Opening Remarks of Derrick Jensen for Earth At Risk

“What is the problem?

Derrick Jensen

There’s a sense—a very real and overwhelmingly devastating sense—in which you could say that the problem is that this culture is killing the planet. One hundred and twenty species were driven extinct today. Another 120 will be driven extinct tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after. Ninety-seven percent of native forests are gone. Ninety-nine percent of native grasslands. Amphibian populations are collapsing, migratory songbird populations are collapsing, mollusk populations are collapsing, fish populations are collapsing, and so on. Nearly all rivers in the US (and world) are dammed. Dams are the death of rivers. There are two million dams in the United States alone: with 60,000 dams over 13 feet tall and 70,000 dams over 6 and a half feet tall. If we took out one of those 70,000 dams every day it would take two hundred years to remove those dams. And the salmon don’t have that time. Sturgeon don’t have that time. Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. There is six to ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in much of the oceans. The oceans are being acidified. The oceans are being murdered. Big cats are going. Great apes are going. Vertebrate evolution has effectively been ended by this culture. The world is being poisoned: there is dioxin (and many other carcinogens) in every (human and nonhuman) mother’s breast milk. More than half of the fish in many rivers are changing genders because of endocrine disrupting chemicals put out by this culture. And of course humans have grotesquely overshot carrying capacity, and are committing unparalleled drawdown.

And our response is utterly incommensurate with the multiple crises we face.

There’s a sense, however, in which the fact that this culture is killing the planet isn’t so much the problem as it is the ultimate expression of this insane culture’s deeper problem, which is that it is omnicidal. It doesn’t “just” destroy every nonhuman community it encounters, but it also destroys other human cultures: human languages are being driven extinct at an even greater relative rate than nonhuman species. It dispossesses or otherwise destroys indigenous cultures. It harms women: the gold standard studies reveal that 25 percent of all women in this culture have been raped in their lifetimes, and another 19 percent have had to fend off rape attempts.

Not every culture has destroyed its landbase. The Tolowa Indians, on whose land I live, lived here for at least 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. Likewise, not every culture has had such extraordinarily high rates of rape, in fact many cultures, prior to conquest by this culture, have had either extraordinarily low rates of rape, or have been rape free. The same is true for child abuse.

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