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Biology

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Erased Edges

When, by some act of grace, the lines we think are there dissolve, something else appears, something timeless and rich, an intermediate zone, languid and latent, the lushness of something about to be and in no particular hurry to make it happen. The boundary between physical and spiritual melts, and we see that one is always infused with the other.

By Barbara Hurd March 2001
The Sun Interview

Enemy Of The State

An Interview With John Zerzan

I’m talking about time not existing. Time as a continuing thread that unravels in an endless progression, linking all events together while remaining independent of them — that doesn’t exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time. This reification of time is related to the notion of mass production and division of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said: Identical seconds. Identical people. Identical chores repeated endlessly. But when you realize that no two occurrences are identical, and that each moment is different from the moment before, time simply disappears. If events are always novel, then not only is routine impossible, but the notion of time is meaningless.

By Derrick Jensen September 1998
The Sun Interview

The Plants Respond

An Interview With Cleve Backster

At thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the thought entered my mind to burn the leaf. I didn’t verbalize the idea; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only thing it could have been reacting to was the mental image.

By Derrick Jensen July 1997
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Forgetting

On the nineteenth of April 1989, one of the huge gun turrets on the battleship Iowa blew up, killing the sailors who were manning it. Debate about responsibility for the explosion continued long afterward, but lost in the emotion of the tragedy was a curious aspect of the story.

By David Ehrenfeld December 1995
The Sun Interview

Limiting The Future

An Interview With David Ehrenfeld

Our new false god is the idea that we can order the future. It’s a secular messianic view of a world in which there will be no death, no sickness, no stupidity — a world we will have totally ordered by the force of our own intellects and technology.

By Derrick Jensen December 1995
The Sun Interview

What The Universe Remembers

An Interview With Rupert Sheldrake

My theory is concerned with self-organizing natural systems and the cause of form. The cause of all these forms, I believe, is organizing fields, form-shaping fields, which I call morphic fields, from the Greek word for form. I’m saying that the forms of societies, ideas, crystals, and molecules all depend on the way previous ones have been organized. There’s a kind of built-in memory in the morphic fields of each thing.

By David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick July 1993
The Sun Interview

Progress And Other Lies

An Interview With Thomas Berry

The root of our contemporary industrial pathology is what I call a deep, hidden rage in the Western world against the human condition. We are devastating the planet in an orgy of destructiveness. We refuse to accept anything in its natural state.

By Ralph Earle July 1990