book review

Terania Creek, a rainforest under threat from logging, Australia, 1979: hippies swarm worksites, spike trees, sabotage or sit in front of dozers, play a sort of honor-system treesitting game, barricade roads, tie trees together with cable, pour gasoline near illegally parked cop cars and divert a creek to flood the road, all while keeping their spirits high with omm circles, communal kitchens and childcare. Environmental Blockades: Obstructive Direct Action and the History of the Environmental Movement, published in 2021, “aims to inform the theoretical and practical concerns of both [activists and academics].

“I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said ‘drawn towards her’ but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.” Twenty-six years before Dracula was published, there was Carmilla. The novella, written by French author Sheridan Le Fanu, chronicles the story of a noblewoman named Laura living in Germany who receives a mysterious yet beautiful countess named Carmilla as her guest.

The world is fucked, and that’s okay. This is the core thematic message of Desert, a long-form manifesto covering climate collapse and its meaning for the Anarchist movement. Written by an anonymous ecologically inclined anarchist, Desert prefaces itself by almost immediately asking the reader the question, “what if we don’t win?” It’s a hard prospect to think about, much less seriously engage with, but Desert doesn’t shy away from it. The text makes a convincing point for thinking about it; after all, lots of people come into the movement full of revolutionary ambition and zeal, dead-set on toppling the hegemonic power structures of our world and/or saving the environment from said power structures, only to burn out and give up in disillusionment.

Old News, Same Nike Joshua Hunt’s University of Nike is not a new story, but a legacy of corruption that shows no sign of changing or even slowing down. It can be difficult to come to grips with the reality that the students of UO are immersed in an active model for the privatization of public universities. So much of the institution that UO students have invested in is built upon the sweatshop labor of women and children trapped in perpetual poverty.

Although Angela Davis had her book Are Prisons Obsolete? first published in 2003, I find it’s contents now and for sometime into the future as text for serious study. Making a strong and relevant case for prison abolition, she plainly delivers the goods deriving from established historical record and the current realities of market driven social dynamism in her thesis. Presenting the nexus of profit and punishment as it exists she informs the reader of the reality that prisons are.