today, because we left our natural way of living like nomadic/hunter-gatherer people. If you ask me, whoever came up with agriculture started a nightmare, and we’re living that person’s nightmare now.
Absolutely.
A human has two programs right now. One is your natural program, the program of existence, the one the animals and trees and tribal people have. Then you have the program called Civilization. As soon as we’re born, society starts installing that program into us. From your parents to your school to television, you keep getting more deeply trained and programmed. By the time you’re 18 years old you’re totally ready to work in civilization. Your original natural program is buried underneath. In Zen Buddhism they talk about “original face” or “no mind”. That’s what they mean, getting back to your original state, All humans think the program of Civilization is actually them. They think that’s all they are, and they will do everything possible to protect that program. People identify so closely with the program they’ve been given, they will defend that program like it’s their own life. When you condemn civilization they feel like you’re condemning them.
Exactly. Take a look at what all the so-called solutions to Global Warming have in common. What all the so-called solutions to Global Warming have in common is that they don’t take the natural world as a given; they take Industrial Capitalism as a given. What they’re about saving is Capitalism, not the planet. What has happened is so many people have confused what is real, and they don’t understand that without a real world you won’t have any social system. What they don’t understand is that the social system, any social system, is dependent on the real physical world. They identify more with this social system than they do with the real physical world.
When you say social system, it’s the civilized program/lifestyle we live in that you’re talking about.
Exactly. It’s just different language for the same thing.
In the naviblue.com website there are all these discussions about tribal people because the Na’vi people in “Avatar” live like tribal people. Most people feel they could never go back to a primitive lifestyle. I’m sayin, you don’t have to and you can’t. But you need to understand this is a program called civilization and that you are not the program. You need to understand how to switch back and forth between the two. When you are working in civilization you use the civilized program. When you are not you switch back to our natural program. Because no matter what, we are in a world dominated by civilization. Even if you buy land and go there to live, you are still tied to the system. You have to pay tax and follow the laws of the system. You can’t just walk out to the forests and start gathering food and living like our ancestors did.
Apart from which, to simply walk away like that is to not acknowledged that your brothers and sisters—by that I mean your non-human brothers and sisters and your human brothers and sisters—are still being oppressed by the system. In Avatar presumably he would have had the alternative of just trying to walk away into the forest and live there for awhile as the dominant culture destroyed the planet. He could’ve lived for a little while just by hiding. But you’ll notice in the film, he chose to fight back.
Right. And I’m telling people that they just need to recognize that the program of civilization is not you. It is something that is installed into us from the time we are born, first by our parents, then the education system. By the time you are 16 you are fully programmed/domesticated, ready to work in this civilization.
I think that’s an incredibly important point. And—this is not an ego question, this is an information question—which of my books have you read?
The ones I’ve read over and over are “Endgame” 1 and 2, and “What We Leave Behind”.
The reason I mention that is because one of my books, it’s a very short book called “Walking on Water”, is about education. One of the questions I ask in there is: why does school take so long? Because they can convey the information—the mathematics and history and reading—they can cover all of it in 4 to 5 years. But they’ve got you for 12 years. It took me a long time to figure out why, and one of the reasons school take so long is because children don’t give up their will very easily. It takes that long to break their wills sufficiently to prepare them for a life of painful employment.
I did read your book “Walking on Water”. You’re talking about getting domesticated in civilization so we can work in the system.
Exactly! It has a lot to do with that program that you’re talking about. Kids don’t give up their belief that trees have an existence all their own, that trees can speak to them. They don’t give up their beliefs easily. It needs to be pounded out of them. I’ve always thought that the most important piece of technology in the classroom is the second hand on the clock, because it teaches all the children in the class to learn the same prayer which is, “Please God, make this thing move faster!” It teaches them to wish away their lives. It takes a long time and a lot of hard work, to use your language, to install that program. A friend of mine always says that the thing about lies is they’re very expensive to maintain. They need to be reinforced all the time. The program that gets installed is actually very unstable. With just a little bit of help, if we get the right sort of virus in there, we can make that program start to go wacky. If there’s no supportive community around then that person could just break down. But if there is a supportive community around, that person could break down and then go on to find their original self.
I want to step back for a minute. You said how it takes so long for them to program us. In the film Avatar, Jake Sully is learning from the Na’vi woman how to live as a Na’vi. It does not take him long to cross over and become a member of the Na’vi people. A lot of people have a problem with that, thinking that it should take him many years of training to reach that point. But in fact, the tribal way of living is our birthright. It’s our intrinsic nature. Once you free yourself from this civilized program it doesn’t take much to return to your natural way. It’s very easy. It’s one step away.
The Khoi Khoi is a tribe of people who were driven extinct by the dominant culture in South Africa. A Khoi Khoi person was talking to a European. The European said, “Why don’t you work? You lay around all the time.” The Khoi Khoi person said, “Why should we work? The trees provide us with all this fruit and there’s fresh spring water everywhere. What are you wasting your time working for?”
People have gotten it twisted. People think being rich, having money, is the ultimate goal in life. Really what we’re looking for in life is fun, joy, free time. What we’re looking for is dancing, singing, sex, travelling, but we can’t do any of this because we’re working all day for the civilization. Tribal people were doing all of this. and people think this society is so highly developed. What is this development? If you look at California 200 years ago, this was a paradise. Not long ago! If you look at the film Avatar and compare where the Na’vi people live in the rain forest to where the Sky People live, it’s very clear who is living better.
The word develop means to grow and to be fulfilled, to go on to something more full. A caterpillar develops into a butterfly, that’s what it’s supposed to do. A tiny spring develops into a river. A child develops into an adult. But a beautiful forest does not develop into a city. That is one of the ways that that program has to maintain itself, by using words that are deceiving like that.
I love how you break it down. Anyone could understand that. When I read your books I see that you’ve been on a search for many years. You have come into a beautiful place right now. You have come into a deep understanding; I haven’t seen anyone else come into such a deep understanding. Writing this new book about dreams, I feel like you’re hitting the mystical shamanistic level, you’re hitting that magic. Once you hit the magic your power is unbelievably large. Do you feel like that?
I feel like there is some real magic in the Dreams book. One of the central questions that runs through the book that I’m trying to grapple with is that if the earth really is alive (which I fully believe) and if traditional indigenous people have had good connections to beings on the other side (which I also fully believe), then how come the dominant culture has been able to win? Why hasn’t the earth killed it off? That’s a central question to that whole book. I have a good friend who’s a Dakota Indian woman, she’s a longtime activist, she’s read the book and she said, “There isn’t an indigenous person in the last 500 years who hasn’t asked that same question.”
In one of your books you say: go listen to the river and it will give you the answers. But if we sit by a river and we don’t know the language of the river, would we be able to hear it?
I think people can because it’s part of our original program. When people ask me about this, they say, “How do I know that I’m hearing something real if I try to listen to the river?” I immediately ask them, “Have you ever had sex? If you did, did your partner have to tell you using words what you were supposed to do? Or did you just listen to the other person’s body and the body told you what to do without words?” That’s what they did. And then I say, “Now let’s go away from sex and talk about other species.” I ask if they ever had a dog, and if they say they did I ask, “How did the dog let you know when their water dish was empty?” The dog would look at you, look at the water dish, back and forth until you understood. There are ways you can communicate. How would I communicate with a person who speaks only Swahili? We can figure out ways to communicate, and yes we’re gonna make mistakes. I’ve known my mom all my life, but sometimes we still miscommunicate even though we both speak English and we know each other really well. We still miscommunicate. But if you speak only Swahili and I speak only English we would still figure out ways through gesture, expression. I point at the door and raise my eyebrows and you might figure out that I’m saying, let’s go. With a dog it’s one step further because you don’t both speak human, but you do speak mammal. With a lizard it’s further removed because you both speak animal, but you don’t both speak mammal. With a tree it’s further away and with a river it’s further. Each of those steps involves listening more and more. That’s on one level. On another level, it just involves really opening up and opening up in the same way that you open up to dreams. For example, when I walk through the forest here there are certain groups of trees that if I’m stuck writing they will give me the answers. Certain groups of trees do that more than others. At first I used to think it was just because I’m taking a walk and things loosen up. But it’s almost certain that when I pass certain groups of trees and if I ask them I’ll get an answer right then and there. What it sounds like in my head is a voice. For some people it’s different. Some people see pictures. For me it’s almost always a voice. What it takes is just listening and paying attention to another language. Getting your own head out of the way. I could ask you what you want but even if you speak English if I don’t listen to you it doesn’t really matter. If I say, “You wanna work for me for free? You wanna be my slave?” It doesn’t matter what you say, if I don’t listen for your answer. But if I want to hear your answer, I will.
You already know the language of the trees but you have forgotten it. It’s not like you need to learn the language of the trees?
We will never learn their language entirely, but there are bridges we can cross. There are openings we can go through where we can learn from them. The bottom line is just paying attention. That’s not so difficult.
Do you think Science is going to save the Earth?
Ask yourself, is the world a better place? Not civilization, but the real world. Are salmon better off because of Science? Are the oceans better off because of Science? Are redwood trees better off because of Science? I think in every case the answer is obviously No.
Humans are not in a better place either. Most of the time I feel like this civilization we live in is a mental institute with a lot of sick people. The only thing that is sane on Earth right now is where there are no people, just birds and animals and nature.
Absolutely. It’s disastrous for the real physical world. That’s one part, and another part is that people forget that Science and technological innovation is all based on dirty industry. They can talk about having these cool groovy solar photo voltaics, but they forget that in order to have electricity you have to have wiring, which means you have to have mining. You have to have a whole infrastructure. And you can’t pick and choose technology in that way. There’s another thing that’s really important. Lewis Mumford wrote about what he called democratic and non-democratic technics. A technic is the social system that surrounds a specific technology. A democratic technic would be one that could be done by everybody. You don’t need this hierarchical social structure for it. For example, the bow and arrow would be a democratic technic because I can make one and you can make one. Pottery would be a democratic technic because you can find some clay and make a pot. Hunting by making a snare would be a democratic technic because everybody can do it. On the other hand, an automobile inherently is a non-democratic technic because you can’t make one in your living room. This is true for a solar photo voltaic. It’s true for nanotechnology. They can’t be done at the community level. That’s really crucial too, to remember whether the technics is democratic or non-democratic. The only technics that are sustainable are the ones that are democratic and small scale.
In a tribal lifestyle everybody knows how to make everything that they need in order to live. In civilization you rely on the system to get what you need to live.
That’s exactly it. It relies on somebody halfway across the world mining, working this horrible job as a miner. It requires the transportation infrastructure. Those things don’t go away magically just because you put a photo voltaic on your roof. So no, Science won’t save the planet.
Can Science and Nature coexist? I’m asking these questions because they are some of the questions people ask on the naviblue.com website.
Look around! Part of the problem is that Science is based on the notion that the universe consists of objects to be described mathematically. So many indigenous people have said to me: the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that indigenous peoples perceive the world as made up of other beings to enter into a relationship with as opposed to other objects to be exploited. Richard Dawkins says that, “Science bases its claim to truth on spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command and to predict what will happen and when.” What that’s describing is enslaving the real world. Science is very good at that, at making matter jump through hoops on command. What it’s not good at is making matter jump through hoops on command without having unintended consequences. It’s also very bad at entering into a relationship. If you want to know how to live in a forest don’t ask a scientist, ask a tree. The tree will tell you how to live in the forest. An avocado tree will tell you if you’re eating too many avocados if you just pay attention. It will tell you if you need to move on because you’ve been sitting here too long. No, Science and the real world cannot coexist. Science is based on dominating the real world and that won’t last.
A lot of people feel like recycling is the answer to that. What do you say?
Recycling is fine but it doesn’t address the real issues on a bunch of levels. One is that 97% of the trash that is produced per capita in the United States is not actually produced by the person. It’s produced by industry. So if you individually recycle everything that you have, every little bit that you use, you are still responsible for about 26 tons of trash. That’s all from what’s being made in factories. 97% is systemic, it’s not personal. It’s the same with water. People say you gotta take shorter showers. 97% of the water used by human beings is used for agriculture and industry. All over the world where people are driven off of their land so you can put in dams or they’re dying of thirst, it’s not because people are drinking the water, it’s because the water is being used for semi-conductor factories or for soybean farms for cattle ranches. It’s for agriculture and industry, it’s not for individual use. The same amount of water is used per individual human being in the city as is used for municipal golf courses. So the problems are not personal, they’re much larger and systemic.
In “Endgame” you talk about how we have overshot our carrying capacity. What does that mean?
Carrying capacity is the number of any given species that can live in a place forever. You can have an island with a carrying capacity of a thousand deer—a thousand deer can live there forever. That doesn’t mean you can’t have more deer than that, but if you do have more deer they’re going to permanently reduce the carrying capacity by eating too much and pooping too much and denuding the landscape. Humans have exceeded carrying capacity and they’re permanently reducing the carrying capacity of the planet. 90% of the large fish in the ocean are gone. A friend of mine, her ex-husband is from Bangladesh, he’s 45 now and when he was a teenager his mother would ask him to go get lunch, and he would go down to the river and catch fish for lunch. That’s what everybody in the village did every day. Now there are no fish in the river because of pollution and they have to get their fish from Iceland. The carrying capacity of the area has been permanently reduced by getting rid of the fish. So, yeah, humans have grossly exceeded carrying capacity. The population of the planet will someday be far lower than it is now. Every cell in my body wants for that lowering of the population. But we all know it’s not going to happen, it’s gonna be a crash and it’s gonna be very nasty. It already is right now for non-humans and for the humans who are being forced off the land. That’s another thing, whenever there’s a famine anywhere in the world, chances are 3 out of 4 that that country is actually a net exporter of food. We’ve all heard about the Irish potato famine. Irish was exporting grain to England at that point. The point is that the people who are starving are not starving because there is no food on the land where they live; instead they’re starving because the land has been taken over for cash crops for export. In Central America people are hungry, not because the land can’t support them; they’re hungry because the land’s been taken over for coffee or for bananas for export. Years ago I interviewed a member of the MRTA, that’s a former rebel group in Peru, and I asked him “What do you want for the people of Peru? He said, “We want for them to be able to grow and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that, we merely want to be allowed to do so.” That’s the central question. That’s it, that’s everything. We want to be able to grow and distribute our own food. Yeah, humans have exceeded carrying capacity and it’s not just population. There are more humans on the planet to support, but there are two other problems. One of them is resource usage. Who does more damage to the planet? A farmer in India or someone living in the United States? Someone living in the United States does far more damage to the planet, so the problem is not simply numbers. The problem is also consumption. Consumption is a huge huge problem. The problem is even deeper than that. The problem comes down to looking at the natural world and perceiving limits. One of the reasons native people in Northern California were able to live here successfully for 12 thousand years was because they had a relationship with the land. They recognized that if you eat too many salmon there won’t be enough salmon for you to live on. So they maintained population, they had a steady state economy and a steady state population. They didn’t have a fetish of growth and the dominant culture. Who’s the idiot that came up with the idea of perpetual growth on a finite planet? If you limit the amount of food that worms get they will limit the number of babies that they have. And they don’t even have brains. Beings know when they’re overshooting carrying capacity, except for members of the civilized, who think that you can keep expanding forever. You can’t. The only one who thinks it can expand forever is cancer.
That’s why tribal people lived so well for millions of years. They kept their population in check, just like the worms you mentioned.
They would use different plants for contraceptives, they had birth control. “We can’t have more babies right now, so we stop having babies.”
The popular myth is that our world is getting better. This is what I come across all the time when I talk to people of this civilization; they always say: with technology and science life has improved greatly over what we had before as hunter/gatherers. What do you say?
First, is it getting better for salmon? Is it better for amphibians? What about traditional indigenous people? What about subsistence farmers the world over? There are former granaries in India that now export dog food and tulips to Europe. There are people starving to death in India because of the global economy. Is life getting better for them? What about for the one third of African American male at the ages of 18 to o35 who are under criminal justice supervision? What about them? Is it getting better for them? And then there’s the whole question of the cancers…I’m recovering from surgery right now, and this is just a classic example. I have Crohn’s Disease. Crohn’s Disease is a disease of civilization. It doesn’t happen in non-industrialized nations. One of the medicines I was given for Crohn’s Disease is called Prednizone, it’s a miracle drug that does great things for all sorts of diseases of civilization—asthma, diabetes, cancer. OK, the culture made me sick, then they give me a drug that makes me better, but one of the side effects of that drug is it kills some of my bones. So then I had to have this high tech surgery to help me recover from the problem that was created by the medicine that treated the disease that was caused by civilization. All these problems get created and then people come up with solutions to them that end up creating more problems. Then we go back to the original question you and I were talking about: are things getting better? Once again, everything I’ve read about traditional indigenous people is that they spend a lot of time telling stories, they spend a lot of time sleeping, they spend a lot of time having sex, and they don’t spend a lotta time working. And the work that they do is what a lot of people consider leisure time anyway. Civilized people get so excited when they get to go hunting or fishing. That was the work that the people did, now that’s what people do on their day off.
That’s a beautiful point. People always try to measure how much time tribal people spent workin, but the truth is everything they do throughout the day is not work. Going to gather fruits and greens, going to the river to get water, carving masks for ceremonies—it’s really not work.
Taking a walk through the forest—that’s what people do when they go on vacation. So how is life better for industrialized people? Well, I can watch television and I can have a computer and I can talk on the telephone. I don’t want to make light of this, because I can sit in front of the space heater and I kinda like sitting in front of the space heater because it’s nice and warm. We can be in many ways more comfortable. I was talking with a Dakota friend of mine about what it was like 400 years ago for the Dakota people. I said, “What did you do all winter?” She was like, “We would go out and hunt or whatever.” I was like, “Oh my god, you went out in Minnesota in the winter?” I don’t want to gloss over the fact that it would be difficult. I know that the Shawnee called January “The Hungry Month” because they would be hungry in January. They wouldn’t have much food, and I’m not glossing over that. But the fact is that there are tremendous costs that come, all of the things are not equal. I would rather have a space heater than not, but the space heater comes with this entire infrastructure that’s killing the planet. In addition, if I have to go from here to Grants Pass, which is 80 miles away, I would rather drive than walk. But the thing is, in order to drive I need to buy a car and I need to work a certain number of hours to buy that car. And I need to pay for insurance. If we include all the time you spent working to pay for the car then you’re only traveling 3 or 4 miles an hour because you spent so many hours working for the car. It’s the same with all this other stuff. There’s all the work that we don’t want to do, and we have this whole system that doesn’t serve us.
That’s really true. I never saw it that way. For a tribal person to travel 200 miles it might take a week, while we get there in a couple of hours. But you forget how many years you had to work to buy the car, the gas, the insurance, maintenance.
Exactly. So it ends up that this space heater is pretty expensive when you look at everything that comes with it. I don’t wanna gloss over this, but we have ways that we are more comfortable.
But it’s an illusion. When I was living with tribes or in remote villages everything was super comfortable. It’s that we have gotten used to a certain lifestyle, so we think of it as luxury and comfortable—like having a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner or a car.
It’s not really an illusion. I’m actually warmer than the people who lived here before because I have a space heater. But that comes at tremendous cost when you look at the whole picture. Most people work jobs that they don’t like, etc. When you look at the whole picture I don’t see how you can say it’s better, especially when it’s killing the planet we live on.
I understand what you’re saying, but on the other hand, you build a resistance to the cold if you live outside a lot and you don’t wear a lot of clothes.
That’s a good point. Do you know where Tierra del Fuego is? It’s at the very tip of South America. It’s really cold there, but when the Europeans arrived the indigenous people who lived there didn’t wear any clothes. So I agree with you, if you get used to it the cold is not uncomfortable.
You could be in Northern California all winter wearing a loincloth and feel fine. You will have to let your body gradually adjust to the temperature change. You can’t just walk from you heated house, take all your clothes off and start living. Everything that we call comfort is not really comfort; it’s just that we have gotten addicted to it and we feel like we really need it. Like we always wear clothes—our ancestors lived naked. We don’t really need to wear clothes.
I totally agree. The reason I’m saying this is because it’s really easy for us to say that there are no comforts and then someone will come to you and say, “I really like pillows.” Or “I like hot showers.” We have to be able to acknowledge that hot showers—I like hot showers too. That doesn’t mean that I can’t live without ‘em. I can’t live without a real world. We need to acknowledge that there is some upside to these comforts. It’s the same as a drug. For someone to say, “Never take crack” doesn’t really help. I’ve talked to so many crack addicts who say that the first time they took crack it felt so good. We need to acknowledge that and say, “OK, how about the 20th time you took it?” At what point did it stop serving you and you start serving it. It’s the same with all these other “comforts”, pillows or a shower. I’m not disagreeing with you at all. The Indians around here, we talk about them as having really small houses because the houses were like 10 x 10. But the truth is that their houses were really big because that 10 X 10 area is just their bedroom where they sleep. Their living room is the whole forest.
That’s the way it is with any tribal people or people who live in remote villages, even today. They don’t live inside the house. You could have so many people sleeping in one house, but as soon as they wake up they go outside and cook by the fire. All day they’re outside. At night they put a mat on the floor and sleep; that’s all they do in that house.
Absolutely. People might think they’re so crowded, but they’re not.
The house is only for sleeping. And they don’t need all this space to store their clothing or their TV or their books. What we consider comforts or necessities, are they really needed?
In your books you make it so clear that this culture, this civilization, is destroying all life on Earth and ourselves along with it. It’s very clear even in the film “Avatar”. Most people I know are sick, unhappy and insane. They are totally domesticated, controlled, programmed. They are less than one percent of their original selves. But no matter what you say, people don’t hear it. Do you feel like people hear what you’re saying?
A lot of people don’t, obviously. But you were at the event in Chico and there was about 700 people there. It’s becoming increasingly clear to more and more people that this way of living doesn’t work. I get so many notes from people saying, “Thank you so much. I thought I was the only person thinking these things.” There are a lotta people who recognize that the civilization is not good and that the civilization is extremely destructive and that these comforts are bought at a great price and they’re not real. A lot of people are recognizing that. The problem is that a lot of people are not talking about this in public because the propaganda for that civilized program is so strong and so constant they can start to think that they’re the ones who are crazy instead of the culture being crazy. Part of my job is to express these things so other people can express them too and then to move beyond them. I had that problem early in my career, but the problem was not with the pubic. The problem was always with the publishers. The publishers were really afraid that “nobody’s gonna want to read this”. With my first major book “A Language Older Than Words”, once it got published the people themselves read it. The problem was with the publishers thinking nobody would want to read it, when actually people were very very hungry for it. Had I encountered my books when I was in high school I don’t think I would’ve liked them because they would have been way too scary and out there for me. When I was in college they would’ve confused me. But by the time I was 24 or 23 I was so hungry for them. I would’ve read them all within 2 weeks.
That’s what I see in the film “Avatar”. People are looking for that message, for living the native natural way. After seeing something so beautiful as the Na’vi people living in Pandora. People are feeling depressed; they are in a crisis because they want to live in a place like Pandora but they feel like they can’t.
That’s what I hear. People are like, “I’m so depressed because I don’t live in a world so beautiful.” I’m like, “Just look outside! It’s still there.”.
A lot of people think that Pandora is a fantasy, that such a beautiful world could not exist. If you look around Pandora still exists here on Earth, and our ancestors lived just like the Navi people. It’s here! We are the Na’vi. Earth is Pandora.
Right. Even in New York City there’s some old growth forest in the very very northwest corner of the island. It’s there. Even in New York City! In one of my books, the one about zoos, I talk about how you can find nature anywhere you go. I decided, I’m gonna go to the least natural place in town, I went to the McDonald’s parking lot. I sat there and after a few minutes I started to see little sparrows and bumblebees, and all sorts of insects. Even there in the worst place in town you can see the real life. Then you go out of town and you can see pure beautiful forest. It’s still here. We’re living on this planet.
In another book you said, “I hate saying negative things about people even remotely heading in the right direction.” A lot of people have criticized James Cameron about different issues, but I feel like he’s really on the right path. He’s putting forward ideas that have barely been presented in mainstream movies. I feel like we need to celebrate people like James Cameron for taking the steps he’s taken. He’s showing how indigenous people live in harmony with nature, and how people from civilization come in to take the natural resources by force and destroy their way of living. He’s really talking about colonization.
Well, I’ve gotten about 11 hundred pieces of hate mail in the last 10 years. Only 2 or 3 of those were from rightwing people. All but 2 or 3 were from people who should be on my side, like vegetarians because I eat meat or anti car activists just because I drive a car. I totally agree that if people are going in the right direction we should support that. Years and years ago Ward Churchill wrote an essay attacking Jerry Mander who had written this good book called “in The Absence of the Sacred”, which was very pro-indigenous and very anti technology. I asked my friend Jen Armstrong, who’s also an Indian, what she thought of Ward Churchill’s essay attacking Mander. She had a great answer, which is, “If Ward doesn’t like it then he should write his own damn book.” My point is that if somebody doesn’t like the way James Cameron made the “Avatar” film what they should do is make their own movie that’s even better. That’s one reason that I write my books, because I was reading all these books and I couldn’t find any books that covered the stuff that I wanted to cover—how the dominant culture has a death urge or how we need to fight back. I couldn’t find it anywhere, so instead of me getting mad at everybody else I decided to write my own damn book. It’s the same thing. If people don’t like the work that you’re doing, instead of attacking you they should do their own damn work.
When you write your books is that you are so clear where the problem comes from. You keep using the word civilization, and I haven’t come across anybody else that talks about this civilization as the problem, the same way you do. Civilization, which we uphold like the greatest thing humans have created, is the thing that’s destroying us.
Thank you. It’s pretty obvious, but not too many people will say it. Now I say it and you say it and James Cameron says it. We all have to say it in our different ways.
Everybody knows that the oil is running out and civilization relies on oil to do just about everything. A lot of people say we’ll invent an alternative fuel to replace oil, other people think that God’s going to save us or Allah is going to save us. They all think something will come along to save the humans.
I can’t tell you whether God or Allah if gonna save us and I’m not going to stake the world on God or Allah saving us anyway. If you look at the history of what God’s done—God has not been very nice to the natural world, in terms of the Christian God. If that monotheistic God really exists as he has been portrayed, then I don’t think I want too much to do with him cause he seems like a pretty nasty piece of work. The best thing that could happen for the planet is for the culture to run out of oil. If you say bio-fuel will save us, who do you mean by “us”? Do you mean civilization or do you mean the salmon? What do the salmon want? What do the polar bears want? What do hammerhead shark want? What do indigenous people still living traditionally want? They know that the culture has to go. As far as there being substitutes, there’s a really good book called “The Party’s Over” by Richard Heinberg in which he goes through bio-fuels and all that stuff and shows how none of those can substitute for oil, and that this culture cannot continue with this level of energy consumption. There’s absolutely no way that this civilization can continue. We’re already on the downside of peak oil. And the world’s economies will either continue to collapse or will grind to a halt or will collapse cataclysmically. I don’t know how it’s gonna happen, but this level of growth can’t continue. Growth at all can’t continue. You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. There are a couple of things in the question. First of all, save “us”.
When people say save “us” they always mean save the humans.
Humans have exceeded carrying capacity, first because of agriculture, which we should talk about another time. That’s a whole other discussion. That allowed humans to exceed carrying capacity at one point by allowing them to mine soil. And then more recently oil had allowed them to explode over carrying capacity. This is one of the things that really bugs me: because I talk about humans having exceeded carrying capacity, people say, “Oh my gosh! Derrick hates humans!” or something. But the truth is, I wish we would have the same reduction of population that didn’t happen through mass starvation. I had this argument a couple weeks ago with this guy at a Q & A I was doing. He was getting all mad at me because I was saying that human population is going to go down. I was like, don’t blame me because humans have exceeded carrying capacity. If you exceed carrying capacity then your population will decline. It doesn’t matter whether you are a rabbit or a human. If there’s too many of you for the amount of food you have, then your population’s gonna crash. When I say that I’m not being blind either, because right now with the Crohn’s disease I’m dependent on high tech infusions for my life. When the grid crashes, and I want it to crash as soon as possible because it’s destroying the planet, when it crashes I’m gonna be dead in 4 months. I’m not saying this in terms of somebody else dying, I’m gone. But back to the original question, saving humans. The only thing that can save humans is the planet. The planet is what supports you. The planet is the source of our life. And right now this culture is systematically making it so humans, as well as everyone else, will have a harder time living. If you really care about humans what you should do is try to bring this culture to a halt as soon as possible.
You say that your new book is about rebirth?
The central metaphor of all my work is death and rebirth. It’s really about destroying that program so that you as a human being can be reborn.
So that we can go back into our original selves.
Exactly. That’s what all my work is about.
Also, physically when you die your spirit is reborn somewhere. You won’t be Derrick Jensen, but someone else.
Right, and I deal with that a little bit in the Dreams book. I don’t have any idea what form that’s going to take. I know something happens, but I don’t know what.
We don’t know. The way I see it is that you have a spirit, the spirit is eternal. The spirit moves into a body, and when the body and spirit meets you create a soul. That soul is Derrick Jensen, and there will only be one Derrick Jensen in existence. When you die that spirit moves on and the body goes to the earth. Whatever you did in your life will be remembered as part of your soul, but your spirit could be living as a tree or a worm somewhere.
Quote on home page is from the book “Dreams” by Derrick Jensen
Avatar image property of 20th Century Fox
