Falsehoods and ambiguities

There are several easy critiques that Jensen leaves himself open to in the course of his writings. While I don't suggest that these are really problematic to his overall argument, I've come across them and want to point them out for the sake of completeness.

Jensen, in his nature-loving bias, occasionally misunderstands basic scientific understandings of the world. For instance, his concept of evolution is particularly flawed:

Endgame, p. 36: “Another way to put this is that any group of beings (human or nonhuman, plant or anmial) who take more from their surroundings than they give back will, obviously, deplete their surroundings, after which they will either have to move, or their population will crash (which, by the way, is a one sentence disproof of the notion that competition drives natural selection: if you hyper-exploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take. Duh).”

The problem with this is that, even if cooperation and giving back to your environment is the thing that allows you to survive in the long run, it's still competition that's selecting for the individuals who do that the best. Jensen seems to have conflated the social-striving, rat-race connotations of the word 'competition' with the ecological one, which is nearly tautological - those individuals that survive best, for whatever reasons are most relevant to their situation, are the best competitors and therefore the fittest, the survivors.

Specific claims regarding indigenous peoples are misleading or entirely false.

Endgame: “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.”

While there may be instances of non-lethal, formalized warfare, it is also true that bitter, bloody warfare in some form is common at nearly all levels of social integration. The Mantaro highlanders of Peru built fortified towns and fought to take and keep good land (Earle, 1997). Chiefdoms in Bronze Age Thy, Denmark warred for prestige and livestock (Earle, 1997). Hawaiian kingdoms fought over good irrigable land (Earle, 1997). The Yanomamo are famously warlike, often destroying whole communities, gang-raping captured women, and, again, taking land (Earle and Johnson, 1987). The Central Enga of Highland New Guinea engage in “frequent and vicious warfare,” (Earle and Johnson, 1987). While these societies are all more integrated than the family level society, few of them meet Jensen's definition of civilized: they do not depend on imported resources (Jensen, 2006).

Derrick Jensen and more pronouncedly David Abram often suggest that indigenous communities, who spend so much of their cultural and intellectual life paying attention to their landbases, are much less likely to do things that will hurt those landbases; they are "sane and intelligent" inhabitants of the land. The stark contrasts between Alberta’s tar sands and literally any indigenous homeland make this a plausible argument. However, the situation is once again vastly more complicated than Jensen’s presentation lets on. While it's certainly true that native cultures understood/understand their environments intimately, there are plenty of counterexamples in which non-civilized groups have drastically altered their environments in ways they would likely not have done by choice. For instance, the Enga of New Guinea have “greatly diminished the former diversity of plants and animals” in their valleys, and created a situation of circumscribed resources and lowered dietary quality (Earle and Johnson 1987).

Native Americans did respect and understand their relationship with animals like deer and beavers, but were influenced by the attractive offers made by European traders. The autonomous decision made by Native groups to trade possibly over-harvested native plants and animals in exchange for trade goods of real value to them should not be slighted. While disease, imperialism, and alcohol were exogenous negative influences on native land ethics, they do not mean that native communities couldn't and didn't make decisions that hurt their landbases - the introduction of Europeans did not remove all agency from Native communities. One might also ask: what good is a strict conservation policy and culture if it cannot withstand a rigorous test like this.

This does not mean that indigenous peoples are “just as bad” as Exxon-Mobil, nor does it justify their exploitation. Had he been more honest, Jensen could have presented these ambiguities and outliers without harm to his argument. After all, indigenous communities don’t need to be perfect, and they don’t need to be uniformly sustainable, to provide many great examples of sustainable ways of living. As Jared Diamond pointed out, “[m]anaging environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult,” (Diamond, 2005) – and it’s neither fair nor realistic to hold indigenous peoples to a standard of land use for purely rhetorical purposes.

Premising his argument on the ecological wisdom of natives hurts Jensen's argument - it doesn't matter if all native peoples behaved the way he's advocating we act - just having some examples gives us the proof that it's possible and provides the light to guide us; making such blanket statements makes his argument superficially vulnerable to being undermined by counterexamples, even though his core argument remains valid.
Further, the usage histories of the terms civilized and indigenous are full of exploitative, misrepresentative, and out-right malicious arguments. As scholars, we can’t allow the backlash against such things to remove from consideration superficially similar intellectually responsible arguments. Any attempt to use facts about indigenous cultures and lifestyles to prove what is essentially a political argument must be held to a very high standard. Such arguments must be replete with carefully qualified statements and specific ethnographic citations. In this sense, Jensen’s argument fails even when its claims are true.