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 writer 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.