derrick jensen, endgame — review
jensen ends one of his most anti-civilizational chapters, "listening to the land", with "before i go any further, i need to be clear that it’s not up to all of us to dismantle the system. not all of us need to take down dams ... some of us need to file timber sale appeals".
other than the fact that the metaphor of blowing things up is not only extremely outdated for any actual civilization effect, but outdated as an actual practical act of eco-terrorism even at the time of this writing, jensen is also hilariously submissive to his role as a rhetorical speaker who is supposed to appeal to a puritan american audience.
the current social stratification that exists where an administration of ten people operate the timber company at the highest level, but a collective of five hundred workers operate various other parts, being of course the same one that creates the supposed lack of child care jensen notes retrospectively "i've heard it said that the most revolutionary thing any of us can do is raise a loving child" is also the same type of social stratification that jensen tragically attaches to, precisely when he denotes that there is an uneven expectation for the division of strategic labour in regards to ecological activity.
wouldn't eco-terrorism benefit precisely from the type of latent militarization that the bureaucracy of human affairs achieved at the height of their ability to divide the entire earth? how come then, a minority of agents are supposed to take the majority of the brunt-work of quite possibly the most dangerous (not to mention practically useless) form of counter-power imaginable, in jensen's advice?
" i think often of the military tactic called hammer and anvil, used most famously by robert e. lee at the battle of chancellorsville. lee kept anderson’s and mclaws’s divisions in place while sending stonewall jackson’s corps around the enemy’s flank to crush that part of the opposing army between jackson’s hammer and anderson’s and mclaws’s anvil. both parts—offense and defense—were, and are, necessary."
of course, his statement would make far more sense if the metaphor of "raising children capable of being attuned and sensitive towards environmental damage" actually was a tactic that could have the very same type of "military" gains that his own advice implicitly presumes. the act of raising a child is the furthest possible act from blowing up a dam.
on the level of basic ethical appropriation they are quite similar, as both somehow benefit in the decreasing of the influence of a large lumber mill. but on the level of a practical operation, what is being suggested is quite the opposite, a series of impulses ground together in the same camp of strategy as a lifelong investment. this is precisely why actual military organizations understand that everything that goes under the term "operation" has actual immediate implications for the conduct, events and circumstances that describe what the endeavor itself would entail. for jensen, this means that the "blowing up the dam" metaphor would need to sit in the same ballpark of feasibility as the "raising the child" one.
then, to imagine such a circumstance for jensen's writing where two ecological strategies could be simultaneously retrospected, the transfer could have us use actual operational metaphors and then transposing them back into ecological beneficiaries. take the example of operation overlord, the 1944 allied invasion of france. it supposedly had two very different strategies running at once: a huge direct amphibious assault at normandy, and a deception strategy called operation fortitude that tried to convince germany the real invasion would happen at pas-de-calais.
if this were the immediate counter-active actions of an ecological movement, it would be something akin to simultaneously hacking into the interfaces of a timber company, whilst also creating a large fake shell organization that attempts to distract all the workers in that organization for a period of four days, enough to bypass the security protocols necessary to create a larger problem of maintenance for the company.
or on a way longer time scale, you could take the example of operation market garden, which also took place in 1944. it combined two very different approaches at the same time: “market” was an airborne strategy where paratroopers were dropped deep behind german lines to seize bridges by surprise, whereas “garden” was a ground strategy where british armored forces raced up a narrow road corridor to link up with paratroopers late on. the ecological metaphor equivalent to this would sit way closer to jensen's original point if you were to assume the paratroopers are ecological elite actively planning sabotage against corporate entities, whereas the ground soldiers are parents.
yet, these parents clearly don't necessarily benefit the environment. in fact, far from that, child-raising is one of the most individually expensive acts you could possibly commit in that time-space, which further points to the irony of the family metaphor. the basic assumption of the metaphor of sustaining children or a social sphere as a totality is anti-ecological in numerous ways currently, including the basic fact that perpetuating your ideology to your child often raises niche resentment and further autonomization of the character of the child partially due to the way society currently even interprets radicality.
but if that idea could somehow work for ecological strategy on that time scale, you could imagine a radical organization on the one hand raising children to become radicals in some type of social or communal operational experiment, whilst simultaneously aiding in the further alienation of elite children of environmental corporations from their parents. this metaphor itself, even with all its unethicality, points way cleaner to the original split jensen is envisioning between attack and defense. if defense simply means "cosplaying the basic maintenance of a civilizational rhetoric" even in the most actively anti-civilizational discourse you could possibly be having, then that's not a very good anti-civilizational discourse is it now?
of course, jensen in that quote is not exactly saying child-raising and sabotage are tactically equivalent. he is saying that a collapsing culture requires different forms of resistance. yet, the presumption of what these forms of resistance actually are, how they are metaphorically argued in the chapter, and even the idea of how they should happen, as well as how they are envisioned to unfold and who is responsible for what aspect of them, all fall apart individually and collectively in his own argument. clearly, the "hamer and anvil" situation obviously makes it seem as if care is a part of a machine of resistance, even if the set of actions he proposes are morally inconsistent, chaotic, maybe even contradictory on some level.
jensen, in the same chapter, continues his anti-civilizational stance with: "if civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, “why did they not take it down?” will they be as furious with us as i am with those who came before and stood by? i could very well hear those people who come after saying, “if they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. we would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in california. we would still have frogs."
what's ironic about this paragraph is that right after it, the next small segment follows jensen's observations on how exactly we can take civilization down so as to prevent this linear curse of stagnating liberation: "i know someone whose brother demolishes buildings. the trick, he says, is to position the charges precisely so the building collapses in place, and doesn’t take out the surroundings. it seems to me that this is what we must do: position the charges so that civilization collapses in on itself, and takes out as little life as possible on its way down."
what appears in jensen's text isn't always in direct parody, but often looks very uncontrolled and contains multitudes in its perspectives. but these same perspectives definitely don't sit well together, definitely not one after the other. how come the placement of the idea that the liberation movement has consistently failed to win in almost any way in regards to the unfortunate progress of civilization's ruination of all things earthly, follows the placement of the idea that to fight against a system that is progressively removing everything the earth previously contained includes not allowing this same system to make a big statement on how this removal should take place, as if this idea is not in and of itself a stagnation, a reduction of liberative possibility?
jensen in a lot of ways values what hasn't been destroyed, and what can be preserved in the bad things that do exist, so much so that to imagine the chaotic displacement of mechanisms of capture is itself an act of betrayal towards whatever can be seen as a naturalistic. innocent, or preservationalistically required property of any system. this idea is obvious because, for a system to take down as little life on the way to its collapse as possible, all whilst being an artificial amplifier of non-naturally occurring and evolving forms of life, itself either assumes that whatever is in this system doesn't sit under the "category of life", or, more assumably, jensen's intended direction, the life to preserve is the life already outside this system, and to destroy civilization but destroy the life around it as well is equally harmful as not destroying civilization precisely because either it is hypocritical to enact civilization even in its destruction, or because since civilization seems to be doing it as fast as is it is anyways, bargaining life to destroy it would then seem equally as arbitrary as letting it continue anywyas at that point. whichever version of the argument jensen would like to imply, it's clear that it is only a question of ethics in regards to which trajectory more radical forms of liberation from civilization could take, rather than a question of strategy or myth or honor, precisely because the collapse of all artificial (urban-generated) forms of life denotes and is related to the collapse of all naturally occuring forms of life.
jensen's final words in the land section are the following “barton springs know this region much better than i. they know what this region needs, know what sustainability looks and feels like here. the springs are much smarter than i am. they’ll tell you exactly what to do.” somebody else asked, “is it barton springs?” “yes,” i said, “and no. it’s everywhere. just listen. not to me. to yourself. and to the land.” this very problem is essential to the question of strategy, because jensen himself admis that to look against the city is to look towards the spring, or to protect the spring against the city. how can someone looking at the spring through the city be on the side of the spring, if they still wanted to preserve the city? they would only preserve the spring in so far as it can preserve the city, for destroying the spring at other points would benefit the city in all types of randomly assumed (as society has a tendency to do at mass scales) or indirect ways (as the problems the city always causes even in its most base state of operations). this points again to the idea that either you position yourself in the spring against the city, or you position yourself to destroy the city even if it leads to the destruction of the spring (as it would, given the city is connected, like a parasite, to the spring, since the city makes the spring capable of surviving, the city already has allowed the spring to be one thing or another, or has decided the spring isn't worthy). of course, you can also position yourself as somebody who like jensen wants to preserve only the land, but this then leads to the problem of narration.
narratively, whatever can be considered organic or occurring before the idea of a city, must, unlike what jensen does, be viewed from the perspective either of a remnant or of something untouched anyways. any other perspective always projects the spring back into the city. jensen always looks at the california redwood from the perspective of someone living in the city that overlooks it, for, even if he was "of the redwood", he would always write to those who are "of the city". the real problem with all of this is that the land can tell us what deserves protection, but it cannot by itself tell us how to organize resistance, or what it means to preserve what remains of it. every operation is already a city operation in so far as the land is concerned, since the spring has no military, and the land has no natural competitor to humans. if there is nobody speaking for something, then you can already assume the logic of whatever is left will at best consider whatever remains to be irrelevant. the actual remnants of what civilization ends up will be the only neutral perspective through which to imagine what the land can actually tell us, only after the city is gone.
there are other issues in consistency that appear all throughout endgame, not due to jensen's inherent lack in argumentative creativity, but strictly due to how repeatedly closeminded you have to be about the conceptual clarity behind what you're talking about the more rhetorically heavy and streamlined you want to sound, a classic problem for most anglophonic theory but especially for radical positions. take the way that jensen talks about the necessity of basic moral laws as an example for the necessity of a common sense that overrules the basic artificial constructions of civilization:
"imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. you’ve been told these stories since you were a child. you believe them. you eat dog-shit hot dogs, dog-shit ice cream, general tso’s dog shit. sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn’t taste that good. or if you cling too tightly to these stories you’ve been told about eating dog shit (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. to make the example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. (who was the genius who decided (for us) that it was a good idea to put poisons on our own food?). or, for that matter, substitute big mac™, whopper™, or coca cola™. physical reality eventually trumps narrative. it has to. it just can take a long time. in the case of civilization, it has so far taken some six thousand years (considerably less, of course, for its victims)."
jensen's silly example is silly not because of the subject (dog shit) but because of what the subject insinuates about pesticides. there is a realistic trajectory where dog shit does indeed become a stable diet. imagine a world that has almost no organic life yet, but has an indescribably large amount of machinic half-dogs that can produce organic matter through their stomachs by eating non organic matter. in this instance, eating dog shit would actually make a lot of sense for whatever else is still organic in this planet. but, one thing has suddenly become very evident in this example. inorganic matter can substitute itself, survive and so on, just in the same way that organic matter can, precisely because it can still be called life in this example.
for that dog, a sudden cohort of naturalists attempting to plant trees in a world that can barely give them the means to survive would be ludicrous, as ludicrous as proposing the sudden formation of a hegelian state to a nomadic society over six thousand years ago. but it's also silly because functionally, the point of eating pesticides or plastic isn't because anyone wants to eat them, but because it has just so happened that they are consequences of whatever thing was worth having them exist in the first place (both have something existentially and essentially more to do with a human population growing too fast than with anything else). whereas, for the placement of the dog shit, its sole purpose in the paragraph is for jensen to rhetorically argue against eating someone no one could consider. this means that his argument is unevenly held together, on one side by a vision of pesticides that make them inherently equivalent to dog shit on the level of a basic cultural contradiction or assumption, but on the other, worse end, make them obsolete even if they have turned out to be functionally meaningful.
even as a disgusting invention, pesticides are loved by its creators the same way a mutant child is loved by its mutant mother - the common sense that is supposed to exist between hating pesticides and being subject to the famine-esque genocide that would exist if it weren't for their existence - or the sudden fact of your likely non-existence if it weren't for their necessary presence in the world - naturally disables us from being able to view pesticides apriori. but not dog shit, dog shit can very much be viewed apriori, which is why jensen can make rheotric use of it.
in fact, jensen ends on this note: "if the foundation for my morality consists not of commandments from a god whose home is not primarily of this earth and whose adherents have committed uncountable atrocities, nor of laws created by those in political power to serve those in political power, nor even the perceived wisdom—the common law—of a culture that has led us to ecological apocalypse, but if instead the foundation consists of the knowledge that i am an animal who requires habitat—including but not limited to clean water, clean air, non-toxic food—what does my consequent morality suggest about the rightness or wrongness of, say, pesticide production?"
well, for one, the consequent morality suggests that the naturalization of assumed human rights, dignities and needs, and the prerogative that these needs can only be viewed through the lens of a prior possession (the possession of things since violently caused to be extinct) actually belongs to the perspective that the hostility which has extinguished them has not only revealed their moral necessity, but revealed posteriori that the eco-anarchist actually, essentially, holds the concept behind such things (the concept of the embodied relation to water, air and organic food) as more important than what they entail - precisely because the metaphysical hostility of the alternatives have already corrupted the assumptions they would hold about basic human survival if not contaminated by this lens.
naturally, the image of mass destruction and apocalypticism and the actual horrifying reality of what these systems produce don't need to suddenly be accepted or morally narrativized to simultaneously understand that the logic behind these systems can hardly be collapsed to a moral decision, or to the idea that whatever existed before was more ontologically sensical. the issue here is one of the naturalization of naturalization, or more specifically, not the idea that whatever appears as natural already has the claim to be itself on top of or against whatever it combats, but that whatever wants to exist (even if it goes against the entire logic of what already exists) actually gets the guarantee that its logic will already be prioritized existentially before any claims can be made about its worth.
as an example, imagine if there was an invisible entity in the world which shared none of our faculties except for cognitive capacity and maybe the cynicism that comes with it. now imagine society suddenly decided to hold jensen as the overlord of logistical decision making about what form of social organization we should all abide by, passively re-transformed back into an ecologically harmonious society, but then, conversely, decided the one thing it will do different this time around is go hunting for ghosts. suddenly, the cynical spirits would be quite distressed about our existence, and quickly jump to the assumption, the fair assumption, that breathing, drinking and organic eating - and all the processes they serve to abide by or support, including metabolic life at its most basic standpoint - all constitute a world where they are they are the conceptual enemies of ghosts.
in many ways, this metabolic reading isnt far off, because jensen of all thinkers is most happy to accept that eating should be a basic fact of living so long as you "take responsibility" for the life you have taken away from the world. this points our reading away from the idea that he should be some type of ascetic or gnostic faminist, and towards the idea that ecology for him corresponds to the endorsement, the complete and total endorsement, of all factors already constituting whatever sphere was considered "natural" from the outside looking in, at the very specific point of human anthropo-ecological history dating back around ten thousand years ago (although he'd argue its been like this for most of history, save for, of course, most of history, unless for some reason you don't particularly enjoy talking about volcanos and bacterial worms and whether for them eating means consuming a species rather than suddenly entering a weird symbiosis with them - or is that the failure of the way metabolic creatures have decided to develop their energy-cost dynamics on a physiological level?).
jensen confirms this sentiment himself, actually: "creatures eat each other. they cause pain to each other. that is part of life. that is part of death. that is part of eating. this causing of pain, this killing, happens whether or not we are vegetarians. it happens whether or not we choose to believe that others feels pain. i prefer to not cause pain, and must be reminded by my vegetarian friends when i accidentally step on a beetle or slug that i am a large mammal, and large mammals accidentally step on smaller creatures. but when i do cause pain, whether by accidentally squashing a sow bug, intentionally killing a fish or potato to eat, or pulling invasive scotch broom, i attempt to at least be honest about it."
jensen is supposedly honest about it, and replaces the tree he harms, or helps the chickens breed after he's done eating them. but eating itself can never be wrong, unless you somehow made it less interesting. the crime of civilization for jensen, in many ways, isn't that it mass produced suffering to deny nature, but that it mass produced suffering to deny nature. you can actually read these two statements completely differently, the former is nature as something that inconveniently prevents our various other interests (like civilization), and nature in the latter case as something that made eating less interesting precisely so that it could deny nature's spatial ontology, its aesthetic assumptions, and its thermodynamic preferences. the crime for most vegans is the former, because civilization has the audacity to instrumentalize whatever it selects as incongruent to its aims, but tries to prevent the instrumentalization, blindly and audaciously and hypocritically, of whatever it mystifies at that historic point as preferable.
but for the non-vegan jensen, the actual sin is ontogenetical, society cannot dare to have any interests that don't neatly correspond with the image we were already sold when we got here. that's really what makes his standpoint much more niche, and far more interesting too. the question of preserving or denying nature, once it can be allowed to be opened on an anthropotechnic level, suddenly invites radical ideologues to preach from the posterior position various preferential philosophies about its treatment. what could be more anthropotechnical than suddenly deciding to reverse our own "worst thing that's ever happened to this planet" treatment of other things, because of a vague aspirational drive to suddenly confirm whatever was natural before we thought to think against whatever is natural (even at the cost of our own sanity)?
jensen’s bioethics in this sense then, is an anti-civilizational attempt to make nature itself the source of moral authority, but with the cruical cost that this becomes unstable because “nature” is never simply available outside history, technology and what constitutes the right frame of survival.