Reviews

Ten years ago the Quaker project Turning the Tide (TtT) commissioned this short documentary which follows three activists – Trident Ploughshares activist Ellen Moxley, environmental activist Martin Shaw, and student campaigner Alison Matthias – as they take part in a variety of demonstrations and examines some of the core issues around protest, democracy and nonviolence. Can violence be effective? Is property damage justifiable and if so under what circumstances? Is civil disobedience anti-democratic or the life-blood of a healthy democracy…

In late January this year there was a very well-organised and dynamic anti-GM meeting in London called Gathering Momentum which attracted well over 100 participants, including farmers, scientists and activists, from all over Britain and Ireland. This very useful little booklet, distributed at the meeting, is essentially a print copy of the Stop GM website, but it reads very well in its own right. It provides a very clear and grounded rationale for opposition to GM and brings the reader quickly up to speed with worrying recent developments…

The basic argument of this book, originally written 18 months before 9/11, was that the “traditional” method of political control through the projection of military power, which Rogers dubbed “the control paradigm” would not work in an increasingly fragile and unpredictable world. He argued that a model of security based on a military security would simply fail as it did not address the growing socio-economic divide nor the rising environmental crisis, but merely attempted to keep a lid on the problem: “liddism” as he dubbed it. The hope…

Written by one of the foremost critics of UK foreign policy and published to coincide with the launch of War on Want’s YES campaign, calling for the withdrawal of British troops and “a negotiated settlement” to the war, this is a useful capsule summary of where things currently stand.

While much of this material (drones, “targeted killings”, secret prisons) will already be familiar to PN readers – and there’s less on negotiations than one might anticipate – there’s also some novel material on US attempts to privatise the Afghan…

The poetics of the Zapatistas should have been a perfect read. I’ve been fascinated by the Zapatista movement, ever since they stormed into San Cristobel in January 1994, and my sister Lucy (who lived in Mexico at the time) has often enthused of the literary quality of Subcomandante Marcos’s writing. So why was this book such a let down in parts?

Part of the problem was, I think, the author isn’t quite sure who his audience is. The title and front cover (a masked Zapatista doll carrying a rifle) suggest an activist readership, but…

Daniel Pennac, who is a well-known writer in France, was a total failure at school up to the age of fourteen. In the first part of this book he describes his despair, both in vivid anecdotes and general comment. “My God,” he says at one point, “the loneliness of the dunce, ashamed of never being able to do what you are supposed to be doing.” He became an insolent class clown, a vandal and a thief.

His insolence was to some extent justified by the mockery of some of his teachers, but it was teachers who saved him – first the French…

This was my first encounter with Simone Weil, the French philosopher, teacher and political activist, and I found her mesmerising – a huge intellect and a huge conscience. She dealt with the challenge that knowing and understanding the world creates an obligation to be involved in it, to affect it, by hurling herself into the stream of life to an extent verging on madness.

Although frail and clumsy, Weil sought out gruelling work in factories and farms; she was a union organiser; she went to fight with the anarchists in the Spanish…

Speaking at a public meeting in May 2008, Green Party leader and MP to be, Caroline Lucas noted that the language of fear and disaster surrounding climate change is both “deeply scary and deeply unhelpful.” According to Lucas “trying to terrify people into action” simply doesn’t work.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, doesn’t seem to have got the memo because Requiem for a Species is a deeply terrifying read.

According to Hamilton “catastrophic climate change is now virtually…

The PPU will be well-known to older readers of PN, but perhaps to others only because of the white “peace poppy”. What was once a mass movement supporting the pledge to “renounce war, and never again... [to] support or sanction another” became a small organisation, largely concerned with peace education.

Along the way the organisation faced challenges, losing members during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The PPU opposed conscription, continuing this opposition into “peacetime”, while supporting individual…

Wobegone is the third solo album by former Chumbawamba member Danbert Nobacon. Chumbawamba were (indeed still are, in their current acoustic incarnation) unique in UK popular music in combining a radical anarchist analysis and action with a creative trajectory that showed the same integrity as their politics.

Never afraid to experiment, their music was, at times, hit-and-miss but some of it was astonishingly, ecstatically good – all the more impressive when you think of the band’s origins in early ’80s post-punk Britain when they…

Though they need some unpacking, everything you need to know about what to eat can be boiled down to just seven words: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This is the conclusion of journalist Michael Pollan after years researching nutritional science. His latest book does some of this unpacking, with 64 simple rules for eating healthily and happily.

Though not anti-science, Pollan has framed these in everyday language, noting that while science has confirmed much of what culture has long known about how to eat well, “it is…

One of the sessions at PN’s 2010 Summer Camp was entitled “Can we eat our way out of crisis?” “Is that a practical workshop?” one wag asked. Everyone laughed, but if Colin Tudge is right – and on certain fundamentals I suspect that he is – then perhaps it should have been.

A modest proposal

Though best-known for his rather wonderful science writing (recent books include a Secret Life of Trees and a book on the evolution and classification of birds) Tudge has also spent over three decades thinking and writing about farming.…

With industrial civilisation destroying the planet, How Shall I Live my Life? is “the only question worth asking” according to the radical thinker Derrick Jensen. Thus the ten wide-ranging interviews with largely American activists, philosophers and writers conducted by Jensen centre on each person’s holistic methods of resistance to the environmental degradation caused by the dominant culture.

Reconnecting to the natural world, looking to indigenous cultures and increasing democracy are some of the common threads running through…

“We have been attacked while in international waters…the Israelis have behaved like pirates”. So says Henning Mankell describing the infamous attack by the Israeli army on the Gaza Aid Freedom Flotilla earlier this year. His piece is just one in a fine collection of articles edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, and published with admirable rapidity as a rebuttal to the official Israeli version of events.

This is an excellent resource for activists which provides both eyewitness accounts of the events of 31 May and detailed analysis of why…

The dogma of deterrence is now so deeply ingrained that the national corruption implicit in the willingness to murder the innocent is ignored. Robert Green dares to differ. For many years he was an aircraft bombardier who, if ordered, would have dropped a UK nuclear bomb near St Petersburg, causing “appallingly indiscriminate casualties and long-term poisonous effects from radioactive fallout” as well as destroying a beautiful ancient capital.

Luckily, he has seen the error of his ways. “I realised that nuclear weapons would not save…