Email this article

An Interview with Derrick Jensen

Environmental Activist and Author

By Katharine Niles

Found in: | Inside | Books | Wellness |

A self-described anarcho-primitivist, Derrick Jensen is one of the nation's leading activists and thinkers regarding our civilization and its extremely troubled relationship to the planet. A prolific writer, he is the author of The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, a USA Today Critics Choice for one of the best nature books of 1995, and Railroads and Clearcuts. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others. He received his Bachelor's in Science from the Colorado School of Mines in 1983, and an MFA in Creative Writing in 1991 from Eastern Washington. Mostly, however, he obtains his education by listening to trees, coyotes, and the salmon. He lives in Northern California, and recently was the keynote speaker for Earth Week at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. With the Kids' columnist Katharine Niles interviewed him prior to his talk.

KN: When did you first get involved in environmental activism?

DJ: I remember a subdivision going in when I was eight years old that drove me crazy. But when I was 25 or 26, I realized I wasn't paying enough for gas, that what we paid for oil was too low. So I would donate the difference between what I was paying and what I thought I should be paying to a local environmental group, or else I would pay myself five dollars an hour to do some form of environmental activism.
When I really began working in activism with others I was lucky to have John Osborn, who was the heart and soul of the Spokane environmental community, as my mentor. He channeled my energy, as I had a lot of energy without knowing what to do with it. I've seen a lot of people get treated rather badly by activist organizations, and that did not happen with me. I began writing and editing timber sales appeals, and materials for the Public Lands Council.

KN: When did you know you wanted to write?

DJ: I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. But I got a scholarship to Mines for engineering. So I got a degree in physics but quit science after that to do beekeeping. I thought I could write part of the year and work the other part. But then the bee business fell apart.

KN: Most ecological writers stick with "nature writing," or "fact-based" nonfiction. But you are venturing into a novel, into fiction now. Why?

DJ: Credibility. I can play with what are considered woo-woo ideas such as falling through time, and get away with it. So in Songs of the Dead, the main character is named Derrick, and a writer, but in relationship with someone that I am not really in relationship with. Publishers aren't happy with that, though, as it confuses the line between what they consider fiction and nonfiction.

KN: The more I write from the Earth in my own writing, the more I realize that many of our notions of what is "fact" and what is "fiction" are based on false notions. If you look at Native American writing, animals talk all the time, and myth and history are intertwined. The past is also very much in the present. Yet in our culture to write an animal talking is considered "pathetic fallacy," and the dead are relegated to ghost stories.

DJ: Right. This is the same separation as in the rest of our culture [nature/human, mind/body, dead/living]. For example, I have dead characters, too, and as they decompose, the dreams they have more like dreams of the soil. With one character, birds are singing through her throat as she decomposes and as that process continues she can no longer tell the difference between them and her.

KN: Wow. That's fantastic. You, like me, are a survivor of childhood abuse. When did you first start making the connection between how this culture treats its children - so terribly badly - with how it treats the planet?

DJ: You mean, when did I move from being a shallow to a deep ecologist?

KN: I suppose so. For me, I think, it took a long time to make conscious what I knew unconsciously since childhood - that what was happening to me at home, while at some level personal, was really symptomatic as a whole of a far deeper systemic malaise.

DJ: I started therapy because I couldn't write. I was just frozen. Not because my life was a mess but because I wanted to know why I wasn't writing. And, well, a little example - and it's just little, so don't blow it up too much - was watching the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. The Democrats were just wimps and the Republicans outright assholes. Her witnesses and support were so credible, and his just ridiculous. But he was the one who came out ahead in that regard. And so, after I started therapy in 1987, I saw how entire systems are set up to support the father, the patriarch, from being seen in all his harm. This was true in my family and it was true of Clarence Thomas. Part and parcel of the abusive dynamic, be it of children or salmon, is to compartmentalize it and separate it off. So the individual abuser may get sacrificed to maintain the overall power structure but that's it. This permeates to our bones.

KN: You are working now, as an anarcho-primitivist, to "bring down civilization." How do you define civilization?

DJ: Civilization is way of life characterized by the growth of cities. A city is a collection of people in numbers large enough to demand importation of resources. It is inherently violent - as you have to keep appropriating resources from others - and imbalanced. Industrial civilization is the next level, and involves your degree of reliance on machinery. Civilization is based on slavery and industrial civilization is based on enslaving the long dead (in the form of oil) - this involves prehistoric energy, prehistoric dead. So perhaps the degree of a civilization's corruption is the degree to which it enslaves the living and the dead.

KN: One last question, as we are out of time. What advice would you have for parents raising children today?

DJ: Raise a healthy child. Don't lie too much. Give them love.

Kate Niles is, like Jensen, a child abuse survivor, despiser (for better or worse) of much of civilization's constructs, a writer and inveterate tree hugger. The latter directly relates to all of the former. Her novel The Basket Maker won ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award for Fiction for Independent Presses, and she is currently hard at work on one involving her ancestors in Nebraska.