As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial#a Graphic Novel

Very depressing. Makes a clear case that corporate fixes for our doomed civilization are so muuch hogwash. You know, the fixes that urge us to buy new light bulbs and others seen on various corporate green ads. Oh, the one where a woman urges us to respect her company because it "keeps us moving" as if that were a great human need in a polluted world under constant onslaught from global warming storms, fires, and droughts. Should be given to everyone who likes comics instead of non-fiction books.

Follow the adventures of a too-observant young girl and a mysterious one-eyed stuffed bunny as they face down a liberal best friend, a sell-out psychiatrist, Al Gore, vivisectors, prison guards, and space aliens, on the way to the revolution! Sound like an unlikely plot? Yet it somehow works, with a story that finds its own edge between naturalism and the mythic, perfectly illustrated by Stephanie McMillan's naif-style illustrations. You'll be cheering by the end, ready to join the determined army of the wild rising like the tide in a last-page effort to save the planet. And where the story ends is where we have to begin. Funny, grim, delightful and dead serious all at once.

Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan's As the World Burns is a revolutionary graphic novel decrying the failure of the green movement. We have become a self-congratulatory society of "green" consumers, recyclers, yogi mediators, and letter-writers. Utilizing pigtailed girls, a one-eyed eco-revolutionary bunny, and a wise bird, the authors expose the fallacies of patting ourselves on the back as we continue down an unsustainable consumption path headed straight for world destruction. Some quick math performed by Kranti (a character from McMillan's Minimum Security cartoon) reveals that even if everyone (100% of the US population) changed our light bulbs, recycled half our total waste, cut our driving in half, installed low-flow showerheads, and adjusted our thermostats by two degrees, the end results would be a ONE-TIME 21% reduction in carbon emissions, which given our current rate of growth, would be offset in 10 years. The real culprits in our ecocide? Corporations and the government they have in their pockets. And what are they doing? Running marketing campaigns and releasing movies to convince individual consumers to take the blame. In As the World Burns, a former-politician-turned-activist conspires with corporations to distract individuals from the systemic predicament, knowing full well that green consumers will pay more to feel good about themselves. As the World Burns is much more than sharp dialogue about the futility of eco-friendly consumerism. Aliens have also arrived on the planet, intent on eating up all Earth's resources, and expecting to have to fight the planet's current residents. To their surprise, the Bible-thumping Dad-worshipping President gladly gives away the planet in exchange for bars of gold, which the aliens know is absolutely useless, not even giving the humans a buzz, but they go gaga for it. The plot thickens even farther as a pill-pushing therapist tries to medicate away our heroine's societal discontent, the one-eyed Bunnista starts his own campaign to free tortured animals, and the government locks bunnies and any suspected bunny sympathizers in terrorist detention centers. The authors of As the World Burns argue that modern industrial society is inherently unsustainable, requiring a no-compromise stance from activists who truly want to change the direction of the global population. In the novel, a raccoon advises, "Stop insisting on your growth economy, on acquiring more and more until you consume the entire planet." We can no longer ignore the natural world, but as the wise bird educates us, humans lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years and could learn to again if we were willing.

The anarcho-primitive activist and post-civilization philosopher Derrick Jensen really knows how to make an impact. Readers who agree with his general philosophy need not agree with every single one of his positions, though you can't deny that he's very effective at advancing them with deft use of persuasion and polemics. This tongue-in-cheek graphic novel came as a bit of a surprise, because I assumed that the "stay in denial" portion of the title would be directed at anti-environmentalists. On the contrary, the book is actually directed at environmentalists who have fallen for popular rhetoric about how their individual actions (recycling, buying new light bulbs, driving a hybrid, etc.) may actually make a major difference in the health of the planet. I don't totally agree with Jensen's disdain for personal virtue, but it's hard to deny that casual environmentalism detracts attention from the true causes of the world's problems. The status quo in business, economics, and politics is the real problem, and to save the planet we might just need a revolutionary structural overhaul of modern civilization. While this fictional story is simplistic and a bit forced, and comes nowhere near the intelligence and emotion of Jensen's other works, as an entertaining graphic novel the message is quite compelling. The low-key but expressive artwork of political cartoonist Stephanie McMillan surely adds to the effect. Perhaps this type of quick-hitting storytelling, rather than lengthy technical and philosophical screeds, will inspire caring folks to take real action. [~doomsdayer520~]

Another excellent work from Derrick Jensen. The so-called green movement is being co-opted by the very mega corporations who are doing the destroying of the planet. They make the big decisions, they rig the elections, they own the mass media and public mind control technologies, they control the economy, the money and they will not stop. Al Gore described part of the problem and told us what we can do, but Derrick does the math. If every man woman and child did them all, and they never would, it only adds up to 21% of the carbon that the US spews. The rest comes from the mega industries and their carbon spew increases about 2% per year so that savings won't last long. Buying green products will not save the planet. We need to find a way for people to understand that they are being bamboozled so they can step into their own power. For those who will say this book is short on solutions I say that is because there really isn't going to be any solution until a lot of people quit believing all the green-wash hype. How we get everyone talking to one another and getting out of our mass denial, so we can do something effective, is the project that we need to focus on. Derrick has described what we are denying, now we have work to do. We see the enemy and it is us, ...but mostly its them.