Part of the problem is that death is not a part of our daily lives, we have a very curious escapist attitude about death and have managed to distance it through a bizarre form of institutionalization.

What is required is a change of heart, in order to change our hearts we need to see things differently, neither romanticizing or denying death is honest or useful, it’s more useful to be accepting of death as part of the grit of daily life.

After a decade of watching his resistance fail to corporations

This work is killing me, it’s breaking my heart.
Yeah, it’ll do that.

The dominant culture hates everything doesn’t it?
Yeah it does.

Unless it’s stopped it’s going to kill everything on the planet isn’t it?
Yes, unless it’s stopped.

We’re not going to make it some great new glorious tomorrow are we?
I’ve been waiting for you to say that.

Like Jensen I used to find myself sobbing on a daily basis, the horrors inflicted on the natural world were too much for me to handle. Coming from a country that surrounded me with nature and made me constantly aware of my part of it, I came to “the future”, the the metal and concrete world of America, and was sorely dissapointed in what we as a species were aspiring towards.

It was a dead place, a wasteland, sure with some parks, but they were the exception rather than the rule. The people toiled and suffered in this world of working and consuming, I suffered alongside them.

If we’re not going to cry about the murder of the planet what’s worth crying about?

If we’re not going to resist and stop the murdering of the planet what is worth resisting and fighting?

We need to normalize the despair, it is an appropriate response to a desperate situation.

Sorrow is just sorrow, pain is just pain, and it’s not so much the sorrow or the pain that hurts, it’s my resistance to it.

There’s this idea that if you acknowledge how bad things are you have to go around being miserable all the time, so we waste energy trying to avoid the reality we find ourselves embedded in, instead of acknowledging our situation and figuring out what to do about it.

Yeah this culture is killing the planet and I could spend a lot of energy pretending it isn’t or I can accept this is reality and do whatever needs to be done.

I’m a complex enough being to be able to hold in my heart the understanding of how profoundly evil and destructive this culture is, but that life is really great and that life is worth fighting for.