I have been listening to Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert for the last days. I am listening, you understand, as the missiles dropping on Ukraine have turned the city of Mariupol and much of Ukraine into, as President Zelensky said on March 23, 2022, “Armageddon.” So many of the powerful nation states are obsessed with creating weaponry of destruction while claiming to be concerned with preserving life on this planet. It is difficult to have faith in our species’ assertion that we wish to persevere when the evidence indicates a dominant passion for killing and death. This is the backdrop for examining attempts to undo global warming that is a consequence of a beloved lifestyle which should rightly be named a deathstyle.
I wept reading this. I wept reading Bright Green Lies. I seem to weep more often as I see more and more madness as we blindly shop our way into extinction. I feel that as only one person, all I can do is rewild my own land and make it habitable to the largest number of species I can. My hope comes from seeing my neighbors doing the same, little by little. My hope comes from meeting others who do not let their despair shut them out from continuing to read and listen and learn how the death economy is roaring forward. My hope comes from reading writers like you, who have spread the message of connection for decades. I continue to share "Speaking with Elephants" to hundreds of people along the way, as I consider it to be one of the greatest stories of these times. So thank you.
Thank you again, Deena for this wonderful piece! Reading this reminds me, of course, of all the voices in We Are The Middle of Forever, and the obligations of love, the depth and nature of love, and the fact that we are products of the love given us by Earth, animals, and all those forms of life that hold us in place, that carry us each moment. In the face of this love, your opening words take me to the news shows now, the people celebrating war while condemning it with their words. The hypocrisy is astounding. I see the auto-erotic nature of it all on the faces of the "experts," suppressing their excitement as they talk about the war crimes. It's a mockery of what we're here for, an insult to the human nature that is part of Nature herself. It's a long cultural, "civilizational" twisting of our hearts and minds, and your words are the work needed to take it apart. They take it apart and reveal the fresh grass underneath all the great lies. Thank you again!
Thank you so much for writing this piece, for speaking these truths, for bringing this book into greater public awareness. How can we change our ways and create a healthy future for ALL life if we continue to delude ourselves?
"Responding ethically to these crises means returning to the natural world, its essential forms and laws. It means becoming animal and living within the natural world and in right relationship to all the beings in it. How we do this, what it asks of us, we don’t know, but why not put as much effort into researching and visioning this as we do into our technological discoveries?"
Yes! My personal hope comes from ever-increasing this activity of visioning, of finding the right natural forms, of changing our minds and opening our hearts. Thank you again.
Metzger is one of the wise ones I allow myself to listen to; some others are Dougald Hine, The Dark Mountain Project, Martin Shaw, Calvin Martin, and the many indigenous who have always understood the true interconnectedness of the Universe, and thus, among so many other gifts, have forgiven us in order to share their wisdom. Which we so desperately need.
I wept reading this. I wept reading Bright Green Lies. I seem to weep more often as I see more and more madness as we blindly shop our way into extinction. I feel that as only one person, all I can do is rewild my own land and make it habitable to the largest number of species I can. My hope comes from seeing my neighbors doing the same, little by little. My hope comes from meeting others who do not let their despair shut them out from continuing to read and listen and learn how the death economy is roaring forward. My hope comes from reading writers like you, who have spread the message of connection for decades. I continue to share "Speaking with Elephants" to hundreds of people along the way, as I consider it to be one of the greatest stories of these times. So thank you.
Thank you again, Deena for this wonderful piece! Reading this reminds me, of course, of all the voices in We Are The Middle of Forever, and the obligations of love, the depth and nature of love, and the fact that we are products of the love given us by Earth, animals, and all those forms of life that hold us in place, that carry us each moment. In the face of this love, your opening words take me to the news shows now, the people celebrating war while condemning it with their words. The hypocrisy is astounding. I see the auto-erotic nature of it all on the faces of the "experts," suppressing their excitement as they talk about the war crimes. It's a mockery of what we're here for, an insult to the human nature that is part of Nature herself. It's a long cultural, "civilizational" twisting of our hearts and minds, and your words are the work needed to take it apart. They take it apart and reveal the fresh grass underneath all the great lies. Thank you again!
Thank you so much for writing this piece, for speaking these truths, for bringing this book into greater public awareness. How can we change our ways and create a healthy future for ALL life if we continue to delude ourselves?
"Responding ethically to these crises means returning to the natural world, its essential forms and laws. It means becoming animal and living within the natural world and in right relationship to all the beings in it. How we do this, what it asks of us, we don’t know, but why not put as much effort into researching and visioning this as we do into our technological discoveries?"
Yes! My personal hope comes from ever-increasing this activity of visioning, of finding the right natural forms, of changing our minds and opening our hearts. Thank you again.
Deena, thank you for your very kind and humbling words. You're right. It was love that made us write this book.
Metzger is one of the wise ones I allow myself to listen to; some others are Dougald Hine, The Dark Mountain Project, Martin Shaw, Calvin Martin, and the many indigenous who have always understood the true interconnectedness of the Universe, and thus, among so many other gifts, have forgiven us in order to share their wisdom. Which we so desperately need.