Derrick Jensen - Bright Green Lies

Advance Praise for

Bright Green Lies

Bright Green Lies dismantles the illusion of green technology in breathtaking, comprehensive detail, revealing a fantasy that must perish if there is to be any hope of preserving what remains of life on Earth. From solar panels to wind turbines, from LED light bulbs to electric cars, no green fantasy escapes Jensen, Keith, and Wilberts revealing peek behind the green curtain. Bright Green Lies is a must-read for all who cherish life on Earth. Jeff Gibbs, writer, director, and producer of the film Planet of the Humans

Bright Green Lies lays out in heartbreaking and sometimes disgusting detail the simple fact that to maintain the growth of techno-industrial civilization by replacing fossil fuels with solar panels, wind turbines, hydropower, electric cars, and whatever other green machines we might construct still requires the continuing rape of Mother Earth and the poisoning of her water, air, soil, wildlife, and human populations. The authors tell us unequivocally: Green growth is a doomed enterprise, and there is no future for humankind living in harmony with nature in which we fail to recognize that unlimited economic and population growth on a finite planet is ecological suicide. Environmental groups that blithely refuse to question the industrial growth paradigm should be fearful of this book, as it exposes with a sword point their hypocrisies and falsehoods. I suggest they seek the immediate burning of all copies .
Cristopher Ketcham, author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West

Bright Green Lies is a tour de force. The authors expose many of the fallacies of mainstream environmentalism and economics. Their main thesis is that much of what passes for environmental concern today is geared primarily toward sustaining an unsustainable lifestyle. Most so-called sustainable practices are just a slower way to degrade the earths ecosystems. For years, I have been harping on the fact that society needs to do a full accounting of the real costs of our lifestyles. This book exposes much of what is missing in our flawed accounting system, and the genuine costs of this failure. I thought I knew a lot about the environmental impacts of the consumer society, but Jensen and his co-authors have shown me that I, like many people, only had a superficial appreciation of these costs. Bright Green Lies takes off where William Cattons book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change left off and provides a stimulating roadmap of how to think about our environmental crisis. It makes a powerful case for what society needs to do to reevaluate its present and unsustainable pathway. Hopefully, Bright Green Lies will result in more thoughtful, insightful, and ultimately productive environmental activism.
George Wuerthner, ecologist, wildlands activist, photographer, and author of 38 books, including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy

Bright Green Lies is a book Ive been keenly awaiting, a book made of numbers, clear thinking, wit, and love. Bright Green Lies urges the protection of the natural world in all its sacred and manifest diversity. Arm yourself with the precision and honesty that this book fiercely inspires and demands; recognize that life itself is the sole bearer of effective solutions, that organic, ecological, elemental, and biomic life can indeed save the planet from catastrophe. Suprabha Seshan, rainforest conservationist at Indias Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary

Bright Green Lies is a much needed wakeup call if we are to avoid sleepwalking to extinction joining 200 of our fellow creatures and relatives that are being driven to extinction per day by an extractivist, colonizing money machine that is lubricated by limitless greed, and guided by the mechanical mind of industrialism. This destructive machine is labelled civilization, and its violent and brutal imposition on indigenous cultures and communities is legitimized as the civilizing mission for which exterminations of the rich cultural and biological diversity of the earth is necessary for the linear, blind rush to progress. Religions change, extermination continues. But there are other ways: the ways of indigenous cultures to whom we must turn to learn how to walk lightly on the earth.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of NAVDANYA and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology; author of Earth Democracy and Making Peace with the Earth

Bright Green Lies is the book weve all been waiting for. Jensen and his co-authors explode the myth that we can somehow grow our way out of the mess that weve created by using renewable energies to prop up the lie that endless growth is possible without continuing to destroy the planet and the life-support systems that it provides. May Bright Green Lies be the first step toward shifting us to a different futureone which doesnt continue to borrow from the future to give us an unlivable planet. Thomas Linzey, senior counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and cofounder of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It 2021 by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert

Politics of the Living Series (m-1)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-948626-39-2

eBook ISBN 978-1-948626-40-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jensen, Derrick, 1960- author. | Keith, Lierre, author. | Wilbert,

Max, author.

Title: Bright green lies : how the environmental movement lost its way and

what we can do about it / Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Max Wilbert.

Description: Rhinebeck, New York : Monkfish Book Publishing Company, [2021]

| Series: Politics of the living series | Includes bibliographical

references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020044348 (print) | LCCN 2020044349 (ebook) | ISBN

9781948626392 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781948626408 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism. | Environmentalism--History. |

Environmentalists.

Classification: LCC GE195 .J457 2021 (print) | LCC GE195 (ebook) | DDC

304.2/8--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044348

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044349

Book and Cover Design by Colin Rolfe

Leaf by Isis Frana

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 East Market Street, Suite 304

Rhinebeck, NY 12572

(845) 876-4861

monkfishpublishing.com

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,

stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic

Contents

A Note From the Authors on Language

Its customary when writing about nonhumans to use the relative pronoun that rather than who : We cut down the tree that used to grow by the pond, not We cut down the tree who used to grow by the pond.

The authors of this book use who when speaking of nonhumans because we believe that how we speak of the world profoundly affects how we perceive and experience the world, which in turn profoundly affects how we act in the world. If we perceive the life around us as a collection of resources to exploit, then exploit them we willand ultimately, we will destroy the world in our attempts to control it. As we see happening now.