Jon Jensen, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Robert W. DeBirk [29 October and 2 November 2007]

Transcript (23, 23 pages) of interview by Rob DeBirk with Allison Jones, conservation biologist for the Wild Utah Project, on October 29 and November 2, 2007

Jensen (b. 1975) attended college in Oregon and Utah, majoring in environmental studies. After college he traveled in Mexico. Jensen discusses the literature that shaped his views, political and geographical boundaries, traditional cultures, Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, the culture of thrift, protest culture in Seattle, and toxic waste. Utah Environmentalists Project. Interviewer: Robert DeBirk

Jon Jensen Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview by Robert W. DeBirk 29 October 2007 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project U-1848 American West Center Environmental Humanities Program, and Marriot Library Special Collections Department University of Utah Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 This October 29 of 2007. This is an interview for the Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project. I am interviewing Jon Jensen. J-o-n J-e-n-s-e-n. I am Robert DeBirk. RW: JJ: RW: Jon, what is your full name? Jon Jensen. No middle name? JJ: No. RW: What is your birth date? JJ: April 28" 1975, RW: JJ: RW: JJ: RW: JJ: What are your mother’s and father’s names? My mother’s name is Tamaris Taylor Jensen. Father, Floyd Andrew Jensen. Where were you born? Salt Lake. How many siblings do you have and where are you in relation to them? I have four siblings. I'm in the middle—two older brothers, younger brother, younger sister. RW: JJ: RW: JJ: Where have you lived? In my life? In your life. I’ve lived in Utah, Oregon, New Mexico, California, India—various parts, central America, Guatemala, Mexico. RD: When did you start moving around? How old were you for your first move? Jon Jensen JJ: RD: JJ: RD: JJ: Well. 29 Oct. 2007 Oregon when I first went to college, I went to Oregon. Where did you go? I went to Lewis and Clark College in Portland for a year. What did you study? I had no sort of program, I was just doing general requirements and then I transferred back to Utah after that year. RD: JJ: RD: JJ: What did you study here? I studied environmental studies at Utah State. When was your next move? After [ finished college, that next fall basically, I went to Mexico. I took a bus from Salt Lake to Nogales, Arizona. I crossed the border with my backpack and spent the next 8 months in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. RD: JJ: Wow. What led you to get on that bus and go to Mexico? Well, during my college years, looking at environmental issues in an academic setting [ started to realize that... and this wasn’t through formal classroom exposure but more on an independent study, different readings in the library and elsewhere. This is before the internet was really big... back in those days. (laughs) RD: JJ: RD: JJ: What year was it? Just so I know. Oh, let’s see. That would have been, like 95 through *98. That you were at Utah State? Yeah. Jon Jensen RD: JJ: RD: 29 Oct. 2007 And what year was it that you went to Mexico? That was *98 as well. I think, oh, *97, *98, sorry. Okay, All right. JJ: No, no, no. I’'m wrong—’98. (laughs) RD: JJ: RD: Ninety-eight. I forget the years. Can you tell me more about how... what you were reading and your studies in environmental studies at U.S.U. affected your decision to go to Mexico? JJ: As I was saying, basically I started learning that... or I started being exposed to information that something was amiss in this country. Actually, I had perceived that before college even, and anyone who has an affinity for open, wild spaces and who has a sort of, I don’t know if it was a natural... sort of, what’s the word, repulsion to the technocratic industrial society which, more or less defines contemporary America, so people who realize that would have felt some sort of dis-ease with the present arrangements of society in America and that something was amiss here and that ours didn’t represent, in fact, a picture of reality that was still common in other countries of the world. And I developed a longing to see those other realities, because I had only basically known the modern industrial technological state. That’s what I was born and raised in and I hadn’t experienced any alternatives to that pattern of inhabiting land and so growing up in Utah, we’re fortunate to still have access to wild open spaces and if you fall in love with those spaces it’s very difficult not to be, at least it was for me, very Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 difficult not to be bothered by coming home and realizing that we didn’t have a society which matched our scenery as Wallace Stegner said, I think. But that we probably did at one point in the past and certainly the indigenous peoples who preceded the colonization of this continent did and there were still people and are still people that do have societies that match their sceneries. I think what I took from that saying of Stegner’s was a society that lives from its place adequately, sufficiently and beautifully and doesn’t depend for is existence on the diminishment of somewhere else and someone else which is colonialism, and which our whole nation was based upon and still is. That what sustains it is the taking from somewhere else and the depositing of our unbelievably voluminous waste on elsewhere too. It’s a culture of externality, of externalizing the true costs and consequences. So, I became interested in places that weren’t like that and trying to see them and maybe learn something. RD: Where did you go first in Mexico and could you talk more about the alternatives that you were looking for in Mexico? JJ: Well, I think maybe at that time I didn’t know really what I was looking for and I don’t think I ever did. [ just started seeing things that became obvious counterpoints to how things are done in this country, which I liked. So, I first went to this region called the Copper Canyons, it’s a canyon country of vast scale; it’s huge, it’s deeper than the Grand Canyon they say. But, unlike when you go backpacking in the Grand Canyon, when you go walking along paths in the Copper Canyons you encounter villages and you find that it’s still inhabited by indigenous people. Of course, parts of the Grand Canyon country Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 still are too, with the Havasu and so on. But the Tarahumara people, which actually isn’t their name, they have their own name for themselves. RD: JJ: What is that name? I can’t remember but it’s like so many other indigenous groups who got named by someone else who couldn’t pronounce their original name. They inhabit this fantastic geography and they inhabit it locally, do you know what I mean? They don’t live by benefit or by dint of an industrial economy. That means they still... their houses, their clothes, the material things for life are from that place and so they are a local culture, they are the land basically. And so my ideas also about environment and culture started to break down when I went there, because before I had probably committed a similar error that many commit here, especially when we start getting into the environmental movement in this country—that the environment is a category of categories that we can identify as out there separately from ourselves. When I observed the Tarahumara I realized in fact, we and everything else are the environment. Our blood is just as much a product of the soil as a bird’s eyeball or anything like that. So this distinction between people and the environment broke down for me at that point. I realized that everything was the environment. So that was my first exposure. The other interesting thing that I think I took away from that, and that was the first week I was there so it was quite shocking in a very good way, a good shock. But I think that I took away that this Copper Canyon country is biodiverse. Mexico is a biodiverse country but the floristic biodiversity, for example, is huge in the Copper Canyons and that’s been maintained by Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 this people who’ve inhabited the place for centuries, for millennia. That was another thing to question, does human presence on the land have to equal destruction of everything else, or can it actually be mutually reinforcing—a human culture, which can actually reinforce the rest of the biota. RD: So you found a strong contradiction then, to say the least, from leaving the United States to your experiences with this culture in Mexico. But, how did this culture in Mexico compare to other cultures which you experienced there? Were they the only example? JJ: No, that was the first of many similar encounters on that trip. I ended up in Belize; in Southern Belize I stayed in this village of Mopan Mayan people who equally lived from their forest. They knew everything about the forest. They could name all of the species, many of which are unnamed still by western science. They could heal themselves from the plant medicines that were there and yet another important lesson I learned was this idea of useless plants and weeds was somewhat of a western concept too. For them there is no such thing as a weed. Every single plant was useful and sacred too. They didn’t take plants without asking permission. They had a whole different cosmo vision of the relationship and the responsibilities of people on the earth. They knew all of the plants and they knew that every one of them was fiber, fuel, food, medicine, or ceremonial. It was amazing. I went hiking with a guy who... from the village to the milpa—these farms where they grew corn, beans, squash, etc. and on the way there we passed through forests where he would just pluck plants and show me leaves and roots Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 and such which were medicine for this and medicine for that. So this whole idea of nature being an obstacle or messy or in the way or inconvenient as it seems to be in this country, it was, it was turned on its head. Everything was important—like biomass was important. Here we are, even right now as we speak, it’s autumn in Salt Lake, and nature is raining down biomass, a gift of fertility on everybody in the form of falling leaves, but to most people here it’s a burden. It’s something that’s equivalent to litter like plastic litter, which has to be bagged in a petrochemical bag and sent to the landfill because it’s in the way, it’s annoying. Well, something that I started learning also when being exposed to land based cultures was that this was a pathology of ours. Wherever one and one’s culture are dependent on the local place for sustenance the things that are given by nature like leaves are extremely valuable and valued—they’re fodder for animals, they’re mulch for gardens, they feed the soil, they’re not irritations to be bagged and deposited elsewhere. But like I said, this is a culture of externalization and theirs is of internalization. That’s one, one observation of a difference. It’s not always that it’s all different, but there are these fundamental differences. [End of file one] RD: So Jon you were just telling me a little bit about the time that you spent in Mexico. I want to return to that, but before we get too far I want to hear more about your time in Salt Lake and maybe U.S.U. I just want to know more about what it was that started getting you interested in these questions that you had about the environment and Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 development and how this led to a global perspective. How this was maybe, how you were perhaps influenced by people at U.S.U., your own family, religion, literature, anything, just feel free to bring in. JJ: Okay, let’s see. At U.S.U. I spent a lot of time in the mountains. Backcountry skiing a lot, and I also spent a lot of time in the library looking at journals that weren’t assigned in class. Also through certain classes [ was exposed to a lot of thought provoking ideas about environment about these questions, right. I mean it started for me before college obviously and that’s why I chose environmental studies. You know, I definitely... I owe a lot, I shouldn’t deny it, to Ed Abbey and Gary Snyder, these kinds of people who I went to the library to read in between classes where I was really learning something. And then I think I liked Ed Abbey because I already had that proclivity, you know, and we shared some aesthetic that he was expressing. He was expressing some reaction to this industrial world that resonated with me on some level, on some deep levels. So I just devoured his books, which I think a lot of people do. They realize that things around them aren’t to their liking but they’re not exactly sure that anyone shares that idea. Then they discover someone like Ed Abbey and they’re like “Hey, here’s what I’m thinking”. RD: So these books tended to reinforce what you already felt or what you already thought? JJ: RD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How would you characterize that? Jon Jensen JJ: 29 Oct. 2007 Well, I mean even in high school, coming back from backpacking trips or from extended periods in the desert or whatever, I always just felt this, this sense of total... I don’t know, depression in some ways reentering the Salt Lake Valley with the blanket of smog, the strip malls, I-15 and the whole, this sort of manic development that was and is occurring that characterizes sprawl. Just the volume of pollution—the scale of this industrial way of living, the size of the houses, the reckless use of land, this total kind of development that’s so unrelated to the exigencies of the land. Even like solar orientation, local materials use, it doesn’t matter because it all comes from somewhere else—your energy. You don’t need to think about passive solar design because there are always fossil fuels to warm your house. The materials don’t need to be local sandstone it can be from some god forsaken forest on the other side of the world, I don’t care it’s at home depot and it’s on sale. All the better. So I think that sort of reaction... it’s sad that it would require going off backpacking which is somewhat of a luxurious past-time to begin with, in some ways although I’m not saying the same argument that the ATV crowds say when they accuse backpackers of being elitist environmentalists. Now that’s the most absurd thing because as everyone knows to buy a backpack and a pair of hiking shoes is far less elitist than having to invest in an ATV and all that gas. Anyways that aside, basically what I’'m saying is counter, um, comparing that to some of these cultures that I experienced or interacted with where being in the natural world was not something that you went out and did on the weekend as recreation. This was daily reality and so for people like the Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 Tarahumara and these Mayans I was mentioning and then in my later travels, these sorts of categories and distinctions that we make between work and leisure, recreation, celebration, ceremony, those broke down in many ways. You know, it’s just the whole concept of recreation as being separate or enjoying life as being this category that you get to enjoy on the weekends. There are these specific times allotted to us by society for enjoying and then are other times for working. Well, many of these other cultures I found just blended all that together. Work was often enjoyment too, recreation was work sometimes and especially if it was communal, which it always was. That was another distinction I noted, there’s so much more communal work done which makes it more enjoyable. But what were you asking? Sorry, I completely forgot the question. RD: No, you’re fine. We can talk about anything but I had originally asked about the role of the books that you were reading, Abbey for instance. JJ: RD: Oh yeah. And if you felt that he was articulating something that was already inside of you. How much was he articulating something already inside of you that you already felt and already knew and how much was he also cultivating those feelings or educating you about those things? JJ: Hmm. Yeah, well not just Abbey but also Gary Snyder and then Wendell Berry whom I started to discover and am still being blown away by. These people definitely opened my eyes to so much, but what I was saying, I think, was that maybe I was predisposed to it for whatever reasons because I had the privilege of being able to 10 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 experience uncontrived land. That is maybe how I would describe it. Because people have brought up problems with utilization of terms like wild, um, like Max Oelschlaeger, this idea of wilderness. RD: JJ: Who was this? Max Oelschlaeger, [’'m not exactly sure how to pronounce his last name. He challenged this idea, that wilderness is a separate thing and argued that there can be human communities that live in lands that are wild in the sense of not being totally human dominated. The human presence can be ecologically neutral or beneficial. So anyways that’s sort of an aside, but since I had the privilege to experience these kinds of places, and I think that Abbey definitely did too, and we had a similar reaction to how, you know, how ugly it seemed—the built environment, the contrived environment that was being erected especially at a breakneck pace in the west. They definitely opened my eyes as well to a lot of things I hadn’t thought about. Especially Snyder with his Practice of the Wild, which is a really phenomenal book that I still read and reread but Snyder kind of uh... I"d say even more than Abbey, opened up this idea of culture and nature being... not being inherently adversarial. RD: Can you tell me about some of these, you’ve mentioned, some of these backpacking trips and how they were so influential? Could you tell me about some of your first backpacking experiences? What you remember perhaps? Where you went what was it that made theses such special events for you and who was taking you on these? 11 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 JJ: That I don’t remember. I mean I remember going with friends in high school to the Maze in Canyonlands, places like that. And then I did this thing in high school up in the Tetons. It was basically one of these summer projects to make sure your kids don’t get into drugs. Make sure your kids are not engaging in mischief—let’s send them off to this camp in the Tetons. But it ended up being really fabulous. It was just one of those idyllic summers were you get to work hard outside and just roam, roam around the forest, cruise up trails, climb up mountains, glissade down snow fields, explore caves, which is totally essential to a well rounded and healthy psychological development of anyone anywhere. [ mean that’s what the latest psychology is saying—exposure to uncontrived outdoor places is really important for healthy psychological development of children. I don’t know if I got enough of it when [ was a kid and I’m not saying that just because [ was, that [ somehow am psychologically healthier (laughing). You know, you get the point. So I think that the main thing about those experiences that was important again, kind of like what I said, was that it wasn’t a grid, you know. It wasn’t geometry writ large on the landscape which is what this industrial society is. It applies mathematical formulae to the land and you can see it any time you fly into an American city. I flew into Phoenix recently and it was like a dystopian vision from the sky— geometry imposed on a wild desert or what once was. And now you’ve got these industrial mega farms and their perfect cookie cutter rectangularity and then beyond that the cookie cutter suburbs and their rectangular exactness. And so for me going to these 12 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 places like mountains and deserts that didn’t have that yet was really important to not be entrapped in the artifacts of this industrial mind. Because I feel that people who are only exposed to that, to the artifacts of industrial thinking, and then don’t have that lucky opportunity that I had to realize that the world isn’t like that—that it is not an industrial factory, it’s a biological, organic, cyclical, unpredictable, chaotic and beautiful thing. If you don’t get exposed to that you can... I really do truly believe that there are psychological ramifications which are deleterious to our inhabiting this planet in a sane and loving way by just reinforcing... having everything you see all day, every day, be a reinforcement of the idea that the world is created by a human mind and industrial logic—straight lines, efficiency imposed, imposed geography, a willful neglect of topography of climate. So that’s what’s important about the exposure to these places. It’s that you realize the world is not like that. And that I think is a very healthy thing to realize. Of course, it makes you crazy for the rest of your life if you have to go back and deal with the truly crazy world of industrial thinking. It’s because of... oh, Aldo Leopold, I should mention him, another influence, obviously. It almost goes without saying. But he has that great statement, I can’t remember how it goes, but paraphrasing, something like the cost of an ecological education is to live alone in a world of wounds. So that’s the down side. I mean it keeps you sane but it also makes you outraged, because almost everything you see after that is offensive and is a diminishment. RD: Do you remember when you began linking these ideas, I mean I’'m guessing that when you were a kid trying to stay out of trouble in the Tetons that you weren’t realizing 13 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 that what you were doing was operating out of system, other than that of the grid, or other than that of industrial systems. Were you just out having fun? Did you realize to what level you were being influenced by what you were experiencing at the time? JJ: No, probably not the full implications, and I still don’t probably. But I did know that I was enjoying life (laughs) and having fun, and that frankly, here in Salt Lake the things that [ remember fondly from my early childhood were these little wild corners of the neighborhood where kids could go and cruise around on their bikes or play in the bushes and hide around. And it was basically the same sort of, the same message and sadly, I have to say, I see those spaces just evaporating and shrinking at a really alarming rate. The place [ remember from my neighborhood is now basically gone. It’s houses, it’s concrete and [ fear for future kids who aren’t going to have those little wild corners and their whole mental universe, their mental environment is going to be colonized from age zero onwards by artifice, by the contrivances of the electronic media. Their escape from... or their playtime will not be in a nonhuman place. It’ll be in the electronic world of video games and computers and so on. A lot of psychologists are talking about this now, this “nature deficit disorder” which is truly alarming because it means that future. .. or today’s and future kids when they grow up are not going to have the same sort of capacity to... they’re not going to have the same sympathy or sympathetic response to the other, to the different and that’s important. If we lose that, then more fundamentalism creeps in I feel. 14 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 That’s another important part obviously of not having had the opportunity to play as a kid, I think, in these places was that the mental environment which, Adbuster’s uses this great term I think which is true, the mental environment. We have pollution of the physical environment but we also have pollution of the mental environment like advertising. That’s the colonization of our thoughts and dreams and aspirations by commercial interests and that’s happening on a grand scale now. From our exposure to electronic media particularly and advertising everywhere. They say that the average American is exposed to thousands of advertising messages a day and that the average American by the age of eighteen has seen three hundred and sixty thousand commercial messages and two hundred thousand acts of violence, not directly but through media, by eighteen and this is data from a few years ago and so it’s probably higher now and it’s on the rise. So the implications of that sort of pollution of the mental environment are pretty huge and the wild places where there aren’t billboards, where there aren’t video games, where especially kids can have some opportunity to cleanse the mental environment a little are really important for creating some sort of perspective, I think. And it’s not to say everyone who goes backpacking stops watching TV, but at least it’s a... I think that it’s a defense against propaganda and some of the more nefarious effects of... and mesmerizing and seducing and sedating effects of modern media. If you’re hearing one thing on the TV about how the world is or reading it in the paper and you see another thing with your own eyes and you feel it with your hands in the mountains, then it’s really hard for you to be blind to it, you know. I feel that’s an important defense of our 15 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 sanity, and that’s why I think there’s a lot of animosity too to preserving the wild from certain commercial quarters that people don’t like that counterpoint to industrial society. [t represents an alternative. RD: Well, can you tell me a little bit about perhaps, growing up and the way that you were raised? Do you feel that that also primed you for these experiences and these ideas? Is that something that maybe you did with your family? I don’t know, what kind of influences where there and how do you think those helped shape these later experiences? JJ: Again, luckily my family went to really beautiful and exciting natural places like the Oregon coast. My father’s from Oregon so we always went there in the summers, to the coast. The coast is wild, or the ocean is anyways and that’s going to continue to be wild for a long time. It’s going to be hard for humans’ to domesticate the ocean, even if they have polluted and depleted it. Just the presence of waves, to me, is a really comforting antidote to all this destruction, because that will always be a living embodiment of wild. And then the Oregon coast is a special place in my memory bank, my mental universe and it will always hold a special place because of the smells as much as anything. Like, I remember the smells of the place and they’re wild smells, like the humus from the forest mingling with the salty spray of surf—they just kind of crash into each other right there and it’s intoxicating. It’s awesome; and then New Mexico, my mom’s from New Mexico and so we would go to those places. And you would traverse a lot of amazing country in the process. You burn a lot of fossil fuels too, unfortunately. But I think the benefits were 16 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 there, and we stopped in southern Utah on the way into New Mexico and smells again, you know that smell of the desert. You know the smell of sagebrush, and the smell of... that electric smell when cold rain from the clouds hits hot sandstone. That’s a smell that you can’t hardly... you can’t evoke that with language really but it’s there. It’s really powerful. Just by virtue of being born and raised in this part of the world, I mean, it would be hard not to be exposed to this amazing landscape. It’s all around you. So that too is a fortunate thing. RD: You mean it’s something particular to... when you say this part of the world you mean it’s something particular to the West? To the U.S.? To... JJ: Not the U.S., definitely, maybe this part of the West. Salt Lake’s an urban center but it’s close to the mountains and it’s relatively easy to go there and be in them and get away from the city, which I think is somewhat unique. I mean it is, [’ve been to other cities, many other cities. and it’s not so easy there you know. And even if you don’t have a car before when I was just mountain biking in high school, you could just ride up into the foothills after school within a few hours you would be back in the mountains which was pretty special. And I shouldn’t neglect to mention Boy Scouts. As much as I now find the institution to be highly objectionable on many levels, one thing it definitely had going for it was getting youngsters into wilderness. Backpacking in the Uintas, and in southern Utah. So, yeah, I went on a lot of scouting trips to cool places. RD: You were speaking just a minute ago about all these different places that you’ve gone to, with your family, Oregon, New Mexico, here in Salt Lake City, and you were 17 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 able to speak quite poetically about each one of those places. So I'm wondering what does it mean to you since you’ve been to so many places not just growing up but through out your life, you’ve been to so many places that obviously and have been heavily influenced by them what does it mean to you to really inhabit a place to live in a place or to be part of a place? Do you have a conception of that? JJ: Yeah, [ mean definitely and more so now than I did before. A huge part of that I would say is living from the place. Not having it be an abstraction which it think place has become with so many people in this anonymous America. Like James Howard Kunstler calls it The Geography of Nowhere, where everywhere you go, you could be anywhere—this Wal-Mart construct. To me living in a place means the opposite of that. It means diversity. It means that the culture of the place and how you live will be determined by what’s available in that place, by the climate of the place, by the building materials that that place naturally offers, by the food that can be produced there or gathered there. We’re a long ways from that, we’ve come a long way from that, and these other cultures that I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with still have a lot of that and, especially in this part of India where I’ve been working, in Ladakh, it’s been very evocative to see an environment which is kind of reminiscent of Utah and parts of the intermountain west, with the poplars and the willows and big mountains and dry country and rivers. But to see a society that lives from that place, that doesn’t live from WalMart. Doesn’t get its building material from Home Depot which was slashed from some Canadian boreal forest which you don’t have to know about because it’s all packaged 18 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 nicely and on sale, like I said. You know it’s not PVC from some god-forsaken chemical plant in “Cancer Ally” in Louisiana that you slap on the side of your house and call it good. That’s not living in place. That’s living in the anonymous industrial consumer society. Living in place to me means not participating in that externalization. It means if you’re in a dry place that doesn’t have big forests, your houses are made of adobe bricks from the soil right there. A lot of people have been pointing out recently that it’s this fossil fuel based, petrochemical driven economy that we have... that only through that have we been permitted to live in any other way besides place-based. You couldn’t have pve sided houses and globally transported food without it and a lot of people are saying we’re going to have to figure out again how to live in our place. If oil peaks and some say it already has, [ mean it peaked in the U.S. in 1970 but when global oil peaks and starts to go down and we can no longer run a global economy that’s based on trans-continental shipment of products, well we’re going to have to remember how to gain our energy and food and our fiber and so on within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of our local bioregions. And so that’s also part of this bioregional movement that’s kind of cropping up around Europe and North America and elsewhere. It’s to sort of... to again center our economies within our bioregions and use those natural boundaries the geography gives us to determine how we organize our economic activity instead of the political, ruler-straight borders that we have. 19 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 And that reminds me... and this is kind of an aside which may be irrelevant but one time I was with a group in Colorado and we were asked by this instructor to draw a map of where we were from, of our region. And all of us drew... the first thing we drew was the state boundaries, the borders, you know the square Utah, the square Colorado and that’s how we thought about our place, you know, this image that had been burned into our consciousness by looking at so many maps and obviously the point of his exercise was to show us that, that’s how we were thinking and how we were trained to think about land and geography and our place—in terms of lines on a map. Then after having told us, or having exposed us to that, to the absurdity of that, then asked us to draw our maps again based on what was really there. And so then of course everyone had their lakes and their mountains, the real geography that defines us. But that same summer we went to the border of Canada and the U.S. in Montana—north of Yak Valley. And whatever I thought about the arbitrariness of political borders and that they’re not corresponding to geographic reality, well, that was challenged for me when I found that the governments have clear-cut a swath of trees all the way across that corresponds with the border so it actually exists. It’s no longer an abstraction. They couldn’t let it be an abstraction they had to show, so that it would be visible from satellites that here’s the border. The forest doesn’t like that but there it is a laser straight swath of clear-cuts through the forest for no other reason than to demarcate here and there. RD: That’s a fascinating way of discussing political boundaries and abstract boundaries manifest as physical ones. Did you find similar things happening as you traveled 20 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 elsewhere, either in Mexico or in India? Did you have similar experiences where what had been abstractions to you became physical, either in the sense of borders or cultures? For instance, how was it to see these alternatives which you mentioned earlier which had only been alternatives in your reading or alternatives in your own imagination, how was it to suddenly see these things, to actually see these things in action? JJ: Okay. Yeah I mean it was profoundly influential I think, too. Because, in college, for example, it started becoming very clear suddenly that while our economy is totally unsustainable and it’s based on finite fossil energy which is not only polluting but it’s running out, well we’ve got to do something different. Our food system, where does it come from? What are the effects? That was a good part of some of my classes. I started to learn some of the effects of our food system in a round about way, like how it was affecting the Colorado River. Studying the Colorado River, you can’t even talk about it without also understanding about the industrial food system of this country, especially California, right? Where these empires, these agricultural empires were built to some extent on Colorado River water, so you start seeing that all of these things are connected and really broken, you know. They’re not built to last, they’re really destructive, and so once you start having those thoughts, you realize, well shouldn’t we do something differently? What if we didn’t have these huge superhighways and transport networks and infrastructure and global trade-supporting infrastructure and satellite directed farming? Or these giant industrial monocultures in the Midwest and everywhere? If we’re seeing 21 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 that that’s creating so much ecological destruction and social breakdown as well what should we do differently? So yeah, finally being exposed to places where things are being done differently and not because of some special new program. It’s because it’s how it’s been done for millennia, since time immemorial as they say. That’s important—you realize it’s not a pipe dream, it’s a common dream. Everyone had it too. You realize it’s not... it’s not as they say, the protagonists and the apologists for the status quo that reign supreme today, for example in the U.S., which is that your quality of life, your happiness, your well being depends on our destruction of the environment. You often hear this—*“You want us to live in caves if you’re for environmental protection. You just want us to live in caves, you’re against our comfort. We’ve strived and struggled so hard through history and this is progress and you know progress is this ineluctable trajectory of betterment, of comfort, of being able to sit in a climate controlled environment irrespective of what nature says outside all year long. I want to be able to enjoy my shorts and t-shirt whatever the weather is outside, and you are threatening that pinnacle of progress.” Well, the great thing about traveling to these places and experiencing these cultures is that you realize that that is a big fat lie. That living locally is not only possible but it’s prosperous and it’s joyful and it can be abundant and it can be done. By prosperous I mean in the sense of... and this is how it was described to me in India: prosperity is the ability to share something. It doesn’t mean money, wealth. It’s the ability to share, and these places I’ve been even where money wealth is very low and 22 Jon Jensen 29 Oct. 2007 therefore these places are judged very harshly by the metrics of economic performance and targeted for development for that reason. Well, if you look at real wealth, the wealth of health, happiness, community, sufficiency, and living within the means of the place, these places are fabulously wealthy. Now they’re not wealthy according to the metrics of the global economy which measures in money exchanged, but again as so many radical economists have been pointing out to us for a long time now, these conventional yardsticks of economic success are pathological in many ways. Because so much of economic... of this official economic activity is based on destruction and destructive things and beneficial things are not distinguishable by this system of measurement and so the arms trade, war, all of these things which normal people recognize as destructive and harmful and things that we would almost all agree we don’t want more of, sickness, well those are the best things for the economy in many regards. The companies which are doing the best today are these companies that deal in weapons. Lockheed Martin is one of those fabulously successful companies right now because they’re profiting wildly off of destruction caused by war. Because they make the stuff of war, these arms and bullet manufacturers are doing great, but is that wealth in a deeper sense? That’s money wealth but you know that same system judges these other cultures that have these other forms of wealth very harshly. These cultures are intolerable to modern governments—that they should still have within their borders cultures that are not caught in the vortex of the global money economy is considered shameful. So again, I totally digress from whatever point we started on (laughs). 23 JON JENSEN Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview by Rob DeBirk 2 November 2007 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION U-1849 Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project American West Center, Environmental Humanities Program, and Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 This interview is with Jon Jensen. J-0-n J-e-n-s-e-n, November 2, 2007. I am Robert Debirk, D-e-b-i-r-k. Sitting with me is Catherine Ashton. C-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e A-s-h-t-o- n. This interview is being conducted for the Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project. RD: So Jon, last time we discussed literature that was influential to you. I wanted to bring that up again. There were some writers like Thoreau and Leopold that people mentioned as being influential. Were they people that you were familiar with when first started being interested in environmental issues and what role did they play for you? JJ: Yeah, I think Thoreau, actually, was probably the first who even got me thinking on these lines, far before Abbey, before I’d even heard of Abbey. And it was an oversight last time to forget to mention and to give props to Thoreau who really started this journey for me. And that was in the tenth grade. I was fortunate to be assigned Walden and even On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by a fantastic English teacher who made us read that. Yeah, that influenced me deeply. RD: What did you find in those... in that book or in that essay that influenced you? Do you know what it was that really struck you about that? JJ: It was probably the first radical writing I had read—radical in the sense of... its etymological sense of going deeply to the roots, the radical, botanical sense of the word. It was. .. sort of the first riposte I had read in response to western industrial civilization. And Thoreau brought up questions about that arrangement that resonated with me, and I’m sure with everyone else who has read him and been moved by him. The Duty of Civil Disobedience obviously, the whole idea of... at that age, not knowing much about politics yet, but the idea that one’s government can be corrupt, and in fact needs to be basically vigilantly guarded against, in the case of corruption run amok. And then the Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 duty to actually resist it was a new and again radical idea... But obviously Thoreau’s response to the wild, the wilds of Concord (laughs) which was where he travelled extensively, as he says, and just seeing closely the land, observing it, respectfully, which was such a departure from the whole Baconian, Cartesian, western, scientific, industrial way of interacting with the natural world, which was domination, which was not careful respect. It was domination and subjugation for human industry. Thoreau, he wasn’t the first, but to me was one of the most eloquent questioners of that, who tried, as he said, to not lend himself to the wrong he condemned. He posed a challenge to the mechanistic worldview. And of course, even what Thoreau was saying was nothing new—in fact he probably could be considered a Euro-American coming around closely to a foggy vista of what the indigenous people of the continent had always been saying, but Thoreau kind of articulated it for the Euro-American society in a way that was understandable—maybe more so than others had. RD: So, I’m curious. Inasmuch as you were reading Thoreau and you saw that Thoreau in Walden was kind of living his teachings, how did that affect you as far as spurring you to your own actions? Did it work in that way? Was it a catalyst for anything? JJ: Yeah, that’s why Thoreau is so inspirational, I think, to a lot of people, because he talked about “simplify, simplify”” and he did simplify. And this was at a time... like if you imagine the time in which he was writing in the mid-nineteenth century when this whole... the whole Wal-Mart consumer culture and the total overabundance of throw- away products that clutter our lives today, this was long before that. This was at a time when most of us, even in New England, would have just been overwhelmed by how beautiful it probably still was, and relatively pollution free. And even then... even that Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 level of industrialization that had occurred, even that level of materialism (in the sense of reckless materialism, which is to distinguish it from mindful materialism as Wendell Berry talks about) was offensive enough in the mid-nineteenth century for Thoreau to start protesting against it with his lifestyle. So that says a lot about how forward thinking Thoreau was and how much ahead of his time he was. He was already seeing that this was a system and a lifestyle that was hedonistic and sybaritic and could not be sustained if we wanted to sustain a harmonious sort of world. So I found that incredible. That someone writing that long ago could have already... and there were others, I'm sure, before him that were even more forward... or who presaged this phenomenon. But for me Thoreau did it, most of it anyway. RD: So for you then is there a relationship between Thoreau and the integrity of his lifestyle and your own desire after college to leave the United States, go down to Mexico, spend time with indigenous cultures or in other cultures to find a lifestyle that maybe wasn’t the same as Thoreau’s but was closer to that style that Thoreau had made for himself? Do you see a link there? JJ: Possibly. You never can tell what influenced you to do something years down the road. But I have no doubt, and I still identify that time of reading Thoreau to begin with as a really pivotal sort of learning process, which I think did later cause me... I had the same discomfort as... or I can’t claim to have had the same, but I feel like I must have had a similar reaction that Thoreau was having. But at a time when I believe it was much more likely that such a reaction would be able to occur, because the advancement of this consumer culture had multiplied so many fold since Thoreau’s time. Yeah, I guess there was probably a link there with wanting to, not just even personally get away from it, Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 which backpacking was an outlet as well, but that was a temporary thing, and it wasn’t actually leaving that system at all, because you were still connected to the industrial world when backpacking. You’ve brought all of your freeze-dried food, and there wasn’t that same level of self-reliance that Thoreau practiced out at Walden. And just an aside, Thoreau’s been criticized more recently for, well for what I’m not exactly sure, but a lot of people don’t like the fact that he was only actually two miles from Concord and he went in there all the time. But Thoreau never claimed that he wasn’t going to do that. Or that he was trying to just escape from society. He never claimed that really. And to me it’s as important that he did that in some ways as staying at the pond, because it’s like, as Gary Snyder says, when you go backpacking, an important lesson is when you return to settled places is seeing the whole landscape. Or that those settled places are part of a continuum of land. It’s not like a separate entity. The whole world is the natural world. And it’s really problematic that we have separated in our minds this ideal of wild and pure land from our backyards. Because, and Snyder argues, and I think Thoreau would have agreed, that unless we consider also our backyards to be sacred ground rather than only very picturesque backcountry, then we’ll continue to be able to live this schizophrenic life where we dump chemicals on our yards from Dow Chemical, or whatever, at the same time as we go out and pretend to value the wild. Unless we consider the whole land as sacred, or at least worthy of protection and eliminate that mental demarcation that we have created between the wild and our homes.... So, getting back to your question, yeah, that’s kind of... that artificial demarcation is something that Thoreau got me to start seeing. And then when I travelled and saw these cultures very much interacting with their local environments in a way that I Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 never saw in contemporary America where we live kind of anonymously from an anonymous global market, that reinforced the idea that that separation was artificial and constructed. RD: So, I want to stick with Thoreau and literature just a little longer if you don’t mind. I’m really interested in the relationship between your life and the books that you read. So, I’m kind of curious, have you gone back and reread Thoreau now, what how many years later, ten, fifteen years later than it was from your original reading of Thoreau. Have you done that? Have you reread him and has it struck you differently or made you think about your past actions or your future actions in a different way? Does it continue to affect you? JJ: Well, yeah, I think so. I haven’t reread Thoreau recently or for a while. Last time was actually on that trip to Mexico and I was reading it in Mexico and obviously there were SO many... RD: In which trip to Mexico? JJ: The first time, right when I left. That was pretty impactful to be reading about... just to be reading Thoreau’s experiment again while in a totally new setting where whole cultures that were living more simply and where you didn’t see this... What was Thoreau’s line—about most men leading lives of quiet desperation? This atomized, nuclearized lifestyle we’ve created or has been created for us in this country to a large extent where community has in many cases broken down; where neighbors don’t know one another; where people really are dependent on a market system over which they have no direct control. On the other hand in some of these communities... I think what Thoreau was trying to do was remember that our dependence on the land and on each other, on our neighbors is paramount. And that we should never let a capitalist, market Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 system try to supplant and replace those relationships and those dependencies because they’ll never care for us the way that a real community and land will. And so I saw communities that were still like that, still are, which was a revelation for me because I hadn’t seen that in this country. I'm sure they exist. Maybe one could point to the Amish or even certain Native American reservations where the social fabric hasn’t been totally rent and torn asunder by the colonialism of resource extraction. RD: All right. Well, so in 1998 you spent some time working on an organic farm. Can you tell me about that? How did you get to work on this farm? What were your interests that you sighted that an organic farm was the place to go? Anything you may have of interest? | JJ: Okay, on that trip, in Latin America, I saw these things I’ve just been mentioning that were sort of inspirational in some ways to me. But I also saw another face, which was the face of globalization and modern day colonialism pretty much nakedly and brutally colonizing people’s lands. I sort of saw where the global economy touches down. I saw the other end of our consumer products here in the U.S. that are stacked on the shelves in supermarkets. I saw the other end of the Dole banana, basically. Here we see the end you eat. RD: That’s Dole, D-o-l-¢. (laughs) JJ: In Honduras I saw plantations, industrial plantations of bananas where little kids were walking up and down the rows with buckets of pesticides. Their arms were stained purple to the mid-arm, elbow area from flinging pesticides on banana leaves all day. These bananas were being grown to service the American banana appetite. So I started recognizing this problem of distance. I think Wendell Berry has talked a lot about this Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 very insightfully. The further things are from our consciousness, in terms of production and disposal, the more brutal, the more polluting they can be because of that distance and the lack of accountability and a lack of responsibility that can engender. So I saw things like that. I saw industrial agriculture and the pesticides themselves manufactured by American companies and shipped to these countries—even pesticides which have been banned long ago in this country. And I started to feel the outrage of injustice, maybe before being able to call it that, but that’s what it was, and the exploitation and the dispossession and disempowerment of people by affluence. I didn’t come to discover Eduardo Galeano till years later, but when I did, it reminded me of that first experience. He’s a fabulous Uruguayan journalist and novelist. RD: Could you spell his name please? JJ: E-d-u-a-r-d-o Galeano is G-a-l-e-a-n-o. Anyways, he wrote this book called The Open Veins of Latin America amongst some of his better known. And in there he said something which stuck with me where he said something to the effect of, the affluence of the affluent, the privilege of the privileged basically depends upon the deprivation of the deprived. The two are intimately related and one requires the other. So I started questioning this whole global consumer culture on that trip because I saw its dark side, and I saw how people were suffering, and the health of kids suffering because of it. I realized that that distance that exists between the consumer of the thing in a household in the U.S. and the suffering on its other end... that distance was necessary for that to go on on the one hand. On the other hand, the consumer probably had no idea or intention—no one intends to harm, or very few, by consuming something. The system of global trade which has its roots in colonialism has created, has facilitated that kind of Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 consumption. And it almost requires our ignorance. Otherwise the burden of knowledge is too much. It’s too painful. So the less you know about so many of these consumer products, the more comfortably you can consume them. Because the more you know, the more uncomfortable you begin to get. So all of these experiences are swirling around in my head when I came back to the U.S. and the stark differences were even more strongly highlighted. And I felt strongly that what we needed in this country was a repeasantization. We really needed a relocalization, which is not that far away in our own cultural past here—a culture of thrift, which again was one of Thoreau’s mighty lessons, given at such an early time too. He could see what was coming. He could see that this culture of thrift and resourcefulness was going by the wayside and that it would come under direct attack by commercial forces in the next... in the following century because it was an impediment to profit. But so when I came back I felt like we needed to reinstate this culture of thrift that our own grandparents had until they were convinced by the “captains of consciousness” in Stuart Ewen’s memorable term, that that was something we had to jettison on the trash heap of history, and that was an impediment to progress. And that thrift and resourcefulness and modesty and simplicity were things that were un-American, basically. And your duty was to waste in order to propel this economy forward. I saw too that that was a suicidal chain in terms of ecological survival and social health and well- being. And so this whole idea of... it’s called “la via campesina”—the peasant way. Peasant maybe is a word that has negative connotations and maybe we could find another word, but basically this relocalization thrust. And so that’s what spawned me into work Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 on the farm, a small scale farm. I had done some of that in Latin America, but I thought this needs to happen really urgently in this over-industrialized de-localized, totally dependent. .. fossil fuel dependent society that has been built up here. So that’s what took me to that farm and of course the organic part of it being connected to the horrors of chemical pesticides which I had witnessed. RD: Where was this farm located? What did you do on it? How did you find this particular farm? JJ: I went to visit my sister who was living in Seattle, going to school there and I just sort of by chance happened upon some directory of Washington state organic farms and started calling them randomly and found one that needed people. And the interesting thing was, I was one of only a few Anglos to be working on the place. All of my other coworkers were Mexicans. So that was sort of a window into the whole free trade controversy and immigration issues, which I then started learning about. Some of these neo-liberal economic policy decisions which were and are to a very large degree behind this immigration crisis, and it’s a crisis of agrarian... an attack on the agrarian, peasant system of Latin America. And very few people understand how these free trade policies, so-called, are intimately connected to people being twisted off of their land and needing to survive. And so there I was on an organic farm, in Washington state, east of Seattle about forty minutes near the Cascades, and all of my coworkers are Mexicans. And they came from farming communities themselves in Mexico, but the economic strain was so much Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 that they simply couldn’t survive any more on their own farms. And so they had migrated. Anyway, so all these issues were coming together on this farm and the farm was like a central place to consider so many different... that was sort of the nexus of all of these issues: global free market, capitalism, toxics issues and pesticides as well as the relocalization of U.S. society. RD: Can you tell me, when you were on the farm, what were your attractions like with the people from Mexico that were working on the farm and then also you said there were other Anglos working on the farm with you. Did you find that anyone was on that farm for reasons that were similar to yours, for their interest in environmental justice, their interest in a global economy? Did you find many people that shared that passion while on the farm? JJ: Yeah, to some extent. The owner of the farm I don’t think... was more of a capitalist venture. .. RD: He was into the resurgence of peasantry for his own reasons! JJ: Right. And now, obviously we’ve seen where that trajectory has led. Wal-Mart is now into organic foods, right? Organic farming has become co-opted and appropriated by the same capitalist forces against which the original organic movement was reacting. And so now there are these side movements which have branched off because organic... because of this phenomenon with the industrial organics—the industrialization of organics by General Mills, by these giant corporations, which are really undermining the whole original intent and vision, but yeah, others of my coworkers there, I think were there for similar reasons. It wasn’t... there may have been some for whom it was just a 10 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 job that had been available. But I think for those who could choose, they probably chose to work there for various low wages and long working hours for other reasons. And those had to do with environmental protection and the soil, and of course working outside and interacting with the natural world all day and not... basically choosing not to enter the confines of corporate America. I think that was a pretty strong inclination for a lot of young people. And one of the guys actually... he ended up the next year, I believe, going to Mexico to the village where a lot of our coworkers were from in Michoacan and working with them, working with some of their family members on their farm that they did still have, that some of them had down there. RD: That’s interesting to see that undercurrent. There’s the current of globalization and the way in which that is dispersing people, by the way in which there is that undercurrent that your coworker was able to go back to that village that some of your other coworkers lived out there. And so in November, correct me if I’m wrong, I think it was November of 1999 you went up to Seattle for the World Trade Organization protests. Can you tell me about how you became interested in that? Maybe what your education was like about the WTO, and then once you got up in Seattle, what were your experiences? JJ: Well, you know it was part of that same trajectory, obviously. All of these things I've been mentioning... and that next summer I also worked on an organic farm near Seattle, a different one, but... and so that whole area was just abuzz with talk and debate about these issues leading up to that ministerial in November. So that whole summer we were picking French beans and peas, going up and down the rows debating the WTO and free trade, so-called... all of these trade barriers so on. It was new to pretty much everyone. 11 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 Very few people had even heard about this system—that sort of global governance or trade which would be... which would supercede sovereign governments. Of course NAFTA had already been in effect since ’94 and people were already seeing some of the effects of NAFTA in the three countries participating, but especially hard hit were disempowered or less politically powerful communities in Mexico. .. NAFTA enshrined investor rights, corporate rights above people’s rights, which we saw with these Chapter 11 cases where a company that wanted to dump toxic waste in San Luis Potosi, this state in Mexico, and were prevented from doing that by the community there, sued the government under Chapter 11 saying this was lost profits for their company. And this was used in other cases. And this system was and is being used by companies in countries all over to play governments against one another and to drive down standards, environmental protection and labor protection and so on. And it’s always this threat that is warned of: we’re going to leave. If your standards are too high for us, we’re going to go find somewhere with lower standards. So unless you lower yours too, we’re going elsewhere. That’s what the investors of these companies... that’s how they use the system to drive standards down or to override the sovereign, locally made politics and democratically made policies. So I and my coworkers started learning about some of these cases and becoming more outraged by this naked abuse of corporate power. And then these big protests were being planned for the meeting. People were going to be coming from all over the world, including small farmers who had been harmed by U.S. agriculture—agribusiness, agriindustry dumping its chemical-laden food products all over countries. Within the context of NAFTA particularly, subsidized mono-crop corn from the likes of Cargill, Dow, and 12 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 Archer Daniels Midland is being dumped on Mexico and causing an agrarian crisis because of the undermining of the lynchpin of the Mexican agrarian economy, which is maize. It’s where it was domesticated; it’s where it’s been the center of all cultures in Mexico and a lot of Central America for millennia. And suddenly farmers couldn’t compete against this pesticide-industrial corn being dumped on them from the U.S., which NAFTA greatly accelerated. So all of these... somewhat a realization of these problems was occurring in our minds. Here was this great opportunity to join in solidarity with all of these people from around the world who were going to be coming and try to make a statement someway against basically corporations ruling the world, as the title of Korten’s book put it aptly. RD: So, when you arrived in Seattle... when did you arrive in Seattle for the protests and what was that like? What was the feeling in the city at the time? JJ: Well, I mean we could have a whole interview about this and it could take a long time, but let us give a truncated version of what happened. To put it briefly, it was electrifying. There was a lot of... there was a visceral energy in the air. There was some... the whole atmosphere was just pregnant with excitement and with this idea of direct action, which I think was really intoxicating for so many people who were becoming jaded with electoral politics and politics as usual. I don’t know. For me, anyway, it was like that. Just building up to the actual ministerial there were teach-ins from the International Forum on Globalization; there were rousing speeches given by different activists from India, from Malaysia, from the U.S., from the different countries in Europe. There were farmers unions from Europe led by Jose Bove, the famed antiMcDonalds French farmer, and so much of this presence. It was a real focal point. It 13 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 concentrated a lot of people’s energies and dissatisfactions or outrages against all of the injustice that was going on in the name of corporate profits and so on. So, yeah, that’s what it was like. RD: Were you there for... How many days were you in Seattle for the protests? JJ: Oh, I was there for the whole thing. It was uh... how many days was it? I don’t really remember now. But I do remember that it started off very much... the first... if you might recall, the first day of the protest, the protestors surprised themselves even by actually shutting down this international ministerial just by linking arms and blocking off every street surrounding the convention center. The row upon row of people, nonviolently, very non-confrontationally simply saying, “No, this meeting will not occur.” It actually worked. I think that the police force was equally surprised by that and not a little upset that that power had been stripped from them, that regular people had actually determined the policy against what the city government wanted by hosting this thing. And so after that initial success, the police cracked down and that’s when a lot of the violence and the confrontation that the media naturally focused on happened. RD: What was that like being on the streets when people were initially beginning to link arms to stop the protest from working, or during the organizational process? What was that like seeing so many people come together from so many different places with so many different political ideologies motivating them, I’m sure, seeing everyone come together and work out their differences? How did you see that actually work out—people negotiate those things? JJ: Well, first of all there was this really amazing organization called the Direct Action Network, which I don’t know if they still exist or maybe they just sort of came up to 14 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 organize this thing, but they had done this really laudable job of preparing people for this. Weeks before hand people were organizing and getting into what they called these affinity groups and making sure that people were linked up and safe. That you were part of a group that would care for you, and then executing it with such aplomb, I thought was really impressive. To deal with that diversity of ideologies that you mentioned, that was accepted, obviously. There was no attempt to bully anyone into... but obviously anyone who was coming to protest was linked or united by certain basic ideologies or ideas. And that was a sense of injustice at what was happening and a desire to oppose that. And then also there were certain basic rules that were requested of people to adhere to, one of which being non-violence... not committing violence against any sentient being, basically. RD: What else did you witness during the times of the protests? Were you there for the police riots? Did you see the banner hangings that were taking place? What effect did those acts, such as the banner hangings or the solidarity actions going on throughout the world in response to the WTO protest... what effect did those things have on the actual atmosphere at the protests themselves and with the protestors themselves? JJ: Things like banner hangings are kind of like a shot in the arm from above for everyone down on the street. There were a few of those which were very memorable. I think they are etched on everyone’s memory—that big sign hanging from this huge crane that had a big arrow pointing in one direction that said WTO and an arrow pointing the other direction which said democracy. That was sort of the highlight, I guess, the theme of those protests, that this system of corporate governance was undermining people’s local democracies. That’s what was being defended by resisting the WTO—people’s 15 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 sovereign ability to determine their own policies and protect themselves and their communities and their land, air and water, etc. against the needs of roaming, casino capital, which needs evermore input of material for its survival. And those come from communities where people and other species live. So there was always this fundamental contradiction and conflict between the needs of local self-reliance, local community... when I say local, I mean community based self-reliance and the needs of foreign capital. Those two things always are coming into conflict and that’s going on right now as we sit here. In every country you can think of there are conflicts between the global market and corporations and local peoples’ needs. Pretty much wherever there is a forest to be logged, oil to be sucked out of the earth or from the bottom of the ocean, wherever there are shrimp to be “mined” and mangrove forests to be decimated in the process, there are also local communities who have sustained and been sustained by those same systems, and they’re in the way. Ask any of those Ogoni activists in Nigeria who have suffered from this process; ask any of the Indian farmers who have been poisoned by Monsanto; wherever this is happening, like I was saying before, where the global economy touches down, it doesn’t just create products out of thin air. It has to create them from somewhere. And that somewhere is someone else’s where. Our away is someone else’s where. That’s what people were trying to bring into the public consciousness with these protests—why did farmers lead a march in Seattle, down the docks to the silos of Cargill Corporation? Well, Cargill’s the largest grain trading corporation in the world and their practices are threatening the livelihood and the survival of millions of farmers—small scale campesino farmers around the world. Hardly anyone you ask knows who Cargill even is, let alone what they do. But 16 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 a lot of people in villages in Mexico will tell you who Cargill is. They know, because Cargill is there. It’s there at their front door. Now Cargill and ADM are getting into this agro-fuel business where they’re trying to sell what they’re doing as a wonderful answer to global warming, when in fact it’s just another way of land colonization and industrial farming and profit with this fig leaf of global warming abatement. But luckily there are a lot of groups that are exposing that. So, I'm sorry I got off topic. RD: Oh, please. So what were you thinking as you were in the streets of Seattle and you were starting to make these connections and all the people around are beginning to make these connections and from those connections you are seeing solidarity actions elsewhere around the globe. I mean there was some here in your old home in Salt Lake City—there were solidarity actions. There were later solidarity actions in Europe and Latin America. What was it like to feel like you were a part of this? Can you... is that something you can articulate? JJ: It was satisfying and exciting, but it was also... it was kind of a doorway to despair. RD: How? JJ: Because the more you start thinking about these things and just how much is wrong, the more overwhelmed you can feel. But I think that’s a good thing in some ways, because that’s where activism comes from and we need more activism. We need a lot less apathism (laughs), more activism. And naturally we are trained and we are groomed to be apathetic in this country from so many sides—from the commercial media and from the fashion mavens and again, the captains of consciousness. So for me, that was a good thing that it caused me—to be overwhelmed because I... thereafter I went into more activism. I got launched into it with much more vigor, realizing that we are so damned 17 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 privileged here in this country with all of our gadgets and stuff. And there are people around the world who are being assaulted by... they are on the frontlines of this global capitalist expansion and a lot of it’s in our name and for our purported benefit—to serve our supposed needs. And so we have a responsibility to wake up from that consumer stupor and change, basically. RD: How did you take that spirit of taking of responsibility mixed with the excitement of the protest and... how did you take that with you after the protest? How did you bring it back to Salt Lake City with you? How did that affect your thinking? JJ: I guess after that I thought that activism definitely did require not just this political engagement and protest, but also personal transformation and trying to live the alternative in-so-far as is possible. It’s pretty difficult, as anyone here who tries it very much will find. Because, again, the structures that ensnare us from the moment we are born, if you’re born in this age, make it difficult to live in another way. Local food systems were long ago abandoned. So to recreate a local food system is a massive challenge compared to just going to the supermarket and feeding from the trough of global agri-business, which is what is the natural... the path of least resistance, which you will go down if you don’t make a special effort to do something differently. Or like not driving. Well, in a society where there has been a deliberate campaign to make sure that driving is pretty much required, or at least not driving requires a special effort that is not that easy to take for a lot of people, you know what I mean? So, what I’m saying is, I felt like there needed to be a mix or a combination of working on these political structures, changing those, and doing what we could in our own lives to walk the talk. And I’m still in the process of oscillation between those 18 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 things. Sometimes I get really much more focused on the personal, individual action and the personal, individual contribution to these problems and that we can change those. And then other times, I swing back to the side of thinking that this is actually a distraction—focusing on my own contribution. The problem is these structures that make a contribution to destruction, it is almost a given and the norm. But I still feel like there’s a need for both of those things. Wendell Berry, I think he explores these issues really brilliantly in the Unsettling of America which he wrote back in 77, I think. And the first chapter in that book is the ecological crisis as a crisis of character where he talked about the total hypocrisy in many cases of so-called or selftitled environmentalists who in their own personal lives are very much contributing to part of the same problems which in their public lives are highly critical of. Berry threw down the gauntlet on that one. He said this is unacceptable. We need to root out our own hypocrisies first. But then he also went on to explore these larger political, structural problems that need to be addressed simultaneously. They’re not mutually exclusive. So I don’t know. I still don’t know where... I don’t think there’s any firm place to come down on that debate. One can tend to become too hard on oneself or one’s associates for their own contributions to the destruction that’s occurring. But then one also has to be compassionate, I believe and recognize basically, our victimhood, but without victimizing ourselves, do you know what I mean? That is to say that we are subject to these same structures and it is a daunting challenge (in many cases, but not all) to make different choices, especially if those choices have already been eliminated before we can make them. 19 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 RD: So what kind of things did you do when you returned to Salt Lake, or whatever community you may have been in after the Seattle protests? What kind of links were people making after those protests in their own communities? I mean you spoke to that somewhat, but... JJ: Yeah, I think I came back to Salt Lake after that, and I met Rob, I met my interviewer at that time. My life was inspired, changed for the better ever since then. Rob DeBirk is one of these environmental paragons in Utah who needs to be interviewed for this project, by damn. I will not see it finished without him. RD: Well, what other people.... (laughs). JJ: No, I had to give props to you because... RD: I don’t think I deserve them, but... JJ: Anyways, [ met people like Rob in Utah who were also thinking about these things and engaged and just realized that local engagement wherever you are was important. And the opportunities for activism are endless, anywhere you are in America, not to mention elsewhere. It doesn’t matter where you are, there is going to be a corporation where you live that’s worthy of protest. (laughs) You don’t need to worry about not having any targets for activism or being bored if you’re concerned about the state of the world. The state of the world is wherever you are. It’s not like, “Unless I live in New York, I don’t really need to worry.” Not at all, it’s wherever you are. And ironically or counter-intuitively, in some cases, the further you live from the epicenter of this industrial society, the more heavily affected you are by it. And a perfect... now see this actually links up to what I did, by joining FAIR and HEAL and getting into these environmental issues of toxicity and environmental health 20 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 and environmental justice where I learned about the fact that there were certain synthetic chemicals in the environment that are... that have accumulated at such high levels that the breast milk of pretty much every woman in America is now contaminated by synthetic, industrial chemicals. And in fact the inhabitants of the Arctic, the Inuit, they’ve been studied by the Canadian government and others and been found to have more dioxins in their body fat, more industrial bio-accumulative organic pollutants in their blood and their breast milk than pretty much anyone studied, despite living thousands of miles from the sources of the pollution. And that was a real shocker to me, a punch in the chest—to think that there are no boundaries or barriers or fairness or equity or democracy when it comes to pollution. There’s total injustice going on and there’s total inequity. The communities suffering the most from this toxic economy that we have that produces our plastics and paints and every other thing, all these hundred thousand synthetic chemicals which are on the market, didn’t even participate in that economy, and whose babies will have those chemicals in them without their consent. In fact a chemical-free future has been foreclosed on them. They can’t opt for that. So where’s the equitable sharing of burden there? The people, the forces, the decision makers who are behind the production of those things are doing what capitalism does very well and what a lot of people have been realizing for a lot of time, which is socializing the costs—externalizing the costs, and privatizing the profits. And all of us are the externalities of that system—all of us now. So, when I started learning about environmental toxicity, I got very concerned about that and still am. Now we know that everyone alive, basically, has a body burden of industrial chemicals the effects of which are not totally known and won’t be known 21 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 until they are known at which time it’s too late. But we already know enough to be very alarmed. Last year they did a study, I think, the Environmental Working Group where they found over two hundred and fifty synthetic chemicals in the blood in an average American baby. They say that the average American child has over a hundred and ninety synthetic organic chemicals in his or her blood today. I'read only yesterday from the Breast Cancer Fund that over ninety percent of this massive volume of chemicals has never been tested and never can be tested. How can you test a chemical for its effects on human health in the long term, multi-generationally and in synergy with the thousands of other chemicals to which we are exposed. It’s impossible. And for that reason, very few have been, yet the policy, the chemical regulation policy that reigns supreme in this country is this burden of proof on the consumer policy. Where these chemicals are presumed safe and allowed into the market and into our bodies until proven otherwise. And that system obviously has opened the door for total contamination and experimentation on us. Those chemicals that have actually been studied for their effects, their bio-accumulative and toxicological effects, normally have been found unacceptably hazardous and pulled from the market. And so, people have started to get this idea of the precautionary principle as being an operating principle for society that we should following, where knowing what we do know about the hazardousness of certain chemicals or even whole classes of chemicals, the smart thing to do is to not unleash them on the population and then say, “Let’s see if they’re too risky. We don’t think they are.” And only then begin regulating them when the risks, i.e. the illnesses start showing up. The prudent thing to do is the old adage from medicine, which is “first do no harm”—that’s the precautionary principle, it’s the duh 22 Jon Jensen 2 November 2007 principle I've heard it called, which is that if there is a reasonable presumption of harm, then you assume harm and require proof of safety in the case of these products before they’re unleashed and unrecallable. You can’t recall chemicals back to the factory or the lab after they are in someone’s blood. So, this whole mini diatribe is just to say that after learning about these issues and becoming quite alarmed and upset, I decided I wanted to do something about that in my context and in Utah. There are so many special toxic issues. I mean what I have been talking about is sort of a background toxicity that we all deal with everywhere. It’s in the pesticide aisle of your home improvement store. It’s in the cosmetics that you’re putting on. It’s everywhere. But in Utah, we have these extra special toxic burdens which are largely in the West Desert where the army has this stockpile of biological and chemical weapons, munitions that they were incinerating in this incinerator in Tooele. There’s another hazardous waste incinerator in another part of the West Desert and there’s radioactive waste dumping. There’s these special categories of uber toxicity which we have the misfortune of being doubly burdened by. So I learned about FAIR that was a group working on these issues and I started volunteering for them, then I worked for them for some years. RD: FAIR is an acronym for Families Against Incinerator Risk. So what year was it that you began working for FAIR? JJ: It must have been 2000. END OF INTERVIEW 23