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Slavery Was A Central Concern Of Governance Form The Time Of The First Nation-state. The Code Of Hammurabi, The Earliest Know Set Of Laws For Governing An Empire, Prescribed Death For Anyone Who Harbored A Fugitive Or Otherwise Helped A Slave To Escape. The Relationship Between The Law And Bondage Goes Back Even Farther: Indeed, The Oldest Extant Legal Documents Don't Concern The Sale Of Land, Houses, Or Even Animals, But Slaves.

-Derrick Jensen

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Slavery Was A Central

Derrick Jensen

...

Slavery Was A Central Concern Of Governance Form The Time Of The First Nation-state. The Code Of Hammurabi, The Earliest Know Set Of Laws For Governing An Empire, Prescribed Death For Anyone Who Harbored A Fugitive Or Otherwise Helped A Slave To Escape. The Relationship Between The Law And Bondage Goes Back Even Farther: Indeed, The Oldest Extant Legal Documents Don't Concern The Sale Of Land, Houses, Or Even Animals, But Slaves.

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Yes, It's Vital To Make Lifestyle Choices To Mitigate Damage Caused By Being A Member Of Industrialized Civilization, But To Assign Primary Responsibility To Oneself, And To Focus Primarily On Making Oneself Better, Is An Immense Copout, An Abrogation Of Responsibility.

Lifestyle Choices

Civilization Is Based On A Clearly Defined And Widely Accepted Yet Often Unarticulated Hierarchy. Violence Done By Those Higher On The Hierarchy To Those Lower Is Nearly Always Invisible, That Is, Unnoticed. When It Is Noticed, It Is Fully Rationalized. Violence Done By Those Lower On The Hierarchy To Those Higher Is Unthinkable, And When It Does Occur Is Regarded With Shock, Horror, And The Fetishization Of The Victims.

Have You Ever Felt Love? Did You Need Scientific Proof Of This? How Would You Have Definitively And Scientifically Proved Your Love Existed? If You Could Not Prove It, Would That Mean Your Love Didn't Exist? What Would You Trust: Your Own Feelings, Or Science?

There Is Always Money To Kill People. There Is Never Enough Money For Life Affirming Ends.

Stand With Me. Stand And Fight. I Am One, And We Would Be Two. Two More Might Join And We Would Be Four. When Four More Join We Will Be Eight. We Will Be Eight People Fighting Whom Others Will Join. And Then More People. And More. Stand And Fight.

Those In Power Have Made It So We Have To Pay Simply To Exist On The Planet. We Have To Pay For A Place To Sleep, And We Have To Pay For Food. If We Don't, People With Guns Come And Force Us To Pay. That's Violent.

I Thought A Forest Was Made Up Entirely Of Trees, But Now I Know That The Foundation Lies Below Ground, In The Fungi.

In Order To Maintain Our Way Of Living, We Must Tell Lies To Each Other, And Especially To Ourselves.

If Your Homeland Were Invaded By Aliens Who Cut Down The Forests, Poisoned The Water And Air And Contaminated The Food Supply, Would You Resist?

If You Only Had A Limited Time To Life (which Is Of Course The Case), How Would You Spend Your Time?

We Have A Need For Enchantment That Is As Deep And Devoted As Our Need For Food And Water.

Casey Maddox Wrote That When Philosophy Dies, Action Begins. I Would Say In Addition That When We Stop Hoping For External Assistance, When We Stop Hoping That The Awful Situation We're In Will Somehow Resolve Itself, When We Stop Hoping The Situation Will Somehow Not Get Worse, Then We Are Finally Free - Truly Free - To Honestly Start Working To Thoroughly Resolve It. I Would Say When Hope Dies, Action Begins.

To Reverse The Effects Of Civilization Would Destroy The Dreams Of A Lot Of People. There's No Way Around It. We Can Talk All We Want About Sustainability, But There's A Sense In Which It Doesn't Matter That These People's Dreams Are Based On, Embedded In, Intertwined With, And Formed By An Inherently Destructive Economic And Social System. Their Dreams Are Still Their Dreams. What Right Do I -- Or Does Anyone Else -- Have To Destroy Them. At The Same Time, What Right Do They Have To Destroy The World?

Within This Culture Wealth Is Measured By One's Ability To Consume And Destroy.

When Dams Were Erected On The Columbia, Salmon Battered Themselves Against The Concrete, Trying To Return Home. I Expect No Less From Us. We Too Must Hurl Ourselves Against And Through The Literal And Metaphorical Concrete That Contains And Constrains Us, That Keeps Us From Talking About What Is Most Important To Us, That Keeps Us From Living The Way Our Bones Know We Can, That Bars Us From Our Home. It Only Takes One Person To Bring Down A Dam.

There Is A Language Older By Far And Deeper Than Words. It Is The Language Of Bodies, Of Body On Body, Wind On Snow, Rain On Trees, Wave On Stone. It Is The Language Of Dream, Gesture, Symbol, Memory. We Have Forgotten This Language. We Do Not Even Remember That It Exists.

Love Does Not Imply Pacifism.

Civilization Can Never Be Sustainable.

We Must Learn How To Think Like The Planet.

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.

If We Wish To Stop The Atrocities, We Need Merely To Step Away From The Isolation. There Is A Whole World Waiting For Us, Ready To Welcome Us Home.

The Task We All Face As Human Beings ... Is To Find And Become Who We Are. The Task Teachers Face Is To Find Their Own Way Of Teaching, One That Manifests Who They Are.

We Have Been Too Kind To Those Who Are Killing The Planet. We Have Been Inexcusably, Unforgivably, Insanely Kind.

Violence, And Evil, Doesn't Always Come Dressed In Black, And It Doesn't Always Look Like Charles Manson. Nor Does It Always Come To Us As Obvious And Arrogant[...]. Often It Comes To Us With The Simple Plea To Be Reasonable.

A Real Partnership In Which All Parties Help All Others To Be More Fully Themselves

Surely By Now There Can Be Few Here Who Still Believe The Purpose Of Government Is To Protect Us From The Destructive Activities Of Corporations. At Last Most Of Us Must Understand That The Opposite Is True: That The Primary Purpose Of Government Is To Protect Those Who Run The Economy From The Outrage Of Injured Citizens.

It's No Wonder We Don't Defend The Land Where We Live. We Don't Live Here. We Live In Television Programs And Movies And Books And With Celebrities And In Heaven And By Rules And Laws And Abstractions Created By People Far Away And We Live Anywhere And Everywhere Except In Our Particular Bodies On This Particular Land At This Particular Moment In These Particular Circumstances.

But What, Precisely, Is Hope? At A Talk I Gave Last Spring, Someone Asked Me To Define It. I Turned The Question Back On The Audience, And Here’s The Definition We All Came Up With: Hope Is A Longing For A Future Condition Over Which You Have No Agency; It Means You Are Essentially Powerless.

Premise Eight: The Needs Of The Natural World Are More Important Than The Needs Of The Economic System.

I've Since Come To Understand The Reason School Lasts Thirteen Years. It Takes That Long To Sufficiently Break A Child's Will. It Is Not Easy To Disconnect Children's Wills, To Disconnect Them From Their Own Experiences Of The World In Preparation For The Lives Of Painful Employment They Will Have To Endure.

The Pretense That Humans Are Superior To Nonhumans Is Entirely Unsupportable. I Have Seen No Compelling Evidence That Humans Are Particularly More "intelligent" Than Any Other Creature. I Have Had Long And Fruitful Relationshis With Many Nonhuman Animals, Both Domesticated And Wild, And Have Reveled In The Bouquet Of Radically Different Intelligences - Different Forms, Not Different "quantities" That They Have Introduced To Me, Each In His Or Her Own Time, In His Or Her Own Way.

I Think A Lot Of Us Are Increasingly Recognizing That The Dominant Culture Is Killing The Planet.

Like The Layers Of An Onion, Under The First Lie Is Another, And Under That Another, And They All Make You Cry.

A Very Poor Kid Came Up To Me After A Talk And Said 'i Want To Go Blow Up A Factory.' I Asked How Old He Was And He Said 17. I Said 'have You Ever Had Sex?' He Said 'no.' I Said 'just Remember If You Get Caught You Aren't Going To Have Sex For Twenty Years At Least.' That's Not Saying That One Person Having Sex Is Worth The Salmon. I'm Not Saying It's A Reason Not To Act, I'm Saying Don't Be Stupid.

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Mass Extinction

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So Long As We Only Believe In The Justice Of The State, Of The Law-made By Those In Power, To Serve Those In Power-so Long Will We Continue To Be Exploited By Those In Power.

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All Writers Are Propagandists.

A Primary Purpose Of The Police Is To Enforce The Delusions Of Those With Lots Of Green Paper.

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All The Mega Corporations On The Planet Make Their Obscene Profits Off The Labor And Suffering Of Others, With Complete Disregard For The Effects On The Workers, Environment, And Future Generations. We Have A Straightforward Proposal: If They Want Public Money, We Want Public Control. It's That Simple.

Suffering Of Others

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When We Realize The Degree Of Agency We Actually Do Have, We No Longer Have To "hope" At All. We Simply Do The Work.

To Believe Christianity Stands In Opposition To Slavery Is At Best To Think Anachronistically And At Worst To Not Understand Christianity.

We Cannot Hope To Create A Sustainable Culture With Any But Sustainable Souls.

A Language Older Than Words

Slavery Was A Central Concern Of Governance Form The Time Of The First Nation-state. The Code Of Hammurabi, The Earliest Know Set Of Laws For Governing An Empire, Prescribed Death For Anyone Who Harbored A Fugitive Or Otherwise Helped A Slave To Escape. The Relationship Between The Law And Bondage Goes Back Even Farther: Indeed, The Oldest Extant Legal Documents Don't Concern The Sale Of Land, Houses, Or Even Animals, But Slaves.

I Thought That, Given The System Of Rewards Central To Our Economic System, In Which Profit Maximization Is Valued Above All Else And Specifically Above Life, It Is Probably Just As Irresistible To The Owners Of Capital (human Or Otherwise) To Exploit Workers (and The Land): "nothing Personal," They Say As They Load Their Property Onto The Ship Bound For The Middle Passage, "but A Man's Gotta Turn A Dime."

I Am Only So Beautiful As The Character Of My Relationships, Only So Rich As I Enrich Those Around Me, Only So Alive As I Enliven Those I Greet.

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If We Hope To Stem The Mass Destruction That Inevitably Attends Our Economic System (and To Alter The Sense Of Entitlement - The Sense Of Contempt, The Hatred - On Which It Is Based), Fundamental Historical, Social, Economic, And Technological Forces Need To Be Pondered, Understood, And Redirected. Behavior Won't Change Much Without A Fundamental Change In Consciousness. The Question Becomes: How Do We Change Consciousness?

Mass Destruction

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