Forget Shorter Showers

Forget Shorter Showers

Though first published in 2009, “Forget Shorter Showers” is perhaps even more relevant today, as we enter the sixth year of drought in California, and after the Paris climate talks. Derrick Jensen calls everyone to take personal responsibility for how our big systems—government, agriculture, and industry—use and abuse environmental resources. He points out the fallacy of believing we can only vote with our dollars, and gives several practical steps we can take to confront the misuse of our planet where we find it. He says:

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.