The ramble below initially began as a personal letter to the author of Endgame by Derrick Jensen, published in 2006 by Seven Stories Press,a multi-volume treatise on civilization and its non-sustaining nature.  It was basically written in two parts, the first being an ongoing commentary written while reading the books; and the second part a more direct 'letter' which I wrote after giving Jensen's positions considerable thought, in particular his notions of how environmental destruction can end through the active destruction of civilization.

     Initially, I was responding to various assertions Jensen made regarding what he sees as the idyllic and only sustainable form of human culture: the hunter/gatherer society; and later to his avowed desire to return humanity to that state of existence.  With respect to his observations on the psychotic nature of civilization, I actually have no argument: his vision is a clear one.  Where I took exception was with his 'solutions,' namely, bringing down civilization.

     I finally managed to get this letter sent to Jensen, via email, but his responses were sufficiently terse to a) suggest he had not read through what I had written, or b) simply was not interested in engaging in any form of dialogue.  I did not pursue the matter and these two files sat unopened on my hard-drive … until now.

     I stumbled over them during a recent bout of archiving stuff I'd written (and saved), and since I am aware of a certain paucity of original material on the eponymous website, it occurred to me that I could store these letters in a kind of online archive, on my site.

     So, here it is.  I suspect it will be only of interest to readers out there who are familiar with Jensen's work, and his cause.  For those who aren't, well, perhaps there is enough in these passages to give you asense of his position, and of course, mine.

     Feel free to comment.

     Cheers
     Steven Erikson

     I write novels under the name of Steven Erikson.  I am nearing completion of a ten book Fantasy series entitled 'The Malazan Book of the Fallen.'  These novels are set on a fictitious world that is Homeric in nature—magic and meddling gods—but at a technological level somewhere around late Roman Empire.  Progress has stalled, as magic has supplanted technological innovation.  Unfortunately, magic is also highly destructive. While these epic novels seek to portray a history in an entertaining style, the underlying themes concern the life cycles of cultures and civilizations(including those of nonhumans) against the backdrop of environmental degradation.




Seven Stories Press (USA)

     Before becoming a full-time writer, I worked as anarchaeologist for eighteen years (and still find myself on digs when time andopportunity permits).  In that career I worked in central Canada (Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and in Belize, Central America.  My specialties (pretty much by default) included stone technology, rock art, and surveying (in the latter I seem to have a knack for finding sites).  I make full use of this experience and the perspective it has given me when writing my fantasy novels.

     Two days ago while in my local bookstore the cover of your book, Endgame, caught my eye.  Two things sold me on the book—the subtitle and the fact that it was Volume One, which implied to me an author with a grand vision (something that, for obvious reasons, I find appealing).

     Taking it home and opening it up, I found the twenty premises.  I was floored.

     In the fourth novel in my series I introduced, rather brutally, a character emerging from an isolated tribal culture, who finds himself first a slave, then an escaped slave, within the far larger world of civilization of which he previously knew nothing.  He ultimately concludes, after numerous travails, that civilization is an abomination, and so he vows to destroy it.

     As this character is terse and rather inarticulate, he rarely expounds on the reasons for his conclusion.  As the author, however, I needed to give much thought to such matters.

     So, in seeing and now reading your book, I find myself shaking my head again and again, as I see you make the same observations I have made; yet where I work through the vehicle of fiction to express the fullest range of emotions I am feeling (sometimes my series feels like a ten thousand page requiem for our species, or a long, drawn-out howl verging on utter despair; as I search in desperation for moral gestures of humanity, no matter how small, no matter how momentary, in the midst of self-inflicted carnage), you have done away with the pretense of the 'other world.'

     I am about two hundred pages into your book, and I would like to take the opportunity to comment as I go—without expectation of any engagement on your part—in the hopes that my observations will be of interest to you.

     1.  Northwest indigenous cultures were something of an aberration in the Americas, primarily because the subsistence base was extraordinarily fecund.  While it possessed functional mechanisms for maintaining that base, there is no possible certainty that such a system, barring absolute isolation, would have persisted unchanged.  Of this, more later.

     2.  It is perhaps comforting to view the Hunter/Gatherer culture as the ideal system for humanity's survival in a balanced, self-sustaining environment.  Without doubt, it remains the longest-lasting system in human history, and clearly the post-city-state forms continuing to this day will not prove anywhere near as successful (for all the reasons discussed in your book); but that longevity did not come from some inherently unique virtue of the life style.  Hunter/Gatherer groups that persisted into modern times are universally peripheral groups.  In other words, they have been pushed into regions unsuitable for anything but the hunter/gatherer style of living (which is why, as technology advances, these regions continue to shrink).

     The loci where horticulture and animal husbandry first emerged all reveal evidence of similar periods of transition from a previously existing hunter/gatherer system.  Both horticulture and animal husbandry are products of necessity, survival mechanisms.  Neither constituted an 'improvement' in the quality of living among the people concerned.  They were more labour intensive; they wore out bodies, wore out teeth, created rich environments for contagion and parasites—basically, they killed people in ways not experienced by the hunter/gatherers.  They also created hierarchies that had not previously existed.  So, if the new lifestyle was in fact more miserable than the previous one, why choose it?

     The answer is found in the faunal remains excavated at such transition sites.  Basically, the hunter/gatherers had no choice.  They'd depleted the wild game and other resources they traditionally depended upon—they were, in fact, too efficient.  To put it another way: we as a species are too efficient.

     Necessity forced the capture and control of prey animals. Necessity established the notion of territorial possession—ground to break, seeds to plant, harvest to reap—and from this rose the imperative to protect and defend that territory.  At precisely the same time as the first sedentary villages appeared, so too did walls and fortifications.




Seven Stories Press (USA)

     3.  City-states and empires existed in the Americas long before European contact, revealing the cycle of rise and fall with all the endemic destruction of civilizations the world over.  I recall standing on a pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle (back in '83), during the modern civil war (that had everything to do with land), and perversely feeling a strange optimism.  After all, when the Mayan Priest-King stood where I was standing, only a few centuries ago, he could see the vast expanse of his demesne—planted fields out to every horizon.  I'm sure he believed it would last forever (just as we believe our civilization will last forever, that we are somehow exempt from the rise and fall cycle that afflicted every previous civilization).  He didn't realize that his culture was unsustainable.  That it was destined to collapse even before European contact.  He believed as did the pre-Inca civilizations in Peru and Chile.  Why did I feel optimistic?  Because I was surrounded in jungle.  The natural world had reclaimed everything.  It had healed, and in a very short time.

     Agriculture was already making inroads in North America by the time Europeans arrived.  If not for the return of the horse, nomadic hunting, warrior societies like the Teton Sioux and the Lakota and the Comanche, would all have converted to horticulture, as did many of their neighbours, for example the Mandan.  The horse opened the Great Plains to native hunters.  Prior to its arrival, bison hunts occurred on the peripheral regions of the Great Plains, taking advantage of the herds' seasonal migrations.  With the horse, hunters could chase those herds into the very heart of the grasslands.  In addition to this cultural revolution centered on the bison hunt, the warrior cultures quickly comprehended that raiding farming communities was far more rewarding than actually adopting farming for themselves.  The Hopi, Navajo, Mandan and countless other nascent farming tribes in North America were under sustained assault from the horse-warrior tribes; and even here the situation was growing dire.  Genocide was forcing farmers to abandon their way of life.  Some simply took up the raiding habits of their belligerent neighbours (as did a number of the Apache sub-tribes). Others vanished.

     By the time of the first major inroads of Europeans into heartland America, the indigenous nations were in the midst of very tumultuous times.  The Lakota had been driven south by the Ojibwa and the Cree.  Until they acquired the horse, they were in fact on their way out; suddenly they were on the ascent.  By the time of the Sioux Wars, the Lakota were at the apogee of their culture, and had already exterminated a number of rivals.

     It's risky to romanticize the pre-contact cultures of the Americas.  One thing that haunted me and haunts me to this day is the nature of the empires of Central and South America.  In their essence (as far as I can see), they were psychotic civilizations (amazingly, Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto' film portrayed this descent into hell beautifully, if that word can be used to describe such brutal insanity).  And they were intrinsically formed to catastrophically self-destruct.

     4.  I am sure you are aware of the book, 1491, which describes the nature of the Americas prior to contact.  This book recounts the circumstances of the collapse of the cultures of the New World.  One section chimed chillingly with the evidence I have observed firsthand: at bison kill-sites.  In the period between initial European contact and subsequent explorations and settling, the indigenous human populations of the Americas dropped by as much as ninety percent, as those populations were genetically resistant to parasites rather than diseases (the opposite to Old World populations).  When explorers spoke of idyllic Edens on the east coast, they were describing depopulated wilderness.  They also made note of all the abandoned villages (not just the US east coast, but up the Amazon as well). When explorers wrote of bison herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Great Plains, they were in fact witnessing the effect of the virtual elimination of the primary predator—humans.  Bison in their tens of millions were an anomaly.

     There is a bison jump site in Wyoming that was used extensively just before and then after European contact.  It's a small one, a sinkhole, in fact, and so could not take down large percentages of the herd. Accordingly, the animals killed in the jump were thoroughly processed—nothing that could be used was left behind.  Contrast this with one of the longest used bison jumps in North America: Head-Smashed-In in Alberta, Canada (worth a visit, by the way).  There are gaps in the usage of this site, but in the broader sense it was continually used for about eight thousand years.

     In times of plenty, the killed bison were barely processed at all.  There was such a glut of dead animals that the butchery became highly selective (tongues, hoofs, etc).  The rest was left to rot.  Needless to say, such slaughter resulted in feast/famine cycles (thus explaining the gaps in usage).

     With the return of the horse the last subspecies of bison resident on the Great Plains was essentially fucked.  It had run out of places to hide.  If not for massive depopulation of humans, they would probably have joined bison antiquus and bison occidentalis.  Not to mention mammoths, giant sloths, etc (and the rival predator species dependent upon them).

     The tool-kit we find at sites reflects the transition: in the Paleo period the spear-points are big, to suit big game.  By the Archaic period, following the extinction of the big game, the spear-points get small, to suit the animals left.

     Archaeology and paleoanthropology are disciplines engaged in a rather awkward dance round more than one giant elephant (or mammoth, if you will) standing in the middle of the room.  It is not the cultural habits of a people that determine value judgements of virtue and vice.  Hunter/Gatherers are not implicitly more ethical than city-states (except perhaps in the context of human relations [and that has more to do with the imperative of maintaining the status quo in a self-limiting, communal society]—definitely not in the context of resource exploitation).  I have excavated scores of New World sites—we dig up their garbage.  It is of course mostly biodegradable (barring stone waste and fired clay), so not much survives.  I have also camped near a still-active Wild Rice harvesters' campsite (a traditional activity still practiced by local native groups), and found that future archaeologists would have no trouble recovering artifacts—the place was a garbage dump of cans, tinfoil, bottles and plastic.  Is this the result of a destroyed indigenous culture? No, it is the continuation of a traditional practice, that of throwing your crap away and not giving a fuck.

     In paleoanthropology, there is presently a huge debate regarding the extinction of the Neanderthals.  It turns out that said extinctions of various populations of Neanderthals throughout their range occurred at different times within a certain window.

     In this respect, I see civilization as but a particularly efficient expression of what has always been with us (and may be implicit in all life—even the virus kills its host and then moves on).  The primary distinction between hunter/gatherers and the hierarchical systems that followed was one of efficacy.  Hunter/gatherers could alter and manage their environment to some extent (and we may look at large mammal extinctions in the New World around the period of the first specialized big-game hunters, the Clovis Culture, as an example of that); but never to the extent that horticulturalists, pastoralists and agriculturalists could.  The fundamental urge was/is one of control and stability, which together comprised safety.

     We desire stability and security above all else, even love. The tragedy lies in the very short-sightedness of such concepts as stability and security.  Stability requires stasis, the kind of gesture to achieve equilibrium that we see in a deer caught in the headlights.  Security measures safety in moments, not weeks, not months, not even years.

     Culture is the pursuit of these two things above all else, which is why it is universally incapable of collectively focusing on the long-term.  Individually, we are generally forced to such long-term considerations after the traumatic annihilation of all immediate stability and security, and even then we seek the first place of safety we can find—somewhere from which to take measure, to recover what we can of our equilibrium.  It seems likely that our species will, as you say, suffer a corresponding trauma, that of collapse.  There will be those who escape, who hunker down, and likely survive.  Most won't.

     As I mentioned earlier, sometimes I just want to howl.

     I recall a 'holy fuck' moment from a few years back.  Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan.  We were staying at a B&B and the owner, a transplanted businessman from Calgary, upon hearing that I was an archaeologist, excitedly told us of two sites just outside the park boundaries but on community pasture.  He drew us maps.  One site was a tipi ring site; the other an unexcavated bison jump.  The tipi ring site was closest so we headed there first.

     Tipi rings leave me crushed—for this reason:  they consist of a ring of boulders once used to hold down the sides of a tipi, and to stand beside one is to look down on evidence of the last natives who ever camped there. The very last.  Forever.  What had been part of a seasonal round, used year after year for countless generations, was over.  Such places are desolate, ineffably forlorn.  In such places, I often weep.

     The site was off a section road.  We arrived with two thunderheads massing in the sky, but by their trajectories both would miss us. A storm had passed earlier that left at least one cow lying legs in the air in the pasture on the other side of the road, lightning-struck.  On this trip, it was just my wife and me (our son was at camp).  As we walked over the unbroken prairie towards an old, abandoned radio tower on concrete feet, I scanned the ground, seeking out the telltale boulder rings.  Instead, I started making out someone else.  As did my wife, who drew close when she saw me light a cigarette—something I normally don't do at prehistoric sites.  But the remnants I saw surrounding us, sharing the hill top with the defunct tower, belonged to a Medicine Wheel.  A big one, mostly destroyed.  Off to our left was a small cairn of boulders.  This was a holy site, and we were trespassing.

     We returned to the car and headed overland, off road, to the bison jump.  Seeing it for the first time, I could not believe my eyes.  A huge section of the cliff had collapsed into the valley, burying most of the kill zone but exposing masses of bones nonetheless.  Looters had dug a few holes here and there, looking for 'arrow-heads' but my attention was more on the bones themselves.  Because two animals haunt my dreams.  Bears and bison.  And their respective habitats haunt my dreams as well; boreal forest and the grasslands.

     I found plenty of bones, but very few butcher marks.  Most of the horns had been left behind as well, as had the hoofs (plenty of toe bones).  There were a lot of juveniles.  Generally, the animal remains found at the actual kill-site comprise those left unprocessed, as the area of processing meat, skin, marrow, etc are generally off to one side, up-wind of the kill-site.

     We found a few arrowheads (actually, spear-points), of a style known as Oxbow, which dates to around 4000 years ago.  The vista at the head of the jump was one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.  Directly below, however, was a place of death, and wanton waste.  If the hunters spoke to the bison, they had nothing good to say.

     Despite this, the grasslands do indeed possess a kind of beauty even in the midst of their unnatural desolation.  You can still find pronghorn antelope, jack rabbits, red-tail hawks, prairie dogs, mule deer and coyotes.  Just no bison.  And no Plains Cree.

     That was a day of two 'holy fucks' and they have marked me for good.  And I came away feeling closer to the indigenous peoples of this land (I've worked and lived alongside many)—just as profligate as the rest of us, after all.  A sobering feeling.  And closeness here does not imply comfort of any sort.

     The East Coast of North America was crowded with confederations and nascent nation-states when the Europeans arrived—and those native groups were warring with each other over the usual things: territory and the resources in that territory.  The Moche and the Aztecs repressed countless peoples.  The Inca carried little children to mountain tops and smashed their skulls in.  The Maya drugged virgins and threw them into cenotes.  The Puebla and their pre-cursors ate each other—and lovely as the view from those cliff-face towns are, they were built there for self-defense.  Long before the Dutch arrived, the inhabitants of a chain of islands in a Pacific archipelago were locked in an endemic war that resulted in genocide and enslavement.  The first human colonists of Easter Island gave us all the perfect analogy for resource depletion and the collapse that followed.  The colonization by humans of Australia and New Zealand (and Madagascar) resulted in the extinctions of most large animals—by hunter/gatherers, no less.

     It is simply too easy to ascribe all vice upon a dominant civilization, and lather thick the virtues of less-dominant ones (indigenous or otherwise, especially since the notion of 'indigenous' is something of a misnomer: ultimately, we're all indigenous to Africa).  The distinction depends upon efficacy and capacity—but even the smallest group capable of sustaining itself can exhibit the fullest range of human traits one might consider insensitive, reprehensible and ultimately suicidal.

     Whew.

     


     The second 'letter' was written after reading Volumes I and II of Endgame. The tone shifts from the personal to rather more academic, as I was more consciously engaged in formulating an argument, rather than simply observing; and my audience had shifted from Jensen himself to … someone else)…


     

     As much as it makes my skin crawl to say this, let us assume that Jensen's vision of the idyllic future of hunter/gatherer subsistence for the chosen few, arriving as a consequence of the active destruction of civilisation, is somehow confirmed as viable, how do we get there?  Before I address that, let's look at the initial assumption.  It is predicated on the notion that such cultures existed and thrived in the past (to which I would point out that yes, they existed, and might even be seen to have thrived, indeed for a very long time, but that life in that system was far from idyllic; one need only look at the paleo-forensic evidence to see the signs of stress, injury, periods of deprivation and malnutrition, and endemic diseases and parasitic invasion, to know that life was hard and plagued with suffering and misery. And as soon as strategies arrived that had the potential to mitigate that difficult existence, those who could jumped at them).  Whether such an idyllic existence existed in the past is, however, not really the point.  The point is, and this is what Jensen is precisely addressing, how do we return to it, given the planet's present condition?

     The answer is, we can't.  We have long since passed the point of no return.  Let us now look at the possible scenarios to reaching Jensen's goal  (and this goal is born of the heartfelt desire to save the wild animals of the world).  In the broadest sense, there are two.  Both are dependent on a radical depopulation of the human species, down to perhaps one or two percent of the present population.  The distinction lies in how we get there, and it is in that distinction on which everything hinges.

     Hunter-Gatherers need something to hunt and something to gather.  Without them, the hunter-gatherer starves.  Accordingly, for that last one or two percent of humanity left after the fall of civilisation, there needs to be enough animals left to hunt and eat; and there needs to be abundant edible plants to harvest and maintain.  Having one and not the other is of course possible, as with the traditional Inuit or strictly vegetarian cultures (not that many of those ever truly existed), but these were very specific in their characteristics. And for the populations in question, biological adaptation was a crucial factor in survival.  Finally, the biome being exploited was in each instance fecund enough to sustain viable (if small) populations, all other things being equal (i.e. the presence of ice).

     What will those hardy survivors of civilization's end eat? The answer to that depends on how the other ninety-eight percent died; more specifically, on how quickly they died.  If civilisation falls with minimal loss of life, or if it crumbles over a matter of a few years or even a decade or so, then we are looking at six billion very hungry people.  What will they eat when the last stockpiles of processed food are gone?  Why, they will eat everything (a present-day corollary can be found in the Congo, where civilization has already collapsed).  They'll start with the best stuff first: every animal wild and domestic they can track down and slaughter.  Once those are all gone, they'll turn to lesser creatures—those more difficult to capture or of little or no nutritional value.  And finally, when they too are all gone, when every forest is silent, when the skies are truly empty, they will turn to the last source of food available to them: each other.

     This scenario, of slow or gradual collapse, will in fact trigger an absolute extinction of every wild and domestic animal on Earth, concluding with us.

     Those people who did what they could to prepare for the end will find themselves under siege.  They will live (for a time) in heavily fortified enclaves, desperately defending their livestock, seed-store and harvest, and indeed, the delicious biomass that is their family and friends. Equally (or better) armed raiders—getting hungrier by the moment—will descend upon those enclaves in ever more desperate waves of need.  And attrition will tell in the end.  The bullets will run out; the defenses will be breached; defenders will die; and even if all that is survived, all the livestock will have been stolen, and malnutrition and disease will descend. Medicines will run out or expire, losing efficacy.  Eventually, should the enclave prevail and survive the year or two of absolute horror, they will be looking upon a lifeless world.  They will have eaten the last attacker shot or speared to death.  At which point, they had better pray to whatever hard-eyed gods they've rediscovered, that the climate's deterioration doesn't then hit them with drought, because they have no reserves.  If, for whatever reason, their crops fail, they will all die.

     Jensen advocates taking down civilisation piece by piece, hydroelectric dam by microwave tower, Wal-Mart by oil tanker.  He advocates a steady destruction, at some point reaching a threshold of zeal so that the point of no return is finally reached, and it all crashes into ruin.  That sounds like a slow process to me.  In fact, it sounds like the perfect recipe for the violent slow-death scenario I have just described.

     No, one needs to knock off ninety-eight percent of humanity through something faster, fast enough to leave populations of wild animals mostly intact.  Nuclear Armageddon won't do it, since it'll likely kill most of those animals.  So what are we left with?  Conventional wars take too long.  No, what we need is something biological.  Let's call it the Ultimate Plague. Maybe it's diabolically created and released to do its work; maybe it's the inevitable consequence of overuse of antibiotics; maybe it just shows up.  But it needs to be virtually untreatable.  It needs to kill everyone, well, almost everyone.  Leave us a few to inherit the hunter-gatherer idyll.  Of course, the Ultimate Plague doesn't skip the Chosen, the ones with well-stocked hidey-holes and an arsenal on their cellar wall; nor the ones in their happy communes busy learning the old ways of living.  Presumably, unless someone climbs inside a sealed bubble and stays there for as long as necessary, or takes to the hills (but then, there's Bill the neighbour doing the same thing, damn him), the Ultimate Plague will disregard even those boundaries of righteousness and moral purity.  Since that is the case, then, there is no guarantee that the ones who survive the plague also happen to be people capable of surviving in a wild, uncivilized world.  At least there is one consolation to this scenario: the wild animals return.  Earth recovers from our manic depredations.  And maybe one percent of the one percent surviving the Ultimate Plague then manage to eke out a living for a while longer.

     This latter scenario, in fact, is the only one with the potential to achieve what Jensen wants.  But, as one can see, its outcome is neither controllable nor ideal, and most certainly it is not guaranteed to create a hunter-gathering utopia of harmony and perpetual sustainability.

     Well now.

     Let's reiterate.  I run through these thoughts:  Jensen wants spasms of destruction, ultimately leading to the fall of civilization, and with that fall, the end of humanity's ever expanding front of destruction upon the natural world.  I fully understand his sentiment, and I understand as well, his need for attacking those skeptics who hold to a darker view of human nature—a view so much darker that many of them have concluded we're not worth saving.  That conclusion infuriates him and he heaps no end of scorn upon such believers, primarily because he views such a conclusion as a convenient excuse for inaction. 

     He has a vision.  It is born of a collection of beliefs in the world that once was, the world that preceded this present civilization.  It is a collection of beliefs imbued with denial, ignorance, wishful thinking and whole heaps of noble-savage romanticism.  But he needs it, for without it he can offer no viable alternative to our present mess.  Without it, there is no light at the end of the bone-walled tunnel.  Accordingly, he reserves his most vicious attacks for those who, in seeing what he sees with respect to the un-sustainability of modern civilisation, most egregiously arrive at a conclusion fundamentally different from his own; specifically, that a backward step to hunter/gathering is unworkable and doomed to fail; and secondly, that the destruction of modern civilization serves no purpose and will in no way achieve an earthly paradise for the chosen.

     But I need to make a slight correction on that last point. The destruction of modern civilization as advocated by Jensen does serve a purpose.  Alas, it has nothing to do with saving the wild world.  Rather, the sentiment being exercised is one of personal satisfaction.  It is, in fact, about vengeance.  Vengeance as a virtue; vengeance as the mobilized hand of Nature swinging down to destroy the destroyers, to slay the slayers.  It is, in essence, the hand of God's wrath. 

     But look at this objectively.  He actually has righteousness on his side, because civilization is really making a mess of things.  He also has the biblical imperative of an eye for an eye, hard and cold justice against the sinners, and oceans of blood miraculously parting to guide his chosen few out of the ravaged, death-worshipping hell he has both helped to bring down (civilization) and thereafter helped to create (in the messy ashes of post-civilization).

     So, it is important to attack and denigrate those people (environmentalists, scientists, writers, etc.) who—seeing what he sees—then possess the audacity of seeking another way through the ongoing wreck that is civilisation.  Who, indeed, see no value in destruction per se (for it will not win a brave new world for anyone), and therefore endeavour to participate in civilization and therein seek to mitigate its destructive nature.

     There's another way of looking at this: it is worthy and indeed imperative that we save the wildness of our world; and accordingly, we need to continue fighting the good fight.  At the same time, what little conscience civilization possesses is the only thing keeping wild animals and their habitats alive.  Jensen wants to end civilization to save the wild animals, when ending civilization will actually seal the annihilation of every wild animal walking, flying or swimming on this planet.  What irony.

     The present situation?  How fares the health of modern civilization?  There may be some blips of recovery, but in essence we're going down.  We cannot sustain our present lifestyle but we're not willing to surrender it, and so we proceed as we have always done, and it's killing the planet and with it, us.  Blowing up dams and Wal-Marts will only make the fall that much uglier, and the wild creatures of the world will suffer as a consequence of this appalling virtue of vengeance.  Finding clean energy alternatives and boycotting the destructive, de-humanizing underpinnings of iniquitous manufacture and trade systems, might—just might—hold the wolves of expansion at bay for a little while longer.

     There is no question that things cannot continue unchanged: we are fast reaching our limits and more than one threshold has already been crossed.  Is there a solution?  Is there a way through to a new and viable way of living?  I wish I knew, but frankly—and I truly hate to say this—Jensen doesn't have a workable answer.

     Wisdom doesn't come cheap.  Sometimes it arrives too late. But even then, it will find its expression, forcing the changes that need forcing, finding ways through that simply didn't exist before.  What can civilisation do to help?  It can house and protect wisdom; more importantly, it can make available the resources needed to put that wisdom into practice.  Without that cocoon, wisdom yields nothing.  Standing in the wreckage of a destroyed civilization, whatever satisfaction the scene yields soon fades.  What takes its place?  An empty stomach. Wisdom doesn't come cheap, and sometimes it arrives too late.   Mister Jensen: take a step back and give this some more thought.  Surrender those most cherished hopes and beliefs about what was and what might be again.  You're a smart man and if anyone can find a way through, it's you.  But destroying civilization?  It may satisfy, but it wins nothing, and doing it will kill the very things you love and value above all else.

     Finally, let's say you win.  You lead your crusade of destruction and manage to bring it all down.  Though I do possess survival skills, I don't really expect to personally survive the terrible age that will follow.  No matter.  I'll give you this word of advice.  In your army there will be many soldiers who care nothing about saving the world, people or wild animals.  They're in it because they like destroying things.  They get off on it.  Best keep a loyal friend guarding your back, because those soldiers will turn on you.  Sooner or later, they will turn on you.  If you'll forgive the corporate analogy, you can bank on it.  On the rarest of occasions, vengeance can be a virtue.  Mostly, it's anything but.

     Good luck.