DERRICK JENSEN speaking at UCSC Monday night (Apr. 14)

EVENT DETAILS:
Monday, April 14th, 2008 - 7:00pm
@ UC Santa Cruz
Classroom Unit 2 - see map and directions at:
http://maps.ucsc.edu/cdclassroomunit.html

"We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."

So began my first book, Listening to the Land . Why do we act as we do? What are sane and effective responses to outrageously destructive behavior? What will it take for us to stop the horrors that characterize our way of being? My work and life revolve around these questions.

http://derrickjensen.org/

Praise for Derrick Jensen:

"Jensen has achieved the impossible: a book that is simultaneously horrifying and uplifting, terrifying and beautiful. I could not put it down."
- Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet

"A Language Older Than Words is what Franz Kafka said a book should be--an axe for the frozen sea within us. The reader should be advised that this is both high praise and sincere warning: Dangerous reading here. Proceed at your own risk."
- Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael and Beyond Civilization

"The primordial language of the universe is the language expressed in the night sky, in the dawn and the sunset, in the flight of the eagle. It resonates in the song of the meadowlark, in the fragile bloom of the orchid. . . the mountains, the valleys and the rivers . . . and this book."
- Father Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth

"A rare and original voice of sanity in a chaotic world. He has wisdom and wit, grace and style, and is a wonderful guide to a good life beautifully lived."
- Howard Zinn

"Jensen's book accomplishes the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader's heart."
- Publishers Weekly

"A Language Older than Words is must reading for anyone in the least concerned about the nature of our common future."
- Ward Churchill, author and activist

"...a gifted and lyrical writer on a wide range of critical issues. He is unrelenting in his commitment to the environment and justice."
- Winona Laduke

Books by Derrick Jensen:

Endgame vol. 1 & 2
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution
Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests
The Culture of Make Believe
A Language Older than Words
Listening to the Land

REVIEW

As an activist, writer, journalist, and philosopher, Derrick Jensen explores the complexities of violence, the nature of responsibility, and the power and necessity of expression.

Jensen is a new American voice, writing in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Audrey Lorde. In his book, A Language Older Than Words, he examines how humans retreat into silence, denial, deception, and self-reproach in the face of deep injustice. In a series of essays, he relates his life experiences as a small farmer and bee-keeper, a creative writing instructor in a Federal prison, and as an activist opposing the logging industry and the decimation of wild salmon.

But underpinning his distinctive writing lies the fact that he was severely abused as a child by his father and that he has experienced the physically debilitating effects of Crohn's Disease. Jensen's radical honesty about personal and state violence, the decimation of human and natural resources, and the psychological and spiritual processes leading to change, are deeply relevant to understanding and acting in our changing world.

His speaking engagements in recent years have packed university auditoriums, bookstores, churches - you name the place. A typical Jensen event is multidimensional and feels a bit like traveling beneath the earth among tree roots, as they twist their way into soil, rock, river beds and accompany fish, insects, discarded tires, cellophane wrappers, animal minds, history, and human instinct on a strange and interlocking journey.

Speaking in an almost improvisational style, Jensen explores the nature of injustice, of what civilizations do to the natural world. Showing how, in the face of the resulting horror of grave injustice, civilized human beings create intricate systems of denial, silence, abnegation, deception and self-hatred that perpetuate our own social dysfunction.

He also reaches back to our collective childhoods, to the reality of magic in life, to discuss how nature has spoken to us and how we must remember all the conversations we’ve had with her and renew them. It’s his antidote to cynicism and apocalypse. That there is a language much older than the language we use daily, without being aware, to dispel the horrors of modern living and dying.

It is indeed a heart rending, mind expanding, and ultimately healing exercise to explore Jensen’s root system, with him not so much as a guide, but an experienced fellow traveler.