Derrick Jensen carries neither lantern nor flashlight. "The book," he says from somewhere in the darkness, "really ends up being about abstraction versus the particular." The moon has not yet risen over the dirt path—exactly three-eighths of a mile long—that leads from his mother's house to his own. Only bright stars and the shadowy tips of redwoods are visible overhead.
PW walks behind with arms outstretched to feel for the inevitable tangle of wilderness at the path's boundaries, and follows the soft sound of Jensen's voice through the velvet dark.
Jensen's latest book, The Culture of Make Believe, out last month from Context Books, started as a 10-page introduction to an encyclopedia of hate groups. Now, 590 pages later, classified by the publisher as philosophy/cultural studies, the book is a comprehensive analysis of race relations, with a surprising twist. Jensen examines at length the relationship between perception and exploitation in Western culture and argues that because Western civilization is based on the objectification and exploitation of people and land, it is ultimately unsustainable and must be dismantled. Such radical appraisals have earned the author a certain renown, with the San Francisco Chronicle suggesting Jensen might be branded "a Red, a Green and by some, certainly, an enemy of the state."
The night air is moist and smells like the ocean. Jensen lives in Crescent City, one of the northernmost towns in California. He slips into his living room through a sliding glass door left permanently open to accommodate his three cats, then turns on the lights to reveal a great, scattered mess of discarded manuscript pages, newspapers, used envelopes and jumbo-sized bags of off-brand dog food. Canvas grocery sacks filled with potato chips and instant oatmeal have been dropped at random spots on the carpet.
The house is cold, and the furniture scarce. Jensen, 41, is tall and thin with broad shoulders and dark curly hair. He wears a heavy coat, a blue cotton sweater embroidered with a forest scene and at least three T-shirts underneath. He sits down on an old sofa covered with a brown-striped bed sheet and speaks about his work.
"We don't think about how we got this land. We don't think about the violence that makes the comforts and elegancies of our way of life happen," he says. "The world is being destroyed before our eyes, and it's really not that hard to tell the truth about it. It doesn't take that much courage."
Despite growing up with a violent and abusive father, Jensen thrived academically in his youth and accepted a scholarship to the Colorado School of Mines just out of high school.
By the time he graduated with a B.S. in mineral engineering and physics, Jensen had already decided he would someday live life as a writer. He worked briefly as an engineer, but couldn't adapt to the rigid requirements of a typical 9-to-5 job. He quit and became a small-scale commercial beekeeper, thinking that keeping bees would require him to work extremely hard during some months, but would allow him plenty of time to write during others.
Bee-keeping could have worked out nicely, but all Jensen's bees died in a trucking accident just before he became deathly ill with Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammatory illness of the gastrointestinal tract. Jensen endured a total physical breakdown and a slow healing process, but never faltered from his commitment to writing.
The personal metaphorical death and rebirth Jensen experienced during his illness set the tone for much of his work, leading to his philosophy that the destructiveness inherent in Western culture has spread through the hearts and minds of generations of people like a sickness. In Make Believe, he leads the reader through intensely painful details of atrocities that have paved the way for Western cultural dominance of the world. Some contend that Jensen has invented a new genre with his mix of philosophy and memoir drawn together in a nonlinear fashion. Part of the reason for this method, he says, has to do with honesty.
"I try to be forthright without whining," he says, and adds that when writing about such subjects as the massacre of Indians, antebellum and modern-day slavery, and industrial forestry, "it's important to mix analysis with blood." That's one reason Jensen chooses to balance statistical facts with intimate, well-crafted stories from his personal life.
Jensen received an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University in 1991. In 1995, an environmental organization hired him to co-author a book called Railroads and Clearcuts. That same year, Sierra Club Books published Listening to the Land, a collection of interviews with activists regarding the culture's "pervasive destructiveness." In 1996, Jensen started work on A Language Older than Words, eventually published in 2000 by Context.
Language—which asks, "How does one become sane in a crazy culture?"—has turned out to be the first in what could potentially become a trilogy. Make Believe asks, "Now that you have become sane, what do you see?" In his next book, as yet untitled, he will ask, "Now that you've seen it, what are you going to do about it?"
Jensen proposes for a first step that people must fall in love with the particular. "To love this particular tree, that particular person, this glint of sunlight off this dragonfly wing..." The beginning of the answer to halting our culture's atrocities is, as he suggests, "a return to our humanity."
