Forget Shorter Showers | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine - The Diigo Meta page

• 29 Nov 09
  

  fred first

  sustainability

  • Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet?
• 30 Sep 09
  

  Jeremy Price

  progress philosophy politics economics ecology environment critique neoliberalism consumerism

• 28 Sep 09
  

  Joshua Goss

  Derrick Jensen individualism personal change environment social change capitalism

  • Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance.
  • Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry.
  • 3 more annotations...
  • • At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive
    • The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system
    • The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers.
• 02 Aug 09
  

  geheimdienst
• 13 Jul 09
  

  Amy MacDonald
• 12 Jul 09
  

  linuxer Radu
• 09 Jul 09
  

  Nelson Cevallos
  • Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”
  • The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide.
    • 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. 
• 07 Jul 09
  

  I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Pers

  consumer climate_crisis

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