Friday, December 30, 2005

Jensen's 'Endgame' on the Horizon

“Derrick Jensen is a gifted and lyrical writer on a wide range of critical issues. He is unrelenting in his commitment to the environment and justice.”
-Winona LaDuke

Something special will be arriving in bookstores in late spring 2006: Derrick Jensen’s long-anticipated book, Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community. The two-volume work, Jensen’s magnum opus on how to bring down civilization, is scheduled for release by Seven Stories Press (not Chelsea Green, the publisher of Jensen’s previous books) in May.

I suspect Endgame will quickly surpass the sales of Jensen’s previous works, even if libraries across the nation choose not to add the title to their collections. His many fans are probably placing orders for the book right now. And word-of-mouth marketing will likely take over after people read the book.

This is mere speculation since I haven’t read the book. But Jensen has offered glimpses of what to expect in Endgame in interviews and speeches over the past two years.

In May 2004, he offered this excerpt from Endgame to Richard Oxman:

Further, resistance needs to be global. Acts of resistance are more effective when they’re large-scale and coordinated. The infrastructure is monolithic and centralized, so common tools and techniques can be used to dismantle it in many different places, simultaneously if possible.

By contrast, the work of renewal must be local. To be truly effective (and to avoid reproducing the industrial infrastructure) acts of survival and livelihood need to grow from particular landbases where they will thrive. People need to enter into conversation with each piece of earth and all its (human and nonhuman) inhabitants. This doesn’t mean of course that we can’t share ideas, or that one water purification technique won’t be useful in many different locations. It does mean that people in those places need to decide for themselves what will work. Most important of all, the water in each place needs to be asked and allowed to decide for itself.

In a March 2005 interview with No Compromise magazine, here’s what Jensen had to say on the issue of maintaining one’s optimism in the face of such great acts of violence committed by humans against the environment and each other:

Well there are a few ways. People will say that if things are so bad why don’t you just kill yourself and the answer is that life is really really good. Don’t take it personally. Life is so fun. I’m happy. I’m really happy, and at the same time I’m sad. I’m devastated. There seems to be this idea that if you understand how bad things are you have to be miserable all the time. But the truth is I’m really happy and I’m really sad. I’m full of rage, I’m full of hate, and I’m full of love. People expend all this energy fighting the despair. Well despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to attempt to not feel those “negative feelings”. Sorrow is just sorrow, and pain is just pain. It’s not so much the sorrow and the pain that hurts as it is my resistance to it.

Seven Stories Press has this to say about its upcoming release:

The long-awaited companion piece to Derrick Jensen’s immensely popular and highly acclaimed works A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Accepting the increasingly widespread belief that industrialized culture inevitably erodes the natural world, Endgame sets out to explore how this relationship impels us towards a revolutionary and as-yet undiscovered shift in strategy. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself. Incensed and hopeful, impassioned and lucid, Endgame leap-frogs the environmental movement’s deadlock over our willingness to change our conduct, focusing instead on our ability to adapt to the impending ecological revolution.

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