What We Leave Behind - Softcover

Jensen, Derrick; McBay, Aric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583228675 ISBN 13: 9781583228678

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2009

Synopsis

What We Leave Behind is a piercing, impassioned guide to living a truly responsible life on earth. Human waste, once considered a gift to the soil, has become toxic material that has broken the essential cycle of decay and regeneration. Here, award-winning author Derrick Jensen and activist Aric McBay weave historical analysis and devastatingly beautiful prose to remind us that life—human and nonhuman—will not go on unless we do everything we can to facilitate the most basic process on earth, the root of sustainability: one being's waste must always become another being’s food.

About this title

About the Author

Activist, philosopher, teacher, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, DERRICK JENSEN holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. In 2008, he was named one of the Utne Reader’s "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World," and in 2006 he was named Press Action’s Person of the Year for his work on the book Endgame. He lives in California. 

Writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer ARIC MCBAY works to share information about community sufficiency and off-the-grid skills. He is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life after Gridcrash and creator of "In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-Progress for Outliving Civilization" (www.inthewake.org).

From Publishers Weekly

Industrial civilization is incompatible with life.... Unless it's stopped... it will kill every living being, begin environmental activists Jensen (A Language Older than Words) and McBay (Peak Oil Survival), introducing the recurring theme and thesis of this radical report on the state of Earth and call to action. The book contrasts natural systems of growth and decay, in which soil and life forms feed each other, with industrial civilization: essentially a complicated way of turning land into waste: garbage patches cover more than 40% of oceans and multitudes of fish and birds are being killed by plastic waste, now more abundant in the seas than phytoplankton. Jensen and McBay trash sustainability stars like William McDonough, who designs green buildings without questioning their unsustainable uses (truck factories and airports); the authors argue that we value our culture more than the planet that sustains it. The book is flawed by lapses into rants and rages, but Jensen and McBay's message that we need to grow up and put away the childish notion that we have the right to take whatever we want from nonhumans is eminently reasonable. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1583228675
• ISBN 13: 9781583228678
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464