Bright Green Lies

How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

By: Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Max Wilbert

Narrated by: Joel Richards

Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

"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 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.

©2021 Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert (P)2021 Tantor

Best book ever

This book is about the ultimate truth - life, and saving life of our beautiful planet. By exposing lies, you fight for truth. The truth is suppressed, hidden, green washed every way possible. But it's very simple. In fact , so simple that any 3 year old can understand - without clean air, water, food we all die, not only us but the whole planet. We are part of a living organism, but smart or dumb enough to kill what keeps us alive.

The book that made me face the facts.

I love this book for showing the impossibility of a sustainable life on this earth as long as we are an industrial civilization. You can not turn this living world into materials and think it is fine. It's not. The last 40 years has been a nightmare for the other wild species that has seen an averge population loss of 50 percent. The next 40 years will take the rest if we don't change. This book confronts the lies that keeps this hostile civilization running. This book gives the right diagnosis to the problem.

A GIFT For The EARTH

This is, perhaps, the most important book of our time. Read this or listen to it with your community and then live and act accordingly,

one element of levity amidst the grief

i particularly appreciated their indignant refusal to let go of their outrage at Naomi Klein’s monumentally stupid line about polar bears not doing it for her.

Good read if your goal is hopeless depression.

A laundry list of why various solutions to climate change will not work. Some problems are made out to be much worse than they are. It seems like the goal of the book is to whine about how terrible people are for worrying more about people and less about nature. The solutions suggested at the end are entirely unworkable; if we give up all extractive technology we will not be able to feed 8 billion people. Like the Bright Greens, the authors ignore that climate change is a symptom of ecological overshoot, and climate change can not be addressed without solving the real issue; more people on earth than can be supported long term.

Probably right, but useless

BGL describes in detail much of what we expected- there is no clear way out of the current eco disaster. But worse, it gives ammo to the climate deniers who can now say that even if one believes Climate Change is happening there is nothing we can do anyway.
BGL devotes less than a paragraph to the ultimate driver- too many people, as it is not worth talking about. Similarly dismisses out of hand Nuclear Power as part of the solution.
Their solution appears to be for mankind to return to pre-agriculture society (hunter-gatherer?)with no discussion of what that would entail for individual people and the utter impossibility of that picture.