In his 1971 classic, Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky wrote that “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Environmental activist and writer Derrick Jensen knows what he wants to attack, and he thinks he has a constructive alternative, but I have my doubts.

In Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization (2006), Jensen argues that civilization, which he defines as a culture “that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities,” is inherently unsustainable. This is because “Cities, the defining feature of civilization, have always relied on taking resources from the surrounding countryside, meaning, first, that no city has ever been or ever will be sustainable on its own; and second, that in order to continue their ceaseless expansion, cities must ceaselessly expand the areas they must ceaselessly exploit.”

He therefore says we should bring civilization down “by whatever means necessary,” including the use of violence. This, Jensen believes, would allow us to return to our natural, non-civilized state of being. In short, Jensen believes we should all return to local, subsistence-based economies of the kind enjoyed by tribal peoples for hundreds of thousands of years before the rise of the first city-state. He believes that non-civilized living maintains a harmony among people and between people and the natural world, and that it would be possible to return to this virtuous lifestyle following civilization’s collapse.

Jensen’s critique of civilization is damning, and I have few quarrels with it. His portrayal of non-civilized life, however, is dangerously naïve.

He writes, “This I know: Indigenous peoples have entirely different relationships to each other and to the land, based on perceiving ‘nature’ as consisting of beings (including humans) to enter into relationship with, not objects to be exploited.” Is Jensen correct?

In The Biophilia Hypothesis (edited by Stephen Kellert and Edward Wilson, 1993), there’s an essay by Jared Diamond entitled New Guineans and Their Natural World. Diamond believes that New Guinea offers a unique opportunity to understand non-civilized life. New Guineans were still using stone technology until European colonization in the 19th Century. Most continued to use stone tools and remained isolated from the outside world until the 1950s, and some maintained this lifestyle until the 1980s. The people of New Guinea are also incredibly diverse, regardless of whether that diversity is measured genetically, linguistically, culturally, economically, politically, or ecologically.

Diamond writes that, by and large, New Guineans don’t share empathic relationships with the non-human inhabitants of their ecosystems. He writes that “It is not only that New Guineans fail to cultivate friendly responses from wild animals. They also seem not to take account the fact that these are living creatures capable of feeling pain.”

For example, “when a wild animal is captured in the forest early in the day and is to be transported alive for the rest of the day so that it can be killed and eaten fresh in the village that evening, the animal’s legs may be broken to prevent it from escaping.” Diamond also writes about New Guineans who torture captured bats for amusement. New Guineans have also driven many animal species to extinction, such as the rhinoceros-like marsupials called diprotodonts and two species of large wallabies, and they’ve pushed a number of other species, such as the tree kangaroo, to the edge of extinction.

New Guinea isn’t an isolated example. While it’s true that the planet’s non-civilized peoples have historically tried to conserve their land base and the non-human populations living on it, they have also brought about the extinction of many species, including most of the world’s megafauna like the Woolly Mammoth.

Contrary to Jensen’s romantic beliefs about indigenous people living in near-perfect harmony with the natural world, Diamond writes, “In reality, modern and prehistoric peoples throughout the world are human: neither animals, nor paragons, but human. Like other humans throughout the world, New Guineans kill those animals that their technology permits them to kill. The more susceptible species become depleted or exterminated, leaving less susceptible species which people continue to hunt without being able to exterminate them. When technology improves, as it did in New Guinea with the arrival of the bow and arrow, or with the arrival of dogs a few thousand years ago, or with the arrival of shotguns within the present generation, some species that have been able to survive previous hunting technology become susceptible and disappear. A quick first wave of exterminations, followed by a slower trickle, has similarly marked the arrival of humans in all other areas of the world explored paleontologically: the islands of the Mediterranean, Pacific Islands, Madagascar, Australia, and the Americas.”

Jensen also holds romantic views of non-civilized warfare. Whereas he believes civilization is founded upon trauma-inducing violence, he thinks tribal peoples lived relatively peaceful and emotionally secure lives. He writes that “Civilized wars are parodies of indigenous warfare, which is a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play, meaning civilized warfare is a parody of play.”

Let’s compare this to the realities of indigenous warfare in the Pacific Northwest. According to professor of anthropology and archaeology Alan McMillan, “Raiding and warfare were commonplace, even among people speaking the same language. Raids were frequently to avenge insults or injury, or to take slaves. Less common was full-scale warfare over territory. After a successful raid, warriors burned the houses and turned homeward, their canoes laden with booty, the severed heads of their vanquished foes, and women and children taken as slaves.” (Natives Peoples and Cultures of Canada, Second Edition, 1995) This kind of warfare hardly sounds like “play,” and it seems likely that it produced more than its share of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I believe the basic flaw in Jensen’s work is his failure to understand how hunting technologies facilitated social stratification, a process that culminated in the rise of cities and the genesis of civilization. According to Barbara Ehrenreich in Blood Rites (1997), the invention of projectile weapons like bows made hunting far more effective. This allowed men to monopolize hunting, a practice that she believes was previously conducted by the entire tribe. This led to the formation of warrior elites. The rise of these elites coincided with the extinction or rapid decline of major predator species, which removed one of the natural constraints on the development of human societies.

Warrior elites initially formed to protect their societies from predators, but with the disappearance of the predators the warriors began running protection rackets, protecting their own tribes from rival warriors while stealing the resources of other tribes. This let warrior elites dominate their societies. Once this dynamic was set in motion it spread quickly, as peaceful tribes were forced to militarize and stratify in order to protect themselves from the predation of their warlike neighbors. From that point on, it was only a matter of time before technological advances made civilization possible, allowing it to spontaneously appear in places like the Middle East, Africa, India, China, and Central and South America. These civilizations became ever-more complicated and expansive with every new technological break-through, and even as they fell apart they spawned new civilizations to take their place.

Unless we render the planet incapable of supporting human life—which is a very real danger—this dynamic won’t be stopped by the simple collapse of our civilization. We won’t forget how to forge steel and create weapons, and warrior elites will continue using these technologies to enforce social hierarchies and to exploit the natural world. Ecological and social violence didn’t begin with civilization, and they probably won’t end when our civilization collapses. Instead, this collapse will likely generate incomparable violence. We’ve seen what happens when states like Iraq and the former Yugoslavia have disintegrated. If our global civilization falls, we can expect to see the same kind of madness metastasizing everywhere. Though he doesn’t realize it, this is what Jensen is advocating.

I think Jensen is justifiably terrified by civilization’s monstrous cruelty, a cruelty that’s expressed not only in environmental destruction and militarism but also in family violence, such as the sexual abuse his father inflicted upon him when he was little. To protect his spirit from being crushed, I believe that he’s erected inside his heart a tribal Eden, an imaginary world of ecological and social sanity that he’s convinced himself not only once existed, but that still exists as a vibrant potential awaiting our rediscovery. By associating non-civilized societies with love and life and civilized societies with rape and death, he’s erected the same kind of psychologically convenient binary opposition that has historically led people to commit acts of profound violence in the name of a higher good.

By encouraging people—other people, of course: he doesn’t think he has the aptitude for this sort of thing—to blow up dams, pull down cell phone towers, and drop e-bombs to knock out electronic infrastructures, and by promising them that a purified world of non-civilized bliss will arise from civilization’s rubble, he’s advocating what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “apocalyptic violence.” Proponents of apocalyptic violence believe that the world as we know it is so corrupt that it must be destroyed so a new and more perfect world can be born. Apocalyptic violence underlies such diverse ideologies as those held by Christian Premillennialists, the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and the Esoteric Nazi movement.

The allure of apocalyptic violence lies in its refusal to recognize the tragic paradox of the human condition: creatures capable of symbolic thought and social co-ordination are equally capable of acts of great beauty and cruelty, and will tend to create societies and technologies that eventually outstrip the environment’s capacity to sustain them. For the proponent of apocalyptic violence there is no tragedy, there’s only an evil that needs to be uprooted so that goodness can blossom. Apocalyptic violence gives people a sense of meaning, purpose, and righteousness, but like all forms of violence, it devalues the very things it’s trying to protect and it eventually makes us resemble our enemies. When, for instance, Jensen says that as a child he should have killed his father, when he bemoans his own reluctance to blow up dams, and when he reviles pacifists for their “cowardice,” I wonder if he’s showing the same contempt for his own perceived weakness and vulnerability that the patriarchy he despises shows for these supposedly “feminine” traits.

Despite everything I’ve said, I strongly recommend Endgame Volume I. Jensen is a very skilful and thoughtful writer, and one who perceives the suffering of the human and non-human worlds with exceedingly rare clarity and love. The paths he walks are worth exploring, even if we don’t follow him into the dead-end he’s currently wandering down.