Transcript for END:CIV Premise 1

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Every day that passes, the world is in worse shape.

The glum-looking man you see on the screen is Derrick Jensen.

Derrick is the bestselling author of several nonfiction books,

including The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older than Words.

His books deal with topics such as surveillance, child abuse, the environment,

and something he calls civilization.

But it's statements like these that make him so controversial:

I've been thinking of raising the Shasta Dam in California, and the reason that

Senator Feinstein gave was, "It is Californians' God-given right to water their lawns."

You know, there is no way to argue with that,

except with explosives.

That was Mr. Jensen in 2006, the same year he published a two-volume set called

Endgame. In Endgame, he argues that there is an urgent need to bring down civilization.

If people would have brought down civilization 100 years ago,

people in the Pacific Northwest could still eat salmon. There's going to be people

sitting along the Columbia 50 years from now, and they'll be glowing, for one thing,

but they'll be starving to death, and they'll be saying, "I'm starving to death because you

didn't take out the dams that killed salmon.

And those dams were used for barging, and for electricity for aluminum smelters

for beer cans, so --

Goddamn you."

He lays out his case against civilization by enumerating 20 premises.

Due to time limitations and the fact that most people would not tolerate a 20 hour movie,

we will explore 5 of these premises and accompany them with real-life examples.

Industrial civilization -- civilization itself, but especially industrial civilization -- is not

and can never be sustainable.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of life that's based on the use

of non-renewable resources won't last.

Civilization is a way of life characterized by the growth of cities.

So you've got groups of people living in a dense enough population that

the local landbase cannot support them.

What that means is you have to get

your basic resources from somewhere else,

because you've used them up where you live.

So your going to go out into the countryside and gather up whatever it is you want;

bring it back in.

If you require the importation of resources, what that means is you've denuded

the landscape of that particular resource.

There's no way that in the long term you can continue to destroy

the land that you need for your survival

or the waters that you need to drink and expect

to continue to live.

How do you develop a mountain? Well, you reduce it to useful products, so,

you pound it up, turn it into matrix for roadbeds, or you turn it into ballast for rail lines,

or you turn it into the sort of course gravel that's used in heavy construction.

When you're done developing the mountain,

the mountain no longer exists, and you can

apply that same principle to the rest of the ecosphere.

If you have a finite amount of anything, if you start using it, eventually you use it up.

(slurping) Aaahh

And so, it would seem that if your entire culture is based on -- I don't know,

let's take a random resource -- oil --

that you would think about what's going to happen when the oil runs out.

We've found energy resources that have

allowed us to escape some of the

kinds of limits that previous cultures have had to face much more quickly.

It used to collapse because they ran out of resources -- easily accessible resources --

the limit being the distance that people could travel with things like horses

or other pack animals.

That ended with the beginning of the fossil fuel age; now they can go all over the planet

and take what they want, so globalization has only accelerated

this tremendously destructive process.

We've poured our wealth into building

an infrastructure for daily life

that has no future.

I do think that the oil problem is going to accelerate within the next 3 to 5 years,

maybe even sooner. The numbers indicate that we've probably peaked in global production.

Where do you find the break from that; I mean,

all of it is a giant machine or ensemble

that just moves forward.

Technology, for example, never takes a step back.

This whole thing just keeps going like a cancer.

[Break] I don't know of any civilization that's been sustainable.

I don't believe there ever has been one.

Technology, really in its essence, is our culture's determination,

that comes from certain philosophical and historical sources,

that we will be nothing else but more relentlessly technological.

There is no clean, green path to living at a lifestyle that we're all used to

in industrialized nations. This way of life is over.

Civilizations are often cutting their own throats very visibly, very obviously,

but they just keep on doing it.

It's my belief that the human dimension of this is self-extinguishing,

and it'll take other species with it, as it is doing,

demonstrably, all around us right now.