This book made me recall the line ‘Stop the world — I want to get off’. (I think it’s actually the title of a Broadway musical back in the 1960s.)
I won’t attempt to do a review of Bright Green Lies,* but the opening gives you a glimpse of the problem: “We need to stop being guided by the general story that we can have it all,” Derrick concluded, “that we can have an industrial culture and also have wild nature, that we can have an oil economy and still have polar bears.”
* Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert. Monkfish Book Publishing. 2021,:
Committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into broad consciousness, and that’s a huge win as the glaciers melt and the tundra burns. But they are solving for the wrong variable. Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life.…
The truths in this book are hard, but you will need them to defend your beloved. The first truth is that our current way of life requires industrial levels of energy. That’s what it takes to fuel the wholesale conversion of living communities into dead commodities….
And finally, there are real solutions. Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let natural life come back. There are people everywhere doing exactly that, and nature is responding, sometimes miraculously. The wounded are healed, the missing reappear, and the exiled return. It’s not too late.
Prologue, Bright Green Lies
The book goes on to document the problems with what we’re told about solar, wind, renewable energy, and other so-called solutions. it makes a persuasive case that they are all designed to preserve the economy at the expense of the planet and all who live on it.
Fortunately, the authors also lay out real solutions for those who are looking for sustainable ways to save life on Earth.
I don’t agree with everything they say, but if you want to take off the rose-color glasses and get real about sustainability, take the time to dig into Bright Green Lies!
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