Derek Jensen = plutonic environmental love.

The PIELC was as interesting and stimulating as I expected...I found it exciting to be around environmental activists and lawyers who are fighting in causes that were just an idea to me, issues that I felt were important but I wasn't sure what was being done around the world about them. After hearing Zhang Jingjing from China (Director of Litigation at the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims) talk about her work in helping victims from "cancer villages" speak out against corporations that polluted their communities, as well as hearing from a young lawyer in Panama who is working to combat development and destruction of mangrove forests close to the canal, I realized I am merely a drop in the bucket. There is a whole movement of social justice in the legal field, and these lawyers emphasized the need to remain interconnected, to be aware of the work and efforts of each other and not to get apathetic or hopeless about the movements you believe in.
This was their message, and it was positive. I had heard it before.

Derek Jensen, who I had not heard before, was not as positive.

I went to all three of his sessions, including the one on "Terrorism, Property Crimes and the Future of Environmental Activism," and it was exactly what I needed to hear. Derek's message was that we are living in an unsustainable industrial society, and it needs to stop, or we are going to (and we already have) destroy the earth to the point where any form of life won't be able to exist, much less humans. That much I was able to understand..he also talked in abstract about paramilitary, violence against women, how much he dislikes Richard Dawkins, gendered power struggles, impoverished communities, talking to rivers, saving salmon, burning dams and living at home with his mom (Derek and I have a lot in common). In his presentation, Derek urged the audience to be radical in their environmental movements...complacently thinking that we're not contributing to the problem because we compost or don't use very much toilet paper (I'm not sure where he was going with that one..) is not enough. As Derek alluded to FBI informants and how environmental activists can be unfairly portrayed at terrorists, some disgruntled audience members accused him of fear-mongering...but that's not really what I took from what he said. He was encouraging people to be aware of the nature of the country and society that they live in, to make informed decisions about which side of environmental movements they want to be on, to think about whether their role is to be a public one or one that is more underground. Not everyone needs to be chained to a tree or in the middle of a protest to create change...people need to be activists in their own way. (Derek said that, not me..but then he kind of took it back when he said that we should go destroy all the dams in America, so who knows..) Derek Jensen is provoking and what he talks about is scarily true. He's there because someone needs to be that radical. If everyone was like him though, I'm not sure that much effective change would occur.

Some people found his ideas too radical or unrealistic. I really found them refreshing after several panels describing environmental detriments that I think we're all aware of, but that didn't go into depth about concrete action that we can take.
Some people didn't like his stream-of-consciousness way of talking. I think of him as an environmental poet.
Some people definitely found him too negative. I think he sees the peril that our world is in and it drives him crazy.

I echo Mike: I like extremists because they give me ideas I wouldn't otherwise have.

Thank you so so much to the Law Foundation for making this trip possible.

-Tharani