Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It
by Max Wilbert, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen (Monkfish Book Publishers, 2021)
“Bright Green Lies” examines the problems with mainstream responses to the climate crisis, and proposes a whole different set of solutions anchored in defending and restoring the natural world.
The book makes the case that solar and wind energy, electric cars, efficiency programs, and green cities are failing to protect the planet, because in large part these technologies are designed to protect empire from the effects of peak oil and ecological collapse. Rather than sustaining the natural world, these techno-fixes are designed to sustain industrial civilization — the way of life that is killing the planet.
“When we find ourselves no longer listening to and retelling bright green lie after bright green lie,” the authors write, “we will find ourselves where we should have been all along, in alignment with the earth and with the powerful, wonderful, beautiful, creative processes that have made life on this planet what it is.”
478 pages — published March 16, 2021
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The book is also on Amazon, where it has a 4.7 star rating from readers.
A wonderful reader offered to create an index for the book. You can download it here:
Praise for Bright Green Lies
“Laying out a nine-point manifesto of bio-centric goals, Bright Green Lies suggests unity with Earth will require us to build communities that are self-sufficient and based on biological integrity.”
Spirituality & Health
[S]ubstantial…detailed and exhaustive…a thorough critique of the environmental protection movement and its reliance on renewable resources.”
Publishers Weekly
“This disturbing but very important book makes clear we must dig deeper than the normal solutions we are offered.”
Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia Works
“Bright Green Lies is a much needed wakeup call if we are to avoid sleepwalking to extinction— joining 200 of our fellow creatures and relatives that are being driven to extinction per day by an extractivist, colonizing money machine that is lubricated by limitless greed, and guided by the mechanical mind of industrialism.
This destructive machine is labelled ‘civilization,’ and its violent and brutal imposition on indigenous cultures and communities is legitimized as the ‘civilizing mission’ for which exterminations of the rich cultural and biological diversity of the Earth is necessary for the linear, blind rush to progress. Religions change, extermination continues. But there are other ways: the ways of indigenous cultures to whom we must turn to learn how to walk lightly on the Earth.”
Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of NAVDANYA and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology; author of Earth Democracy and Making Peace with the Earth
“Bright Green Lies exposes the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of leading environmental groups and their most prominent cheerleaders. The best-known environmentalists are not in the business of speaking truth, or even holding up rational solutions to blunt the impending ecocide, but instead indulge in a mendacious and self-serving delusion that provides comfort at the expense of reality. They fail to state the obvious: We cannot continue to wallow in hedonistic consumption and industrial expansion and survive as a species.
The environmental debate, Derrick Jensen and his coauthors argue, has been distorted by hubris and the childish desire by those in industrialized nations to sustain the unsustainable. All debates about environmental policy need to begin with honoring and protecting, not the desires of the human species, but with the sanctity of the Earth itself.
We refuse to ask the right questions because these questions expose a stark truth—we cannot continue to live as we are living. To do so is suicidal folly. ‘Tell me how you seek, and I will tell you what you are seeking,’ the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said. This is the power of Bright Green Lies: It asks the questions most refuse to ask, and in that questioning, that seeking, uncovers profound truths we ignore at our peril.”
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of America: The Farewell Tour
“Bright Green Lies is a book I’ve been keenly awaiting, a book made of numbers, clear thinking, wit, and love. Bright Green Lies urges the protection of the natural world in all its sacred and manifest diversity. Arm yourself with the precision and honesty that this book fiercely inspires and demands; recognize that life itself is the sole bearer of effective solutions, that organic, ecological, elemental, and biomic life can indeed save the planet from catastrophe.”
Suprabha Seshan, rainforest conservationist at India’s Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary
“Bright Green Lies lays out in heartbreaking and sometimes disgusting detail the simple fact that to maintain the growth of techno-industrial civilization by replacing fossil fuels with solar panels, wind turbines, hydro-power, electric cars, and whatever other green machines we might construct still requires the continuing rape of Mother Earth and the poisoning of her water, air, soil, wildlife, and human populations.
The authors tell us unequivocally: Green growth is a doomed enterprise, and there is no future for humankind living in harmony with nature in which we fail to recognize that unlimited economic and population growth on a finite planet is ecological suicide. Environmental groups that blithely refuse to question the industrial growth paradigm should be fearful of this book, as it exposes with a sword point their hypocrisies and falsehoods. I suggest they seek the immediate burning of all copies.”
Cristopher Ketcham, author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West
“Bright Green Lies dismantles the illusion of ‘green’ technology in breathtaking, comprehensive detail, revealing a fantasy that must perish if there is to be any hope of preserving what remains of life on Earth. From solar panels to wind turbines, from LED light bulbs to electric cars, no green fantasy escapes Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert’s revealing peak behind the green curtain. Bright Green Lies is a must-read for all who cherish life on Earth.”
Jeff Gibbs, writer, director, and producer of the film Planet of the Humans
“Bright Green Lies is a tour de force. The authors expose many of the fallacies of mainstream environmentalism and economics. Their main thesis is that much of what passes for environmental concern today is geared primarily toward sustaining an unsustainable ‘lifestyle.’ Most so-called ‘sustainable’ practices are just a slower way to degrade the Earth’s ecosystems.
For years, I have been harping on the fact that society needs to do a full accounting of the real costs of our lifestyles. This book exposes much of what is missing in our flawed accounting system, and the genuine costs of this failure. I thought I knew a lot about the environmental impacts of the consumer society, but Jensen and his co-authors have shown me that I, like many people, only had a superficial appreciation of these costs.
Bright Green Lies takes off where William Catton’s book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change left off and provides a stimulating roadmap of how to think about our environmental crisis. It makes a powerful case for what society needs to do to reevaluate its present an unsustainable pathway. Hopefully, Bright Green Lies will result in more thoughtful, insightful, and ultimately productive environmental activism.”
George Wuerthner, ecologist, wildlands activist, photographer, and author of 38 books, including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy
Voices of Resistance: We Choose To Speak by Max Wilbert (2018)
We Choose To Speak is a collection of essays written by Max Wilbert between 2013 and 2018. This collection was compiled and edited by Boris Forkel in Germany, and is published by, Babylon Apocalypse. 200 pages.
This book is no longer available for purchase.
Essays in the collection include:
- The Everyday Violence of Modern Culture
- 15 Points on Organizing
- The Modern COINTELPRO and How to Fight It
- Is the Climate Movement Making Progress?