Derrick Jensen is an American writer and environmental activist, the author of more than twenty books, among them A Language Older Than Words, Endgame and The Myth of Human Supremacy (2016). That book says that the belief that humans are separate from and superior to all other beings is a myth, propped up by tests and arguments that use humans as the measure of everything. Therapeutic Shamanism draws on his case against human supremacy, whilst his wider politics, and his views on gender, have made him a much-disputed figure.
Who is Derrick Jensen? #
Jensen was born in Nebraska, grew up in Colorado, and in 1999 moved to Del Norte County, on the coast of northern California, where he has made his home in Crescent City.1 He took a degree in mineral engineering physics at the Colorado School of Mines in 1983, and a master’s degree in creative writing at Eastern Washington University in 1991,2 and has taught creative writing both there and at Pelican Bay State Prison.3
His books include Listening to the Land (1995), A Language Older Than Words (2000), The Culture of Make Believe (2002), the two volumes of Endgame (2006), The Myth of Human Supremacy (2016) and, with Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies (2021). Running through them is the argument that industrial civilisation is destroying the living world. In 2010 the American news programme Democracy Now! introduced him as “the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement”.4
What is the myth of human supremacy, as Jensen describes it? #
Jensen defines human supremacism as “the belief that humans are separate from and superior to everyone else on the planet”.5 He traces it back to the old Western idea of the Great Chain of Being, a ladder of creation with humans near the top, and sees in it the root of the modern habit of treating the world as a store of resources.
His central argument is that the case for human superiority goes round in a circle. Humans pick out human characteristics, such as a large brain, language or tool use, decide that these are what make a being intelligent, and then find, unsurprisingly, that humans come out on top. He points out that the same kind of reasoning has been used to defend white and male supremacism. He asks what humans are meant to be more intelligent at, and suggests turning the usual assumption on its head. Instead of treating other beings as objects until they prove otherwise, why not assume that they are subjects, with lives of their own, until proven otherwise?
Much of the book gathers evidence for the intelligence and sentience of other beings: plants that communicate and learn, trees, fungi, fish that use tools, bees and wasps. He also says that much of what humans are doing to the living world is neither intelligent nor rational.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism draw on Jensen? #
Paul Francis takes up Jensen’s argument, calling The Myth of Human Supremacy a “powerful, compelling and paradigm-shifting book” in which, “like a shaman waking their apprentices, Jensen demolishes this notion that humans are superior to other beings”. The circular reasoning behind that notion is ‘garbage in, garbage out’: blinkered and nonsensical, because the tests are biased.6 The modern assumption, in Jensen’s phrase, is that humans are “the pinnacle of evolution, the most highly evolved species”.7
For Therapeutic Shamanism the myth is one of the central stories of Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer, and animism is its answer, with a world of Peoples in which humans are the youngest, not the highest. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
Jensen calls on us to find the things in the natural world that we love, and fight for them. That fighting is best done from an Adult place.8 Paul names Jensen among his personal heroes, alongside Carl Rogers, Wilhelm Reich, Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Macy, though he puts none of them on a pedestal, knowing that each is a flawed individual.9
Why is Jensen a disputed figure? #
For three main reasons.
The first is his politics. Jensen has argued that civilisation is killing the planet and needs to be stopped. In 2011 he co-founded, with Lierre Keith and others, Deep Green Resistance, a movement whose stated aim is to dismantle industrial civilisation “by any means necessary”, and whose code of conduct says that its groups take part only in aboveground, non-violent activities.10 Some fellow activists have criticised it sharply, among them a group in the radical environmental network Earth First!, whose open letter of 2013 called it hierarchical and transphobic.11
The second is gender. Jensen and Keith describe themselves as feminists who see gender not as a binary but as a hierarchy, which they want abolished.12 Trans activists and their supporters have called these views, and Deep Green Resistance’s policies, transphobic, and some of his talks have drawn protests, as at Eugene in Oregon in 2018. Jensen replied that his critics were trying to shut down public discussion.13 In 2022 an Indigenous group opposing a lithium mine in Nevada ended its relationship with its lawyer, Will Falk, a member of Deep Green Resistance, its spokesman citing the group’s views on transgender people. Falk said that he had never hidden his involvement with the group, and Jensen and Keith said that their views on gender play no part in its environmental work.14
The third is Bright Green Lies, which says that renewable energy will not save the living world. The writer Craig Collins, whilst agreeing that renewables have serious drawbacks, criticised the book for treating everyone who supports them as an enemy, and for dividing the environmental movement instead of building it.15
What Therapeutic Shamanism draws on is his case against human supremacy, and his call to love the living world and fight for it.
