It’s hard to make people understand something when their entitlement depends on not understanding it.

Below are some of my takeaways from the conversation with the book’s authors “Bright Green Lies” Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert.

When people ask “How can we stop global warming?”, what they’re really asking is “How do we stop global warming without stopping industrial civilization, without stopping industrial fishing, without stopping the murder of the oceans?”

And the answer is YOU CAN’T. It’s like asking: “How can I stop emphysema without stopping smoking?”

“How do we save the salmon?” What they’re really asking is “How do we save the salmon without removing dams, without stopping industrial logging?”

We think we’re so clever when we make a lithium-ion battery that stores 1 megajoule per kilogram but nature made this thing called ‘fat’ which is 37 megajoules per kilogram. And we’re so excited when we make something that has less than a third of the energy storing capacity of a potato.

We hear that Costa Rica is a miracle because 72% of its electricity comes from hydropower. One of the problems is hydropower is counted as carbon neutral but in fact…Let’s ignore the fact that hydropower kills rivers, land inundated under reservoirs. In addition, it ends up that it’s actually even worse for the climate than burning coal, for example. They call dams methane bombs because they produce so much methane, and they produce more greenhouse emissions than coal. Yet we pretend that our accounting systems are more important than what happens in reality. It’s pretty much the entire culture in that show.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. ~ Upton Sinclair

I’d say: “It’s hard to make people understand something when their entitlement depends on not understanding it.”

The sorrow and the grief is a coal-burning inside and it never goes away; the pain never stops. When you allow yourself to feel that pain it does kill you. But there’s a wonderful thing about being dead which is once you’re dead they can’t touch you anymore because the you that dies is the you that is identified with the system more than with the planet.

By Max Wilbert

When the truth sweeps you away, you feel like you’re lost in a storm at night. I just want to tell people: that grief is yours; it’s a sacred thing. It’s like a gift from the world; you grieve for what you love, what you respect, and what you revere. It’s a true gift; that isn’t something to be afraid of or run away from. It’s something to embrace and honor.

We don’t have a magic wand to make industrial civilization go away; we wish that we could but the strongest thing we have is that love. If we revere, we respect it, we work to build that emotion in all of us; that is the power that will carry us through that grief and through all the struggle that we have to get through.

Written by Irina Le

Take a listen to the conversation and you’re welcome to reflect on your takeaways from there: