Lewry, Gabrielle

Annie Sprinkle describes herself as a feminist porn activist, ecosexual and radical sex educator. With Beth Stephens, she has pioneered the ecosexuality movement – the eroticising of nature by coming into relationship with the earth, showing our natural partner the same love, care and respect we would a lover. Although some may consider this odd, she reminds us that really ‘all sex is eco sex, as we are really part of, not separate from, nature.’ However, this book focuses more on Sprinkle’s…

Human beings are social creatures and the effects of loneliness are deeply harmful to us, to our health and our mental state. We are inclined towards altruism and community but an obsession with individualism is driving us into isolation. And this separation can be useful to those in power: a community of people working together is not so easy to control as a fragmented society of apparently disparate individuals.

George Monbiot believes that loneliness has become an epidemic and…

In this novel Rivera Sun describes a USA of the not-too-distant future where the divide between rich and poor is even more pronounced than today. It is a land of media control, debt labour camps, martial law and curfews. Democracy no longer exists and terrorist attacks are common, but who are the real terrorists?

It all sounds very familiar and all too possible. However, what lifts her book up from the usual dystopian nightmare is what happens next.

Sun focuses her…

Eileen Flanagan is a Quaker, spiritual writer and climate change activist.

This book tells the story of her journey from young and idealistic Peace Corps teacher in Botswana to 50-year- old mother handcuffing herself to the White House fence to defend the environment. This is a wonderful book full of nourishing wisdom, courage and humour. I found Flanagan’s style immediately engaging, with a good balance of information and anecdote, and the pace of a good novel. She combines…

Essentially a handbook for those wanting to explore the potential of a spiritual approach to nonviolent direct action, this is a profoundly important, as well timely, book

Many people are now realising the need for a sense of spirit, a reclaiming of the sacred in their lives. And this embrace of spiritual beliefs can also be a taking back of power; a way of connecting, and taking responsibility.

Though working from within, spiritual activism – or ‘subtle activism’, as I…

Tip of a mammoth tusk carved as two reindeer depicted one behind the other; approximately 13,000 years old. Montastruc, France. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum

This exhibition, ‘Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind’, brings together for the first time in this country the earliest evidence of art in Europe ranging in age from 10,000 to 40,000 years old.

As a…