You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 106. Derrick Jensen FINAL.mp3
Derrick Jensen: I can identify more advertising jingles than I can identify bird songs. I can name more stars in movies than I can name stars in the sky. I can identify more brand logos than I can identify edible plants and fungi within 100 yards of my home. This would have been unthinkable 500 years ago. What's happened is we have learned a lot more about humans, but we don't know as much about wild nature. I can tell you, I just happen to know this, I remember from high school, that Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia, which is never going to affect my life. But I can't tell you, and I'll bet most of your listeners can't tell either, whether the moon is waxing or waning right now.
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Today I have the honor of speaking with Derrick Jensen. He's an author, environmental activist, host of Resistance Radio, and someone particularly dear to my heart. I started reading Derek Jensen long before I read the works of anyone I have interviewed or talked about on this podcast before. I read a language older than words when I was about 15 years old and it left a mark on me. So we're gonna talk today about something that is dear to my heart, but underrepresented on this podcast. I would like to think that my podcast or anything I do is a reflection of my values, but I really haven't reflected how deeply I value our connection to the natural world. And we're going to change that today. And there's no better way to do so than to speak with Derek Jensen, who I've been following for a long time and has a deep, deep connection to the natural world. So Derek, thank you so much for joining me today.

Derrick Jensen: Oh, thank you for having me.

Stephanie Winn: So I want to talk to you about our connection to the natural world, what it means to us as humans, ecological devastation and grief that some of us might feel and think about consciously, others maybe feeling and thinking not so consciously. I'm remembering just off the top of my head passages from your books about the world that we lived in before the level of environmental devastation that characterizes the modern era and how how rivers were teeming with fish and the sky would be darkened by the enormity of the flocks of birds. And so maybe we'll just sort of start there if you could paint a picture for me and for our listeners of the world that we have forgotten, the world that is somewhere in our ancestral memory.

Derrick Jensen: Well, thank you for that question. And a few things. One is I live in Northern California, the coast, about three miles from the ocean, about 20 miles from the border of Oregon. And as late as the 1930s, there are records of the Klamath River just south of here. It's a big river. It's the second biggest river in the United States on the West Coast that drains into the Atlantic. I mean, it's the Pacific. And they said it was black and roiling with fish. It's quote, quote, black and roiling with fish. As late as the 1930s. And the salmon are pretty much gone there now. And I see occasionally a couple of fish spawning around here. and it's like two fish. It's not the entire bottom. Somebody sent me a picture 20 years ago of some river up in Alaska that if you look at the picture, you think, why did they send me this picture? It's sort of a high view down from the Steve Mountain slope down to the river. And you see the river has little bands of yellow along the edge, and then the whole center is black. And if you look more closely, you see that it's because it's only at the banks that you can see the bottom of the river, and the rest of it is filled with fish. It's not black because it's so deep, it's black because it's filled with fish. And in Northern California, 500 years ago, 200 years ago, if you were near a stream or near a body of water, you would probably see a grizzly bear every 15 minutes. And grizzly bears are of course extinct in California now. And it's the same with many places. The banks of cod were so thick in the North Atlantic that it would impede shipping. The sailing ships would actually slow down because the bodies of fish would slow them, and whales were a hazard to shipping. There were so many whales that you had to worry about, if they hit your boat, it might harm your boat. And, evidently, whales don't have particularly good breath, at least smelling to us, and it would make harbors stink because there are so many whales who are preaching. And people have heard of passenger pigeons. They were in flocks so large, they would darken the sky for days at a time. And it's just, that's unimaginable to me. I've never seen flocks I've seen some big flocks of birds, but it's like they might go across the sun for five seconds or something. I can't imagine that level of, that amount of fecundity. And there were, I mean, it's the same no matter where you were, there were bison from horizon to horizon, or there were, I don't know the numbers. I'm making up the numbers on this, but one prairie dog village, the biggest prairie dog village in Texas was like, I don't know, 10,000 square miles. I'm making the numbers. It was huge. It evidently numbered in the billions for how many prairie dogs were just in that one large community. And you're right about there being no place in the heart for us to comprehend this level of catastrophic changes. There's two stories I want to tell about that. One of them is that one of my mom's favorite movies, she died five years ago, one of my mom's favorite movies, it's called Trip to Bountiful. And it was a play written in the 50s and the movie was made, I think, in the 80s. And it was, as I said, set, it was written in the 50s and set in the 50s about this old woman somewhere around Houston who's living with her son and his wife. And she's very old and independent and wants to go back to her childhood home one more time to Bountiful. And she does, and she escapes the house and gets on a bus, and it's the husband and wife sort of track her down and get her a bountiful, and she promises she'll never go again. She just wanted to make one last trip to this place. And the reason that I mention all this is because that play could not be written now. And the reason it could be written then is because Bountiful was still this beautiful, natural place. And I guarantee that if somebody grew up 70 years ago in Houston and they now wanted to go back home, it would be shopping malls and or shopping malls are gone. So it'd be suburbs and strip malls or something. And my mom grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. And when she was a child, she used to hop on a cow, like three or four years old. She'd climb up on the fence and hop on a cow and ride it to her grandma's house. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I did a talk in Lincoln and I went to her address. And it's the middle of town. It's, you know, there's no cow. Only cows there now are in the grocery store. And one more story about this, which is that there's a really good book called 13 Moons by Charles Frazier. And it's basically a love story between a man and a woman, but that's not the real… For me, that wasn't the real point of the book. There's two love stories. The other love story is between the protagonist and the land. And it's set in 1820s, starts in 1820 or so, 1815, North Carolina, and ends about 1900. And there's a scene at the end where the main character gives his speech to himself, the soliloquy, where he is saying, we evolved to lose our parents. We were born to become orphans. This is just what happens. You lose your parents, you lose your friends, you lose your lovers, you lose you know, everybody dies and then eventually, you know, you're first in line and then, and then you die too. And there, we evolved that way. But what we didn't evolve with is through all of that change that would happen, what was always there was the land. And so the continuity in your life would be your larger human community that would still be there, and also the river would still be there, and the salmon, not in his case, because it was North Carolina, but the wood bison would still be there, and the wolves would still be there, and this and that tree might die, but the forest itself still lives. And at the end, he's watching trains of tourists going west, and had logs coming east and he has this beautiful, beautiful speech about how there is no place in our heart for there to be no continuity. And I don't know anybody. I always hesitate to say don't know anybody cause I'll think of one person. But for the most part, I don't know anybody who wants to go back to where they grew up. I grew up in Colorado. And what was semi-country is now just all wall-to-wall people. And almost everybody I know who grew up in a place that wasn't already urbanized has the same story. They hate going home because the tree where they put the tree for it has been cut down and there's a condominium in its place. I mean, that's how I became an environmentalist. And then I'll shut up and let you ask another question. That's how I became an environmentalist was in second grade, they put in a subdivision right next to where I lived. And all these meadows and pastures, I mean, it wasn't even wild nature with a capital W. It was small meadows. But in those meadows lived meadowlarks and garter snakes and cottonwood trees, ant hills. And those, those were my early childhood. And I remember thinking, even in second grade, so I'm only seven or eight, I remember thinking, if they keep doing this, where are the meadowlarks going to go? Where are the grasshoppers going to go? Where are the the crawdads from the irrigation ditch going to go. And it wasn't a stream, it was irrigation ditch. And still I love those places. And so I didn't have this language as a kid, but I understood viscerally that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. And basically all my work has come from that understanding that I mean, if I had to sum up all my work in one sentence, it would be, this way of living won't last. And when it's over, I'd rather there's more of wild nature left rather than less. So that's sort of a brief, what were things like? There was a lot more wild nature. And I can't even … I mean, this is just crazy. And a lot of people talk about this. I remember when I was a kid, you had to clean off the windshield all the time when you drove somewhere because there were so many insects. I haven't cleaned the windshield in 10 years. That's not true. Yeah, probably 10 years. And your license plate would just be speckled with bugs. Even at the time I lived here, which is 25 years, even the population of banana slugs has been collapsing for the last 20 years. I find that pretty terrifying because when I first moved here, I would I unfortunately got to know the feeling of walking through the forest at night without a flashlight and feeling a banana slug squish between my feet. And there were so many banana slugs that if I used a wheelbarrow, I got in the habit of pulling it instead of pushing it so that I could see them and avoid them. There were so many. And now I was outside for about an hour a day and I saw two banana slugs, which is pretty good. It used to be, even 20 years ago, it used to be if I was outside for an hour, I would see 40. I used to see a half dozen rough skin newts at a time and I see, and oldsters, people who lived here even 25 years earlier. So people would tell me about back in the seventies, they might be at some, some stream or something and might see 40 or 50 rough skin newts at a time. And I see one every couple of years now. And again, when I first moved here, if I went and sat by some water, I would say there's a 50% chance I would see one in a half hour and the best I ever saw was a half dozen. And now I could sit there all day and I might see one if I'm lucky. And this is happening, this is true no matter where you go.

Stephanie Winn: It's a rapid pace of loss if it can be observed in a single person's lifetime. The stories you're telling me remind me of how when I went to college and did undergrad in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, I did an internship at a state park where the monarch butterflies overwintered. I don't know how long it had been like that because it was an invasive eucalyptus forest that they were living in. It wasn't something that was native to coastal California, but that was where the monarchs overwintered and they had this whole migration pattern and I worked under someone in her 50s or 60s who remembered a time when they would be in your face. If you were there during the right season, you would be spitting out monarchs, carefully tiptoeing not to step on one, and they would be dripping from the trees in the millions. And by the time I got there, there were a few hundred each winter. That's a pretty rapid pace of change. So I think you're talking about something enormous. If she could remember that, if you could remember a time that you had more bugs on your windshield or that you saw more newts in your nearby body of water. And when you said you don't know anyone who wants to return to where they grew up, it reminded me of a conversation I was just having with my fiancé. We were talking about nostalgia. He's a much more nostalgic person than I am. And although he's not particularly nostalgic for memories where there was a lot of nature, he had a childhood with access to nature. And I think that's part of why his childhood felt safe to him. And he said something that really resonated for me. He said, you, meaning me, you're nostalgic for a time before you were born. And I almost cried just hearing that because it was like, yeah, I'm nostalgic for pre-industrial revolution. And I mean, there's all kinds of bad things we can say about the human rights and justices of a few hundred years ago. But the things that you point out, there was a continuity, regardless of how much more frequently women died in childbirth, or the status of women's rights in general, or the amount of violence. I mean, there's all kinds of things we could look back on and say, yes, humanity has made progress. When I think of the progress we've made, it's been cultural and also technological. And I imagine that at every step along the way of human technological progress, that for most of human history, I just imagine that nature felt so overwhelmingly bounteous that the thought that we were going to lose something must have been hard to conceive, a tragedy of the commons issue. It's like the ocean is enormous. The ocean just feels like something that could swallow you up. When you describe the enormity of the size of herds and flocks and all of that, at every step along the way that humans were solving human engineering problems to do things that maybe felt like they were going to make a life a lot easier for us in the short term, At what point would it have dawned on us that we would miss seeing the stars at night? That was something that we took for granted until light pollution and air pollution took that away from us. And now, seeing the stars at night is like a special occasion. I mean, maybe not for you with the lifestyle that you've chosen in this beautiful place that you live, but for someone like me. who craves it. It's a thing I get to do a few times a year if I go to the effort of putting myself in the right place in the right time.

Derrick Jensen: I resonate with what you're saying, and I'm not sure what the question is.

Stephanie Winn: I'm not sure what the question is either. I'm just talking. Wherever you want to go.

Derrick Jensen: A couple things. One of them is that I think in some ways it's even worse than they couldn't imagine that they would run out. That I think There are some people who couldn't imagine that they would run out, but there are other people whose attitude was that they will run out and I need to make as much money as I can before they do. And I read a really interesting book a couple of years ago called The Floating Coast, And that was about basically the, the Bering sea area and the Bering strait area. And a lot of the whalers understood that they were, that they were killing the whales far faster than the whales could reproduce. But what that meant is that we need to get as many as we can so that the money goes to me because the money's got us going to go to somebody. So I may as well, kill 10 instead of killing five or kill 100 instead of killing 50 because then I make more money. And then when it runs out, I'll move to something else. And we see that sort of resource substitution happening. Oh, one example of that is fish in the oceans, that a lot of the fish that are now considered to be good, good to eat, were at one point considered trash fish and would just be thrown overboard because they weren't the good tasting ones. So they worked their way through. And you see the same thing with … I mean, this is how So I got a degree in physics, and then I went one year of a degree toward mineral economics, and then I quit. None of the reasons I went or quit matter right now. But the important thing I learned from mineral economics is that mineral economics is like regular economics, except it has to do with non-renewable resources a lot of times. So it has to do with mining or petroleum or something. And the one thing I really remember from all those decades ago about mineral economics, it doesn't make sense, is you get the easy stuff first. So the first thing you do is you grab the oil that you can just scoop up out of the ground, and then you get the oil that costs you a little bit to do because you have to drill a little bit, and then you get the oil that you have to drill way down, and then you get the oil that's offshore, then you get the oil that's compressed into rocks, you got to get the shale oil, the tar sands. You do the easy stuff first, and that's basically been their attitude with everything. First, we're going to get you know, the animals that there's bazillions of, and then we're going to get the animals that there's millions of, and then thousands of. And there's been no recognition of limits at any point. And that's ignoring. That's just looking at them as resources. That's not even acknowledging their existence as sentient beings who have lives that are valuable to them as as yours is to you and mine is to me, which includes trees and everybody else too. So even if you look at them as resources, they haven't been doing it sustainably from the beginning. This is one of the things that has just sort of astounded me about all of this. This is not so much eco-philosophy or eco-psychology, but just resource extraction. Well, again, the word resource I find very wrong, but using that language for now, that if there's uncountable salmon, and then you can count them, and then there's millions, and then there's hundreds of thousands, and then there's tens of thousands, I don't understand how people can't extrapolate, or they don't want to extrapolate. Everything I've ever written in any of my books is not particularly cognitively challenging. It's not like I'm that smart. It's just, I don't, even after all these books, I don't really understand how and why. I mean, yeah, I've written about denial and you and I can talk all we want about psychological mechanisms of denial and the necessity of denial when you're powerless or when you're victimized. We can talk about all that stuff or the necessity of denial when you're exploiting somebody too. We can talk about all that, but I still don't really get it. You know, it's like, It just seems like a terribly, just a very bad idea to be putting endocrine disruptors all over the planet. Like there's an open air experiment like that. If you're going to do it, do it inside one sealed building. I mean, if you really want to test what the effects of endocrine disruptors are going to be on humans or non-humans, which I think is a bad idea in the first place. If you're going to do it, don't do it out in the open. Don't just dump them into rivers and say, gosh, what might happen? Oh, but nostalgia. I want to go back to the nostalgia thing too. I don't feel a lot of envy. I don't really have the envy gene. So if some other writer has a bestseller or something, there are some writers who get really envious of other people. Like Ernest Hemingway used to complain that other people were working on their masterpieces, that he would make fun of everybody who was more successful than he was and had a lot of envy. I don't have that. I don't care if somebody else is really successful. It makes me happy for them if they're doing good work. But I do feel envy over people who got to see the big runs of salmon and got to live in those forests. And whenever I read a book that was written in the 1920s or in the 1880s, it's like, wow, you were alive back then, huh? If you were in the Pacific Northwest, you actually got to hear the runs of salmon, because you could hear them for miles before you see them. I was talking to this person. I did a talk 20 years ago down Humboldt County, one county south. After the talk, somebody came up to me. She was an older woman. She said, when I was a child, I can remember hearing the runs of salmon. She said, you could hear them long before they would get to the stream by your house.

Stephanie Winn: Wow.

Derrick Jensen: So, I do feel that envy. There's a picture, there's a pretty famous picture of some Confederate soldiers captured at the Battle of Gettysburg. It's by Matthew Brady. Very famous photo of these three guys. And whenever I look at that, I always think, you three got to see passenger pigeons, didn't you? And it's not just they got to see them, but they got to live in a world that still had them. That's the more important thing. So yeah, I feel that I totally get that's one area where my envy gene does not apply. I do feel great envy for people who got to live in a world. I think that the people who come after us are going to envy us for the same thing.

Stephanie Winn: If you're looking for a simple way to take better care of yourself, check out Organifi. I start every day with a glass of their original green juice powder mixed with water. It contains moringa, ashwagandha, chlorella, spirulina, matcha, wheatgrass, beets, turmeric, mint, lemon, and coconut water. 100% organic with no added sugar. It's the best tasting superfood supplement I've ever tried. It's super easy to make, and it makes me feel good. Organifi also makes several other delicious and nutritious superfood blends such as red juice, immune support, protein powders, a golden milk mix, and even superfood hot cocoa. Check out the collection at organifi.com sometherapist that's o-r-g-a-n-i-f-i.com sometherapist and use code sometherapist to take 20% off your order. Going back a little bit, you were talking about you were in some ways sort of countering my innocent framing of the issue by saying there is this exploitative mentality. True. Yeah, I think both are true as well. I think when it comes to technological innovation, any technology has the risk of becoming a Pandora's box or can't put the toothpaste back in the tube situation. For example, on this podcast, I talk a lot about trans issues on this podcast, and you've interviewed me about that on your podcast, and that's one of those things where, well, somebody decided to open Pandora's box. Somebody decided that there is such a thing as changing sex. Now, I don't believe there is such a thing, but now that people have attempted it with technology, there are now new types of problems that exist that never existed before. You know, the gender issue is just one example of a technology that has created a Pandora's box situation where now now we have new problems on our hand. We need to figure out what to do medically with people who have medical problems that never existed before the iatrogenic harms were invented. And so similarly, I think with looking back, if we look at the history of innovation, that it comes from both, that innovation can come from both altruistic motives to help solve the problems of your community, as well as the mad scientist, the John Monies of the world who wanted to play God and had no regard for the laws of nature or the value of natural limits. Then I think about the individual as well as the group psychology of things. You're talking about You talked about how some people have this mentality of it's going to run out, so I might as well take as much as I can for myself rather than let someone else have it. It's like, yes, once you've opened Pandora's box, once you've created that situation for people, it does. I think there's probably, for people who are well-versed in game theory, there's probably some terminology that would be helpful in this discussion, but I don't know what it is, but it exerts this pressure where Either you can join in on the frenzy, the gold rush, the drive to take as much of this resource as you can while it's hot, or you don't participate and then potentially the resource still runs out but you're at a disadvantage because you don't have it for yourself.

Derrick Jensen: The solution to this, and this is gonna be a tremendously dissatisfying solution, because it doesn't work in modern society, the solution to this is communal decision making. Is this something we actually want? Do we actually want to, I mean, it's not just the trans issue, it's automobiles. Do we really want to design our entire cities around automobiles? Do we really want to base our lives? I mean, one of the things that Daniel Quinn talked about and said very well was that one of the problems is that we are reliant for our very lives on a system that's killing the planet. And so do we want to make ourselves dependent upon that system? I mean, it was a very bad idea in the beginning, and we've continued to follow that bad idea out to the end. I think about what Jeanette Armstrong, Okanagan Indian writer and activist, said to me about their traditional decision-making methods, that when they would have a big decision to make, they would break into four groups. And the groups were roughly the mothers, fathers, elders, and youth. And the four groups would have different sort of attitudes toward this new technology or this new ritual, this new thing that they're going to do. And basically, if we just look at these as representing four perspectives, it's the youth perspective was action, change. What innovation can we bring? And the elders were like, generically against change. You have to convince us that this change is actually beneficial. How does this fit with our tradition? And the fathers would be, how do we implement this? What's the action we can take? and the mothers would be, how do we all feel about this process? And the thing is, it doesn't matter, youth, elders, mothers, fathers, I don't care about any of that. The important thing is, those are all four important aspects that in a sane society, we would be addressing those about, do we want Do we want, okay, there's this stuff that comes out of the ground that you can burn, it's tremendously useful for fuel. So do we want to A, leave it there, B, use it to cook food, or C, use it to power industrial, power these larger, and those are decisions, those are discussions that are worth having, and we don't really have them. And one of the reasons we don't have them is because we have this mass society where it's exactly what you said. If we don't participate in the gold rush, we're just going to lose out. And the others are going to participate in the gold rush. They're going to get the advantages. So let's go way back in time. And there's a couple of directions I want to go with this. One of them is Lewis Mumford. And Lewis Mumford he wrote some really great books, and I really recommend that at the very least, people read this 10-page essay that's available online that he wrote back in the 60s called Democratic and Authoritarian Technics. I may have it backwards. It may be Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, but it's one of the two. T-E-C-H-N-I-C-S, Technics. And one of his fundamental insights was that you can't separate technology from society. And he called that mixture of social structures and technologies a technic. So that's what he means by a technic. And he said that technics can be either democratic or authoritarian. And examples might help make this clear. What he means is that a technology can arise from and give rise to either democratic or authoritarian decision making processes. So for example, basket weaving, he would call that a democratic technique because nobody can really control your access to grass or reeds. And when you make a basket, that doesn't really lead to authoritarian techniques. On the other hand, anything that requires mining, nobody wants to go down to the mine. And mining is one of the first forms of slavery. So anything that requires mining requires that you have the ability to take the land on which the mine's going to be, the ability to force people into the mines, the ability to have a police force to control the ore so nobody steals it. Because it'd be great if you go mine it and then you smelt it and you do everything with it and I just go steal it. That's great because you did all the work and I get all the benefits from it. So there's got to be a police force to stop that from happening and those end up being the technologies end up sort of controlling our social structures. And a couple examples of this, one of them is that in the fur trade for the destruction of the beavers, so my friend George Draftworth, whom I wrote a couple of books, we were just hanging out one day, he said, you know, Indians killed more beavers for the fur trade than white people did. I said, my God, George, that's racist to say that. And he said, no, it's just history. This is just true. Facts aren't racist, it's just true. And he said, what this shows is the relationship between an economic system and culture, that you have these people who are living sustainably for thousands of years with the beaver. And if you introduce metal pots and knives and guns and they have to buy them and Hudson Bay blankets, those are handy things to have and they want to buy them. But the only way they can buy them is by killing beaver. And so once you get sucked into the capitalist system, once you get sucked into that consumer society, it destroys that spiritual basis that you'd been living with for thousands of years. And another example of that is I read this book on the history of the Mississippi River a few years ago. It was really fascinating. And one of the things that just blew me away was within, I think, 20 years of the introduction of metal pots, a several thousand year tradition of pottery had been forgotten. Because metal pots are easy. I mean, it's cheap. It's easy, but it's cheap for you. And then you can drop it and it doesn't break. it's a lot easier to go kill one beaver and sell that beaver for a metal pot than it is to actually make the pot however they did. So within 20 years, their entire several thousand year history of tradition of that was gone. Nobody knew how to do it anymore. And this happens So my point, actually Mumford's point, is that technologies not only lead to authoritarian social structures, but the technologies themselves end up in charge. I know that sounds crazy, but are cities designed for humans or for automobiles? People talk all the time about, gosh, fossil fuels are heating the climate and it's doing all these terrible things. It's like, okay, so it's doing these terrible things. Let's stop it. Fossil fuel use was higher last year than any year previous. It's just who's in charge. It's not us. It's not you. It's not me. It's not our communities. And one of the reasons is, I mean, it's not, it's, it's not like that technology is alive. Well, as a discussion we could have, but it's part of the problem. This is why, okay, so I wanted to introduce Mumford and I wanted to introduce agriculture. That agriculture, what it does, it's a way of life that you strip the land of, you know, you cut down all the trees, you plow the soil, you break the land down, and then you grow crops for humans. That you are harming the land. The advantage is you can grow more humans. And the, go back to the disadvantage that by harming land, eventually you wear the land out and your, your way of living is not sustainable if you're plowing it up and you're, and we see this all over the world. And, but, but the thing is you've been able to grow more humans in the meantime, you now have a choice. You can either collapse or you can choose to slowly decline or you can choose to conquer somebody else's territory. But if you do that, You have the advantage of you've been able to convert the land into humans who can be soldiers, and you've also been able to probably force some of them into mines and make metal weapons. You got the advantage when you go to attack your neighbors. So the problem is you can have all these people all over living sustainably. As soon as one of them starts living that way that leads to more humans, to armies, to greater technologies, everybody else has to follow. I am against the military as much as anybody else who is sane, but I also recognize that if the United States demilitarized completely tomorrow, or if any country does, their neighbors are just going to go, that's nice. So, and I know that we're supposed to stay on nature and don't worry, I won't go too far into politics, but So far as psychology, part of the problem is that there's been this ever-expanding wave for several thousand years of people who I think have been traumatized by either ecological destruction, and or being conquered by somebody else who had destroyed their land, that makes you traumatized and trauma has some predictable effects on people individually and collectively. And we've sort of seen an expanding wave of that all over the planet as people who I think are collectively suffering from complex PTSD, then which has made them devalue relationship and value hierarchical perspectives. Again, what are you going to do if you yourself are a peaceful people and your neighbor is not? And it doesn't matter whether your neighbor is Genghis Khan or the Nazis, or it doesn't matter what technological level. You still are in a conduct. in a very, not a conundrum, you're in a terrible position, and what do you do? You can either run away, but then you're going to run away onto somebody else's land, which means you're now the invader, or you're going to stand and fight, in which case you may win, but you've still had to devote energy, and you've still been traumatized by that process. Sorry if we're going way off topic, but it also has to do with the destruction of the natural world because That's one of the things that's been happening for several thousand years, is the conversion of the natural world into weapons of war.

Stephanie Winn: Well, and one of the things I hear you saying, this is going to be quite a significant paraphrasing, and it may not resonate with your original intention, but I almost hear you describing each technological invention as having kind of its own spirit, its own personality, its own role in the world. And I don't know how much that reflects the spirit or intention of the inventor or the circumstances that led to its invention. But I can think of some recent examples that align with what you're saying. Recently, Jonathan Haidt shared that there was a study that found that the majority of Gen Zers basically wish that TikTok didn't exist. They are on TikTok. because everyone else is on TikTok, but the majority said something like that if they could make it disappear tomorrow, they would un-invent it. And I think that probably a lot of people have similar feelings about similar technologies that we ourselves habitually continue to use partly out of habit, behavioral addiction. Maybe we could argue coming from a place of feeling that void where the natural world is missing in our lives. I think that's part of what fuels addictive behaviors. And also just because everyone else is doing it. when everyone else is doing something, in some ways you disadvantage yourself by not using the same things everyone else is using. But going back to what you were saying earlier, you described the Okanagan decision-making process and how these four perspectives together balance decision-making. So, for example, with Heather Hying, I've talked about the, what is, oh I'm forgetting, the not nature versus nurture consciousness and culture. And I think of those as sort of the youth and elders roles in this model, that there is a drive to maintain traditions, to preserve what we already know works, and there's a drive to solve problems and break new ground. those could be represented by the relative roles of old and young, and that those perspectives in balance together have always been needed for sound decision-making. Then you also brought up the roles of mothers and fathers who each have their own role in nurturing and protecting life. I thought you said a lot of really significant things. Another way to think about it, maybe this is just my psycho-spiritual way of thinking about everything, is that when we when a new technology is unearthed, when a Pandora's box is opened, and when it has the potential to affect everyone, it's sort of like this deal making with the devil. So you were saying, you know, with the Okanagan decision making of the four forces, like, yes, we could choose to do this thing that tempts us with short term, what seems like a lot of gain, you know, like what fossil fuels can do for society is pretty amazing and here I am living a relatively luxurious and comfortable lifestyle compared to most of my ancestors thanks to fossil fuels. Could it be said from one angle that I've made a deal with the devil? Oh yes, I will take all these pretty, shiny, comfortable, lovely things that you offer me in exchange for the destruction of the natural world and the loss in a way of a part of my own soul, of a part of all of our souls that's connected to the soul of the planet.

Derrick Jensen: Well, Faust is one of the best metaphors that anybody's ever come up with. You know, you, you get everything you want, but in exchange for your soul and, and also you can never be happy in the moment. It's pretty familiar. And So that was one response to the many great things you said. And then another is, oh, you talked about not wanting TikTok, but then going and watching TikTok. And it's, I think with all this stuff, we really need to talk about the word addiction. And I love the word addiction. I don't love the concept. I love the word addiction because it comes from a root that has to do with enslavement. And the root is edict because a judge would issue an edict, it was back in ancient Rome, a judge would issue an edict addicting one person to another, that is enslaving one person to another. So addiction actually does mean enslavement. And there's that famous line about alcoholism that at some point you stop drinking from the bottle and the bottle starts drinking from you. And we can say the same thing about technology, that at what point, you know, at some point technology, we stop drinking from the technology and the technology drinks from us. That's the authoritarian, it goes back to the authoritarian techniques. And another part of this is that, you know, the Faust then also, in that essay that I mentioned by Mumford, he talks about why is it that we have surrendered so easily to the sort of modern authoritarianism of the technologies. And he said, one reason that we have is because of what he calls the magnificent bribe. And the magnificent bribe is that we have been given, in exchange for, well, we have been given every advantage, and he wrote this back in the 60s, so it's even more so now, You said that you're relatively well off compared to any of your ancestors. That is a huge understatement. The same is true for me, for any of us. Any of us have more access to energy, have access to more luxuries than any emperor of ancient Rome, than any ancient king, than any king 200 years ago. We have access to instantaneous communication. I mean, for crying out loud, you and I are how many miles apart? 400? I mean, how long would it have taken for me 300 years ago, you and I are in the exact same physical positions. I mean, I'm sure I never would have gone there. I never, not even once, maybe once in my life would I have. So we go pre-horses, so we go 500 years ago. Oh my gosh. So you're up near Portland or something? Yeah, so to get there, I got to go over the Smith River Pass, and then get to Grants Pass, what's now Grants Pass, and then I go all the way up north to the Willamette Valley. Probably one person out of a hundred did that in their life or something. I'm just making the numbers up. But it's like, we would never have spoken, much less speak instantaneously, and you can see me making wild gestures with my hands. You know, it's just nuts. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, and that's a long time ago now in terms of one person's life, but you never called grandma until after 11 p.m. because phone rates were cheaper for long distance. I don't know, are you old enough to remember having different long distance rates? yeah and sometimes what you would do is so that you didn't have to pay any long distance bills you would call grandma collect and she would not accept the charges if she was fine just because because long distance was so expensive at that point it was like And then, oh, oh, oh, Jung wrote this thing back in the thirties about how much he hated telephones because they interrupt your day. And that telephone wasn't even attached to your hip. That telephone was just sitting in one place on the wall. It was like, how dare they interrupt my day with calling all the time. And Now, another thing I want to bring into this is just a line I love that is just crazy. A lot of young people aren't even going to know who the Doobie Brothers are, but the Doobie Brothers were a rock band who had an album in the 70s called What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits. And I love that title because what were once luxuries are now necessities. I still remember when George Draffin introduced me to email back in 1989 or 1991 or something. We were working on a book together. I was like, wait, I don't have to mail it to you? I can just push this button and you get the manuscript? He's like, yeah. And now, frankly, most of us are like, Oh, so my mom had this notepad that had on it, there's a special place in hell for the person who invented answering machines. I was like, let's just add that to email. I mean, most everybody I know is like, how many hours a day are you going to have to spend answering the stupid emails? they're supposed to, we're supposed to drink from the bottle instead of the bottle drinking from us. Emails are supposed to serve us instead of me bowing down to the email gods every, you know, two hours every night or something. And it's addiction, you know, and I know we're, we're, I'm perfectly fine with this direction we're going and we can go any direction you want. I'm also fine with us heading back to nature if you want, whatever direction you want to take. I think there's all, I want to say one more thing about the, I fully believe that trees are living, and I believe that rivers are living beings, I believe that rocks are living beings, and I don't know about technologies. This is something that I've intellectually or spiritually struggled with for decades, is if I believe that everything is alive, so does that include the plastic that was made into this trackball?

Stephanie Winn: You're speaking of an animistic view of the universe. I personally find it more fulfilling to have a somewhat animistic view of things, to believe that things have soul, not in any you know, divine law, any serious sort of religious way. But I enjoy being surrounded by material objects that have character. And, you know, like, for example, as we're sitting here talking, if I look Just over that way, I see this hand-painted cabinet that I bought from someone on the internet where I saw that someone refurbished that cabinet and they painted this beautiful landscape on it and it has so much character. There's a lamp on that cabinet that's unique, that has character. I think part of my own nostalgia for pre-Industrial Revolution times is that it feels more soulful to think of a world in which every single thing was handmade, that a human being interacted with natural elements to create something, and that there were memories and emotions and intentions woven into the creation of that. I do think that there's more soul, so to speak, in things that are handmade and have a story compared to things that are mass produced in factories out of plastic.

Derrick Jensen: I don't disagree with you at all, and that's how I go through the world too. You've mentioned the Industrial Revolution a couple times, and there was something that happened throughout that time. that's pretty important, which is that so many indigenous people have said to me that the most important distinction between Western and indigenous ways of being is that most Westerners, even the most open-minded Westerners, generally perceive listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. And how you perceive the world affects how you behave in the world. There's a great line by a Canadian lumberman, when I look at trees, I see dollar bills. And if, when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you're going to treat them one way. If, when you look at trees, you see trees, you're going to treat them another way. And if, when you look at this particular tree, you see this particular tree, you'll treat it differently still. The same is true, no matter what we're talking about. If, when you look at fish, you see dollar bills, you treat them one way. And this, by the way, is one of the many reasons that I oppose pornography, is because if, when you look at women, you see orifices, you're going to treat them one way. And if when you look at women, you see women, you're gonna treat them another way. And if when you look at this particular woman, you see this particular woman, you treat her differently still. And that conversion of the world from other beings with whom we can have a relationship into objects to be exploited is one of the fundamental, the metaphor that keeps coming to mind is the biblical leaving the Garden of Eden, but I don't really wanna use that one.

Stephanie Winn: Like a fall from grace?

Derrick Jensen: Yeah, a fall from grace. Yes, I like the fall from grace. Or we can also say it is a change of perspective that has led to many material advantages at the cost of both the world and our soul. It goes back to Faust. And I also just want to say a couple of things. One of them is just because you perceive the other as an individual doesn't mean that nobody ever kills anybody. It's just that you recognize the enormity of what you're doing and you acknowledge that the other is a being whose life was as valuable to them as yours is to you, et cetera. And the other is, excuse me, that we, it's not, okay, there's a really good book I read in my 20s called I and Thou, it's Martin Buber, and it's basically, if I can horribly summarize, it's basically the world can be broken into two types of relationships, I you and I it. I you is the world of relationship. I, it is the world of experience, as he says, that I experience something versus I have a relationship with it. Anyway, the point is, at one point he says, if all you are is I, it, you're not fully human. I don't like his use of the word human there for obvious reasons. But you're not, I'd say, fully sentient, fully whatever word we want to use. On the other hand, he says, you can't always be I, you. because you will just existentially explode. That I can't, if I go to the grocery store I just want to buy some lettuce. I, first off, I don't want to be thinking at every moment, Oh, this lettuce had a life. And then in addition, the person standing here had a life and the cashier has a life. And then the cashier's friends have lives. And then the flies were buzzing around the ceiling. How about if you, if you, if you are, I, you all the time, you'll, you'll, you'll do nothing because we, our brains can't comprehend that. I mean, you said you have a relationship, and that—so already I'm dealing with you as a human being, now I'm dealing with your partner as a real being. And then if you have any pets, then I got to deal with them as real beings. And then meanwhile, one of you, your toe hurts. It's like, we can't, we can't, you see what I'm getting at? You can't function.

Stephanie Winn: There have to be limits. I mean, you're talking about things that are relevant to highly sensitive people or empaths. And I am remembering when I was younger and I think even more sensitive and even more open I would get paralyzed in the grocery store because I could see the life cycle analysis of every item on the shelf. I couldn't buy a can of beans because I was thinking about where it was grown, how far it was shipped, the materials that went into packaging it, you know, I mean, I get what you're saying there. Whether you're a long-time or first-time listener of the podcast, odds are you're just as concerned as I am about the gender ideology crisis that's affecting today's youth. What you may not be as aware of is another insidious practice occurring in med school classrooms, practitioners' offices, and hospitals alike. The discriminatory practices that focus on race instead of qualifications of healthcare providers. These universities, associations, and sometimes even states are breaking federal laws in their racially discriminatory practices. and one group is holding them accountable, Do No Harm. Do No Harm's membership-based organization is fighting so that patients get the best quality service, and so that today's med students succeed as tomorrow's medical providers. If you're a medical provider, I encourage you to join Do No Harm today. Learn more and sign up at donoharmmedicine.org slash sometherapist. That's donoharmmedicine.org slash sometherapist.

Derrick Jensen: Mass culture makes all of this more difficult because we evolved living in numbers, in communities less than 150 people. And it's possible to live without a police force and everything else in a small community because everybody knows everybody. And so if somebody steals something, you know, pretty soon you're going to get a reputation and people won't want you around anymore. And, but if you're living in a city of a million people, you know, I can just steal from people over here. When I'm done with that, I can just move over a little bit and there's always new marks. And it's the same with living with nature, that if you're planning on living in the place for 500 years, you'll make different land use decisions than you will if the world is infinite and you can just move on. Oh, so I started all this by saying that a dramatic change happened with the Industrial Revolution. And one of those changes was a conversion of the world, a conversion of our perspective. Even though we were already Christianized and everything else, as David Ehrenfeld makes clear in his great book, The Arrogance of Humanism, at least there were limits if they were put on by God. There are still limits on how you use the land. And with the Industrial Revolution, we pretty much substituted humans and technology for God, and now it's humans and technology that are in charge. And I'm gonna mention another book, but I have a problem with it. There's, Carolyn Merchant wrote the book, The Death of Nature, about how we changed our perspective from perceiving the world as alive to perceiving it as objects through the scientific and industrial revolutions. The problem with that book is that she made up a whole bunch of quotes by Descartes and by others of that type. And I, like many other people, cited them in my books. And then I found out many years later, I couldn't find them in the original sources. I just So her thesis is still really good. It's just don't ever trust the individual quotes. But her thesis itself is quite good. And that's one of the things that happened. You keep saying before the Industrial Revolution, it was like we did live in a different perceptual world at that point, a world that was ablaze with meaning as some anthropologist or another said about indigenous people. And that's a huge difference. And I think that we are We evolved that way. This is our home. We didn't evolve separated by barriers from everything. John Livingston made the point, I love this, that pay attention to what is the source of nearly everything you perceive. And almost every perception you have has either been created by or mediated by human beings. And he thinks that drives us insane. Well, he's dead now, he thought, but that drives us insane because we're living in an echo chamber. And he thinks that most of our ideologies are hallucinations because we only hear the voices of humans and we come to think that only humans have voices then. But think about this. I know I can I, and yeah, Mr. Nature Boy likes to be out in nature and everything, I can name more, I can identify more advertising jingles than I can identify bird songs. I can name more stars in movies. Yeah, there we go. I can name more stars in movies than I can name stars in the sky. I can identify more brand logos than I can identify edible plants and fungi within a hundred yards of my home. I mean, it's just, it's just crazy. If I say Jennifer Aniston, you probably know what I'm talking about. Or if I say Brad Pitt or if I say, you know, George Clooney or anybody, we know, we all know who that is, but do we know the people who live right there by people, I mean the Redwood people or the slug people or anybody. No, I'm not attacking you or any of your listeners. I'm exact same. And that is not only nuts, it's unprecedented. This would have been unthinkable 500 years ago. In one of my books, Dreams, I talk about how Sam Harris says that basically the most ignorant person now would know a lot more than the most educated person 500 years ago. And I just rip him apart for that because What's happened is we have learned a lot more about humans, but we don't know as much about wild nature. So I can tell you, I just happened to know this, I remember from high school that Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia, which is never going to affect my life. But I can't tell you, and I'll bet most of your listeners can't tell either, whether the moon is waxing or waning right now. It's waxing. Good.

Stephanie Winn: That's great. That's my special skill. Actually, that's my party trick. We do it. It's part of my connection with nature at home is my fiance will ask me, Where is the moon right now? And I'll do a little thing and I'll point to where in the sky, even if it's on the other side of the planet. It's part of how I maintain my connection in the natural world, although I couldn't tell you where it is right now. I'd have to stop and think. But point taken.

Derrick Jensen: That's wonderful. And B, that is an extraordinary skill. C, 500 years ago, that would have been no big deal. Right. It's like any six-year-old would have known how to do that probably.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah.

Derrick Jensen: Nothing against your special skill.

Stephanie Winn: No, absolutely.

Derrick Jensen: Or could you catch and skin a rabbit and clean it?

Stephanie Winn: No. I mean, there's so many skills we've forgotten. And earlier, you were talking about the loss of pottery making skills in a certain native tribe. And that's easy to believe. I've been watching a lot of Outlander recently. I don't know if you're familiar with that show. But part of it takes place in 18th century colonial America. And some of those very same dynamics are shown, the trading dynamics and the complexities of navigating shared space between the natives and the Brits and other European immigrants. There's a memory that I want to share of a mystical experience that I had that I don't talk about very often. And I will say up front, I was not on drugs because when I tell this story, it's going to sound like I was on drugs. It sounds like the sort of thing that people experience on psychedelics. But when I was I don't know, maybe 21 or so, I had a friend who was a very bizarre person who had spent a lot of time with someone he considered an important teacher to him, who he said came from some ancient druidic lineage. And he was always encouraging me to go meet with this teacher, but I was like, I'm not going to change my entire life plan to go to wherever in Europe this person is. But one day my friend wanted to do what he called, he said, let's just call it a meditation. and went out on a grass lawn. This was Los Angeles. This was not a place with a whole lot of access to wild nature. We went out on a grass lawn. I believe there was some moonlight. He simply asked me to close my eyes and we were just meditating together. And I had a vision. And so I felt from the base of my spine, a cord like a tail drop down and connect to the core of the earth. It was like my root chakra plugged into the core of the earth. and I had an inner vision of a time in the earth's memory in which there was that I-thou relationship. I saw a joyfulness in the relationship between humans and the world that they lived in. We happened to be near a hill. Again, just a hill in Los Angeles, a hill that was covered in houses and also oil drilling because that's also a thing that happens on this particular hill in Los Angeles. And I saw people going to and from a hill, collecting whatever they collected, whether it was water from a spring or berries. I don't remember the details, but just collecting things from the hill as needed and giving thanks. And there was this I, thou, there was a relationship of gratitude and joy, and it felt warm and lively and vibrant. And there was like a merriment to it. So I saw this in the memory of the Earth's history, and then I saw I guess you could say like the darkness coming in this sort of plague of our time of the like fundamental cutting off of the life force exchange that had been happening in that when people started treating the earth as a dead material resource to be exploited and nothing more. taking without giving, and I saw the lack of joyfulness, vitality, and merriment, the lack of gratitude, just the taking rather than the relational exchange. And I probably wept. I don't really remember. This was a very long time ago. But I saw all this without drugs, and it was in a time in my life that I was quite engaged in a lot of spiritual practice and previously spent a lot of time living outdoors in Hawaii and just cultivating my relationship with the Earth. So there were things that had contributed to my ability to kind of tune into this. But I remember that vision, and it's basically been with me my whole life ever since. And I think if it's all right, I'll just sort of use that as a segue to the circling back to addiction. And as you said, it's roots in enslavement. probably biggest addiction and probably a lot of listeners biggest addiction is to technology to phones and social media and just remaining in a state of distraction. And I noticed it, it drops significantly when I'm surrounded with wild nature, whether that's going to my favorite hot springs retreat here in Oregon where there's a river and trees and just really fresh air and you can feel that vitality from the earth. Whether it's when I was in Costa Rica recently, when I was in Hawaii recently, anytime that I'm surrounded with a lot of vitality and life, my desire to be in my phone goes away. and my desire to be in my environment is just so much more. I just feel so much more connected. I think living where I live now, there's not enough of it for me. I try to get my hands dirty how I can. It's complicated by numerous factors, financial health, and all that kind of stuff. But I feel like that emptiness of just not being surrounded with wild nature, and it drives me deeper into my addictions. And it's sort of a constant battle then, like how do I pull myself out of this digital world that offers all this distraction and back into connection with nature? And I think the majority of people listening to podcasts like this are probably experiencing something similar in that they can't or are not planning to do a complete lifestyle reset, but might feel that emptiness, that sort of void that it leaves us. And that's maybe what we could call ecological grief. What are your thoughts on that?

Derrick Jensen: Well, thank you for all that. And I have a bunch of responses, of course. And one of them is one of my favorite lines by the psychiatrist RD Lang is, how do you plug a void plugging a void? And what I take from that is if we have a void in our life, whether that void is disconnection from nature, disconnection from community, human community, disconnection from ourselves. If you plug that void using another void, you can never plug it. And that's how some of these addictions come to manifest. that if I feel an existential emptiness and I try to fill it with drugs or try to fill it with buying things or try to fill it with watching this really good series that I watched over that I binged on the last three nights, you know, which is… What is it? Oh, there's a couple. One of them was Slow Horses. They're on Apple TV. And then I watched a series about Masters of the Air, which was a historical drama of World War II, a bombing squadron.

Stephanie Winn: I love historical dramas.

Derrick Jensen: But the point is, I spent more time watching both of those shows put together than I did out. And I live in this. I think about this sometimes. It's like, you know, I used to teach at a prison for a couple years. And a lot of us, frankly, if you just gave us a screen, our lives are not that much different than they would be if we were sitting in a prison, because we sit in the same chair for eight hours a day. We can go outside. So I'm not comparing our lives to prisoners, actually, because we can leave But the thing is, we don't. I thought about this, as I'm writing all these books, I'm sitting, this is back when I had a desktop computer, I'm sitting in a squishy chair in front of a desk, typing away about how great nature is, as I'm sitting there for four hours in front of this stupid computer, when nature itself is just outside. Anyway, that void won't be plugged. by other voids. And so it ends up, and that is also, I don't mean to go back to this too often, but that's also one of the things that pornography does. And that's why everything with this, this is why the society of the spectacle, the spectacle has to keep getting bigger and bigger, bigger, because it never delivers on what it promised. And it's never fully satisfying. And relationships with other human beings, with non-human beings, Beings are infinitely complex, which means you don't have to keep upping the stakes all the time. You don't have to keep. But if all you're doing is buying, if all you're having is a superficial, if you're plugging a void with a void, it's got to be a bigger and bigger and bigger plug. That's one thing I want to say. Another thing I want to say about your mystical experience or your spiritual experience is there's this really interesting book. I don't remember the name of the book, but I remember the name of the author. Felicitas Goodman has this book, can't remember the title, and Felicitas Goodman. And her thesis was extraordinary. Her thesis was that we are, among many other things, ecstasy deprived. And I say this in terms of Her, she, if she were sitting here, I believe she would say that what you experienced is supposed to be part of our regular experience. And we have lost that individual and communal ecstasy that we, that we're part of our birthright just as much as connection to nature, just as much as anything else is a part of our birthright, and we're missing it. And we fill that void again, in her case, she doesn't say a void plugging a void, she says we fill that lack of ecstasy with drugs, consumerism, all that technology, and One more thing about her that I think is really fascinating is she argued that a lot of those cave paintings that we see and a lot of the figurines that we see are, in fact, instruction manuals for how to achieve various ecstatic states. And what she did, and she both worked with people living today who still experience ecstatic trance, and also with her graduate students, that she would have them do a certain position and then do drumming or do something to chanting or something to help induce some sort of trance state. And what she found is that many of the positions would induce predictable trance states. So if you're in position A, you might feel a root go into the ground. If you're in position B, you might experience flying. It was really fascinating stuff. And actually, just for the heck of it, I tried just once is all, but I tried one of them. put on some, I got some from the computer. I got some sort of, you know, drumming or something to help sort of induce trance. And then I got in the position that it said, but I hadn't yet read what it was. And it actually was, it worked out that if it, I don't remember what it was now, but it was flying. I was flying. And anyway, the point has nothing to do with that. The point has to do with, well, there's part of it is that, and part of it is also, I was walking somewhere back in my thirties. out in nature, and all of a sudden I fell into this space that was a state of grace is what I called it, where I felt bliss and I felt how everything worked together, how the rain worked with the soil, worked up with the plants. I just felt all these connections. And then it disappeared a little while later. And then it didn't come back for a while. And then at some other point, I was out in nature somewhere and it came back. And then when I moved here, at some point, say in the first six months, I'm walking through the forest and it comes back. And then I tried something. I tried because I was feeling so connected to the forest right then, I tried turning it off to see if I could feel how it feels to sort of turn, sorry to use machine language, but to make it go away and then to make it come back. And it did. And I practiced it four or five times. And then for quite a while, when I was in the forest, I could make it happen. Make is too strong. I could allow it to happen. That's better. almost voluntarily. And I don't know, this sort of applies that I do a lot of my writing when I'm walking through the forest. And if I get stuck, I'll take a walk. And I used to think that I was just peripatetic, the act of walking itself was what brought the words. But then I realized a lot of times it came at specific places in the forest. And I started wondering if the trees were actually just helping me write. And I mean, I've talked in many of my interviews about having a muse and I'm not taking anything away from the muse here. I think they work together with it, but it's, it's, I always tell young writers that the hardest part about writing for me was when I was a young writer, finding the place where the writing is easy. And so I was writing up here for the longest time. and it was very difficult. Amy Tan, somebody asked her, does the writing ever get better? And she said, I'm sorry, does the writing ever get easier? And she said, no, but it gets better. That's not my experience. My experience is I was trying to write for the longest time, but once I sort of established, or once I opened up to the relationship with the muse, Now when I get stuck, I say, can I have some help? And something will open up and it's, and then it, it starts to flow. And then I edit, but, but it's all, the first question I asked in the first interview I ever did of anybody was Joseph Campbell when I was 22. And the first question I asked was, that he had quoted a line, the fates guide those who will, those who won't, they drag. And I said, are the fates inside or outside? And his answer was basically, only answer you can give, which is we don't really know. But he said, for him, it was inside, but it's so far inside that it becomes transpersonal. And it's something, what you do, he said, when you reach into that place, you're reaching into something larger than yourself. And Derrick, what does this have to do with everything we're talking about? I think that for me, what opened this topic up was you talking about that experience. I think that that is one of the things that is missing in our lives. That's one of the things that ties everything we've been talking about together is the fact that there is something larger than yourself. and that you can open up to it. And that's where art comes from. That's where the crafts come from that you were talking about, the dresser that you see across the way that was made by somebody. They were also at the same time, they were opening themselves up to something that's passing through them. And I mean, it gets terribly lonely to just be, there's a line by, I remember seeing an interview 20 years ago with some astronomer. They were asking, why do we need to go to Mars? They said, to answer that most important question of all, which is, are we all alone? I was thinking, wow, you really think we're all alone? How can you think we're all alone when there's all this beautiful light? Of course you think you're all alone because you're staring at a computer in a house all by yourself, and humans are the only ones who matter. But if you remember that everybody else matters, suddenly you're never alone again.

Stephanie Winn: I love sleep. Sound sleep is a crucial foundation of good mental and physical health, from mood and concentration to metabolism and cellular repair. And I sleep very well thanks to my Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover. My side of the bed is programmed to be warm when I get in and cool down to a neutral temperature in the middle of the night so I don't wake up overheated like I used to. How would you customize your bed temperature? Visit 8sleep.com and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST to take up to $200 off your purchase. Even if they're already running another sale, this code will get you an additional $50 off. Eight Sleep currently ships not only within the USA, but also to Canada, the UK, select countries in the European Union, and Australia. Thanks for considering purchases that support the show. And this reminds me of what you were saying earlier about how being surrounded only with human ideas and human language makes us insane. You know, for me, there's a certain amount of time I need to spend alone with the elements, one with nature, walking through the woods before I can hear my own thoughts clearly. And when you talked about being ecstasy deprived, that really resonated. And something we haven't touched on yet, but that I think is connected to nature is time and rhythm. Because our sense of time is so much sharper in connection in the natural world. There are times of day, there are seasons, there are lunar cycles, as you pointed out earlier, and all those things When we're living a life that's more closely tied to nature, we're affected naturally by those rhythms. Our time perception is different, our relationship with time. And as part of that, when I think, again, of pre-industrial ways of living, we had communal rhythms as well. So if there was a birth, a death, a wedding, a celebration, everyone stopped what they were doing and celebrated or mourned together. And then there's the role of, as you were mentioning, position and rhythm, so music and dance as part of celebrations or mornings, these things that weave us together in time that create a sort of rhythm that allows us to access that ecstasy, those altered states. We're trying to do it ourselves. You talk about even doing it by yourself, listening to something on the computer to try to induce a state. I am also doing some stuff on the computer. I'm doing this brain retraining course that's supposed to help with People like me with chronic illness and we're doing, you know, I'm going to be learning more techniques for toning my vagus nerve and I'm all for that. I'm doing vagal toning. But some of the things I'm doing now to tone my vagus nerve alone remind me of times in life that I was doing things that just so happened to tone my vagus nerve with other people. Like the time that I spent a lot of time making music with friends and chanting, I used to participate in Indian based, Hindu based, Hindu adjacent music and dance rituals. And while that's not my culture or my religion, and while I've distanced myself through time and space from that particular era, there was something that that gave us, that gave everyone who participated, which is a tradition to step into, a tradition that happens to be welcoming with open doors, that allowed us to do something that I think every human culture, if you go back far enough, had some version of. A lot of my ancestors were Celtic. I'm sure they had their own versions of that. I just don't know what those were, whereas I know how to access things from the yoga traditions and things from Hinduism. They're much more accessible to a middle-aged white hippie like me or to a young person as I was 10 or 20 years ago. I don't particularly care whether the traditions come from this or that culture or religion, but I know there's something very deeply familiar to the human soul about coming together and moving and singing and chanting and dancing and drumming with other people. And where do you draw the line between that as an act of human culture and as a part of human nature, as a part of our connection to nature?

Derrick Jensen: I think it's all the same thing. It's all tied in. There's probably one of the quickest ways to bring me to tears is to just have a collection of people singing together. It's an astounding communion. And it's, it's part of our, again, that's part of our birthright. That's, that's what humans have done forever is to sing together. And Lewis Mumford really didn't like rock and roll. And when I first read his stuff that, that offended me because I'd been to a bazillion concerts and I kind of got his perspective though from two things. One is I was listening to a NPR, interview with some rock and roll person went to Mongolia and he was saying we played power chords for kids who'd never heard rock and roll and they responded viscerally to them and They really opened up to him and that's great but it's like this is sorcerer's apprentice stuff because it's it's a very powerful thing and And then I happened to see, and I saw ACDC live in concert a couple of times in my 20s, and they're fine, but I was watching a video of ACDC playing Highway to Hell at Rio Del Plata, I think, and it's horrifying. You have like 100,000 people all pulsing and singing them on the Highway to Hell. And I think that's a toxic mimic of what of what singing is supposed to do. But yes, singing does open us up with the chords actually affect us bodily. And we evolved with all that. And it's a tremendous power that I think is supposed to be used to reinforce community. And I just, I mean, it's like sex, that sex can be used to reinforce a relationship and it can also be used as a toxic mimic. sex as a weapon of war, rape as a weapon of war, has been used for a long time in patriarchy. I mean, this is a whole different subject we should explore another time, the whole idea of toxic mimics, but we do have that birthright of coming together as human beings in community to sing or to dance or to chant together. And that's the function of those is to help bring us into those communal state, which by the way, I shouldn't just say humans because it's also part, it's the larger cycles too. I want to say a couple of things about that real quick. But one of them is that I was a beekeeper through my 20s and 30s, and you were talking about the cycles of nature. And one of the things that the bees very much made me aware of, and that the plants did as well, especially the plants, the fleeting nature of life in that, let's say a human's going to live 80 years, and let's say apple blossoms only stay up for 10 days, in your entire life, you have 800 days of apple blossoms. You get them 10 days in the spring, then they're gone. And same with cherry blossoms, same with willow blossoms. And I was interviewing this guy about cicadas, the 17-year cicadas a while back. And he was pointing out that if you're lucky, if you're really lucky, you get to experience the full 17-year cicada explosion five times in your entire life. And so he is, cause you get, you know, 17, 34, 51. So he said that when they do come out on those 17 year explosions that he, you know, basically cherishes every minute of it. And I think about this so often when I'm watching a TV series or when I'm playing a computer game that we have, you know, I'm so big on the difference between renewable and non-renewable resources. I don't like that word resources, but it's just crazy to base your way of life on something like oil that's finite. Any way of life that's based on a non-renewable resource will last. It's great. I'm so aware of that on a social level, and then I forget that we have a finite number of hours in our lives, and I just wasted two of them playing Left 4 Dead 2. I'm not attacking computer guys. I think all humans, non-humans … Oh, so I was bringing all this up because yesterday I did a really cool thing. I live in a rainforest, so it's wet all winter here, but it's been warm for the last five days, so finally the road is dried out enough that I can sit on it. So I just lied back. and for about 45 minutes or an hour, who cares how long it was? Forget that, Derrick. Anyway, so I'm just lying there and I'm looking at crows, or ravens, I'm sorry. Ravens, they're playing with each other and one of them has something in its mouth and they're playing keep away. I will remember that time probably for the rest of my life. Am I going to remember the time I spent watching TV? Probably not, but so often you know, go ahead and slow down for a little bit. I mean, it's a cliche, you know, the smell the flowers thing, but go pay attention to a crow for a little while or a raven. You know, I was thinking as I was lying there about how humans and non-humans basically have four or five games. There's tag, there's keep away, some sort of mock fighting. And that pretty much sums up all human sports, most human sports. Oh, there's also, I can do this better than you can, which is basically racing or jumping. And basically all those sports fall down into those. And non-humans do them too. You see it with dogs. You see dogs playing keep away. You see them playing tag. And it's just, again, that's part of our, what am I getting at? What I'm getting at is just, yes, it was, I don't know, the time lying there on the ground, just watching ravens fly overhead. was worthwhile, and I think not enough of us, myself included, do it often enough.

Stephanie Winn: As you were describing that, I was remembering a day, I think it was last spring that I noticed a little bird making a little nest behind a little bush in my tiny little rented backyard. I just watched it for an hour and I would notice its patterns. It's like, okay, first it comes hopping out from behind the bush and then it goes flying or hopping over this way and then it brings back some leaf litter in its mouth and it goes, back behind here, and then it comes out another moment, and then it goes this way, and it collects more stuff, and it goes back in. I never actually saw the nest, but there are so many moments that I've experienced like that, just observing nature, where there's something about that embodied visceral experience. There's a learning that comes from that, just like we were talking to the kids the other day about boogie boarding. Because it's something we love to do. And they're going to go do it with their mom. And my fiance was asking me to give them tips. And it's like, how do you describe something that's about essentially the art of watching water? when you're not actually watching water. It's all about timing. It's all about noticing the way that one wave will build up and catch up with another wave. If you can just catch the timing just right when this wave meets this other wave, that's where you really get to pick up on the most energy that'll take you the furthest. We were describing how sometimes you should just watch other people do it and notice what they're seeing. The kids were saying, oh, that sounds boring. The watching part sounds boring and I thought well this is just evidence that they're not getting enough nature in their lives if observing sounds boring because there's I think the boredom is just kind of like the initial stage that tells you that you haven't been doing this enough, that you're not settled, that you're too much in your mind or that you're moving at too quick a pace. It's when you get to the other side of boredom, to the curiosity or the wonder, the loss of sense of time, the being in the moment, being in that mind-body connection with your environment and feeling like a part of it. that you get to that state that whether it's watching birds or watching waves or whatever it is, that is essentially a part of belonging to this world. If we don't have that, then we don't feel like we belong to this world, then what? Then we think we're masters of this world or victims of this world? Either way, it's an incomplete relationship.

Derrick Jensen: I feel confident saying, and I'm going to pull out my… experience as a writer here, I feel confident saying, as somebody who has more than 25 books out, that boredom is incredibly important. The reason that I say that is that it's so easy to distract yourself from … There's a joke among some writers, at least, which is, what's the best way to get your dishes done? That's to sit down and have to write, because what you do is you go do anything to avoid that. I think it's really important. Another word for that boredom is just getting your mind to slow down enough that you can then be open. to the muse or even the muse of boogie boarding. I was raised a Seventh-day Adventist, and there are many things I don't really like about the church, but one of the great things about it was on Saturday, you couldn't watch TV, and you couldn't go shopping. And so many people in my family would nap through Saturday afternoons, but me being nine years old, wasn't really interested in that. And I spent, and it was great to not have any ability to distract myself. And so, you know, I invented all sorts of games, you know, it was like invention. Invention sometimes require requires that stillness that some people can mistake for boredom. And don't get me wrong. I mean, I take a book when I go to the grocery store. So if I'm standing in line, I can, read instead of either A, interact with another human being, or B, get bored. But there are times and places where, especially when it comes to artistic things, where just that stillness I don't think boredom is a bad thing. I think we need a lot more … Stillness just seems too fancy. It seems like Mr. Enlightened, chop wood and carry water. I prefer the more vulgar boredom.

Stephanie Winn: Well, it's hard to find true stillness. I mean, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to, R.I.P., it is not, I'm sure, not the same since a wildfire affected it, and I haven't been back since. I've been a little too wary to go back to this lake I loved since this fire swept across it a few years ago. but I remember- Wildfires are part of forests. That is true, but one of my favorite things about the lake, it was surrounded by greenery. There was a fire on one side previously that you could see just the bare trees that had lost all their limbs, but it was covered in berries, wild blueberries, and you could be in the lake and swim up and eat a blueberry. I remember, and it's this alpine lake, higher elevation, far away from everything. You have to really, really want to be there to get there. So quiet. I remember being able to sit there and count the number of sounds I could hear. I could hear the lapping of the waves on the shore, the wind in the trees, the flapping of a bird's wings, and the crackling of the fire, and then every now and then other human noises. I could hear every single layer of sound, and then below that, there was silence. That's the quietest place I've ever been. A quiet place isn't completely quiet. A quiet place, you can count the number of sounds that you can hear, and it's teeming with life. I'm also remembering a time when I first went to Hawaii when I was 18, and I was just completely enchanted with being in wild nature. I discovered that there are these seeds that grew wild, I don't know if they were native invasive, but there were these seeds that grew that you could pick and easily make into jewelry. I was so delighted to make simple necklaces and things like that out of them. Someone else who was staying on the same farm where I was doing work trade, when she learned that I was making jewelry out of seeds, she said, oh, you must be really bored. And the thought of being bored had not occurred to me. I was so enchanted by the idea that you could pick these seeds, and they already had a hole in them, and you could just string them. How delightful. I think boredom is a sign that you haven't slowed down enough. There's one more story, actually, that I feel it connects to all of this. And that reminds me because earlier you said cicadas. You were talking about cicadas. And one of my favorite albums is called Cicada Waves. It's by an artist named Ben Saritan, Saritan, something like that. We listen to it a lot of times in the evenings to relax around here. The story of how he made this album is quite beautiful. It was that he's a pianist and a composer. In the early stages of the pandemic, lockdowns decided he was finally going to make that album he'd always wanted to make. In order to really concentrate on his work, He, presumably, this is my interpretation of the story, but he rented a cabin with a piano somewhere out in a very remote part of Appalachia, I think. And it was this idea, I'm finally gonna just hone in on my creative genius, no distractions. And he gets there and every time he tries to compose and record there's some insects or birds or wind or something making noise and he fights it and fights it and then he just surrenders to it and he decides I guess I'm making an album in conjunction with the cicadas." It ends up being this really serene mixture of the sounds of different insects and birds and wildlife throughout the day, including storms and things like that, and then him just listening and tuning into that and playing piano along with it.

Derrick Jensen: That's beautiful, and that's such a great metaphor for life. So is that where we end?

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, yeah, we can end there.

Derrick Jensen: I mean, this is fantastic.

Stephanie Winn: So yeah, let's go ahead and wrap up here. So Derrick, where can people find you?

Derrick Jensen: My books should be available in libraries or bookstores, and you can find out more about my work at DerrickJensen.org, D-E-R-R-I-C-K-J-E-N-S-E-N.org, and also I guess if I can give one piece of advice, it would be that no matter where you are, even in a city, you can still find nature and nature can still find you. And also, nature needs your help. I know somebody who lives in New York City who routinely feeds the cardinals and the pigeons and the squirrels and everybody else in Central Park. And, oh, we didn't talk about that. That's, you know, music is one way of community. And I think that feeding each other is another part of community. And that's, that's how, that's a, that's a fundamental part of, of relationship I think. And, So anyway, wherever you live, there is nature there and you can, you know, it might be, it might be pretty, pretty beaten down in a city, but there are still going to be some bumblebees or seagulls or somebody you can say hello to. When I go to cities, a lot of times I will try to acknowledge some of the trees, at least as many trees as I can think of just because just because it's nice to be acknowledged.

Stephanie Winn: I have a similar ritual where whenever I arrive in a new location, if there's a body of water, one of the first things I do is I go and greet the body of water. If I can, I'll put my feet in it. That feels really grounding. Otherwise, I'll just dip my hand, maybe put a little water on my forehead.

Derrick Jensen: That's great.

Stephanie Winn: Well, this has been delightful, Derrick. Thank you so much. Fun.

Derrick Jensen: Let's do it again sometime.

Stephanie Winn: I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit sometherapist.com. or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at sometherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Pair, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to my producers, Eric and Amber Beals at Different Mix, and to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.