A Language Older Than Words. - Review - book review

Sierra, March, 2001 by John C. Stauber

A Language Older Than Words by Derric Jensen (Context Books, New York, $16)

Derrick Jensen wakes each day and asks himself whether he should "write or blow up a dam." He also communes with other species and beings--trees and coyotes and ducks and mice--and shares his animist conversations in this powerful book.

The author of Railroads and Clearcuts, Jensen bravely shares lessons about violence learned as a child terrorized by his well-to-do father's beatings and rapes and shows how his recovery turned him into an uncompromising activist and gifted writer. Though the links between domestic, economic, and environmental violence are largely denied by our society, "make no mistake," Jensen warns, "our economic system can do no other than destroy everything it encounters. That's what happens when you convert living beings to cash." His indignation is fired by the widespread complicity in this destruction. Regarding those dams, Jensen says, "Anyone who lives in this region and who knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will probably stay. Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, bureaucrats hold sham public hearings, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It's a cozy relationship for all of us but the salmon."

This beautiful, disturbing memoir is a welcome relief from books that suggest painlessly shopping our way to ecological sanity and survival while sidestepping the enormous personal, cultural, and political changes we each must confront--books that list a hundred ways to save the earth but fail to remove a single dam.