excerpts from Derrick Jensen's lil' zine "forget shorter showers"

I picked up a zine by Derrick Jensen at the really really free market at Judson Memorial Church. I liked it, so I typed up some excerpts. Enjoy!

"Part of the problem is that we've been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption-- changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much-- and had nothing to do with shifting power away form corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide."

...

"The third problem is that [perceiving simple living as a political act as opposed to living simply because that's what you want to do] accepts capitalism's redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it."

....

"The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned-- Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States-- who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems."

xo,
j