When environmentalist, author, and cultural critic Jensen was getting ready to go on tour to promote his latest book, I collaborated with talented print and Web designer Tiiu Ruben and created promotional copy for brochures, flyers, reading events, and multimedia companion pieces.
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Book jacket copy:

Derrick Jensen is an activist, author, journalist, small farmer, bee-keeper, teacher, and philosopher whose speaking engagements in recent years have packed university auditoriums, bookstores, churches ― you name the place. His acclaimed book, A Language Older Than Words, has been said to accomplish the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader’s heart, as well as energizing the mind.

A typical Jensen event is multidimensional and feels a bit like traveling beneath the earth among tree roots, as they twist their way into soil, rock, river beds and accompany fish, insects, discarded tires, cellophane wrappers, animal minds, history, and human instinct on strange and interlocking journey.

Speaking in an almost improvisational style, Jensen explores the nature of injustice, of what civilizations do to the natural world and how, in the face of the resulting horror that is one of the all too apparent consequences of grave injustice, civilized human beings create intricate systems of denial, silence, abnegation, deception and self-hatred to keep it at bay.

He also reaches back to our collective childhoods, to the reality of magic in life, to discuss how nature has spoken to us and to how we must remember all the conversations we’ve had with her and renew them. It’s his antidote to cynicism and apocalypse. That there is a language much older than the lying language we use daily, without being aware, to dispel the horrors of modern living and dying.

If there is a connection between Tiger Woods, newspaper journalism, the bad moods of trees, child abuse, amnesia, school, language, and salmon, Jensen finds those connections in a most personal way and exploits them so that the listener can actually experience the intricacies of Jensen’s point of view.

It is indeed a heart rending, mind expanding, and ultimately healing exercise to explore Jensen’s root system, with him not so much as a guide, but an experienced fellow traveler.