What We Leave Behind is a piercing, impassioned guide to living a truly responsible life on earth. Human waste, once considered a gift to the soil, has become toxic material that has broken the essential cycle of decay and regeneration. Here, award-winning author Derrick Jensen and activist Aric McBay weave historical analysis and devastatingly beautiful prose to remind us that life—human and nonhuman—will not go on unless we do everything we can to facilitate the most basic process on earth, the root of sustainability: one being's waste must always become another being’s food. “An in-depth analysis of waste and wastefulness … Some may bridle at Jensen and McBay's bluntness, urgency, and bold vision, but their demand for the end of wishful thinking and beginning of environmental transformation is rooted in meticulously constructed arguments, striking psychological insights, and profound love of life.” –Donna Seaman, Booklist

“What We Leave Behind is the kind of direct, unflinching, personal writing that you'd expect from a memoir about a harrowing childhood, not one about the state of the planet, or what happens to waste … The directness of the storytelling and of the horrific vision [Jensen and McBay] lay out is both depressing, and oddly, comforting.” –Brita Belli, E Magazine

“Jensen and McBay's message that we need to grow up and 'put away the childish notion that we have the right to take whatever we want from nonhumans' is eminently reasonable.” –Publishers Weekly