Derrick Jensen
| Derrick Jensen | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 19, 1960 |
| Occupation | Environment activist and writer |
| Citizenship | American |
| Genre | Global warming, ecology, social justice |
| Website | |
| www |
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Derrick Jensen (born December 19, 1960) is an American author and radical environmentalist (and prominent critic of mainstream environmentalism) living in Crescent City, California. According to Democracy Now!, Jensen "has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement."
Jensen has published several books, including The Culture of Make Believe and Endgame, that question and critique civilization as an entire social system, exploring its inherent values, hidden premises, and modern links to supremacism, oppression, and genocide, as well as corporate, domestic, and worldwide ecological abuse. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.
He holds a B.S. in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, which he attended on a scholarship, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington.
Derrick Jensen is primarily an advocate for indigenous peoples and wild nature, and an opponent of civilization, rejecting the notion that it can ever be an ethical or sustainable model for human society. He describes the linguistically and historically defensible definition of civilization as "a culture — that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts — that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning state or city)," and the definition of city as a group of "people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life." He explains that, by such definitions, civilizations and cities are both unsustainable:
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