Theresa Wolfwood
Vandana Shiva has a knack of bringing together issues we often see as separate, and linking our awareness to these connections.
In Soil Not Oil she argues that the triple crisis of the title is actually a triple opportunity – in relation to industrial farming, petroleum-based fertilisers and oil-based transportation on- and off-farm.
What better and more immediate way to reduce our CO2 emissions than to change our food habits? Shiva encourages us to power down our consumption…
This amazing book is a political treatise, personal journal, lively commentary, an invaluable history and a guidebook to sustained activism, all in one volume. This is a work to be read and consulted for many years.
In 2005 activist Angie Zelter and her friends contemplated the weakening of the peace movement and its lack of energy. Instead of moaning and hand-wringing they created an ambitious plan to galvanise British activists. They came up with the idea to blockade Faslane in…
During my years of work in the international and local anti-apartheid movements and my pursuit of poetry that speaks to political reality, I discovered Brutus's poetry and heard of his activism. But I knew few details of his life and work. This book of memoirs, speeches, interviews and poetry is an excellent account of Dennis Brutus, and informed my admiration of his courage, commitment and perseverance.
Classified as “coloured” by the South African government, Brutus's…
The big shopping splurge of the year is upon us. Are we buying war and injustice for gifts and ourselves? It is time to consider the implications of our shopping habits. Around the world people are speaking though their wallets: boycotts and ethical buying are powerful tools.
First of all, we can support international boycotts of corporations embedded in war and oppression. The global boycott of corporations that support the war in Iraq was launched in 2004 at the World Social Forum…
“Peggy [his mother] became a flame of optimism in my young life [during WW2]. And when I once asked what was the point of struggling with my homework when we were all going to die, she replied: “By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that ...” “She asked me repeatedly [during the Israeli siege of Lebanon in 1982] why governments spend so much money on guns.” (p793.)
For nearly thirty years, Fisk has been a journalist in the Middle East - through peace, war…
“It's always too soon to go home. And it's always too soon to calculate effect.” Activists who feel despondent and or just plain tired will read this book and take heart in our work and find purpose in the creative search for a better world. Solnit believes we've had many successes; we can and should rejoice - and then carry on.
“I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the first great antinuclear movement in the United States, the one that did…
This little book excites me more than the whole heavy stack that I recently received to review. It is immediate, politically and socially relevant, practical and comprehensive - we need it. Small-scale water power, that is.
The price of petroleum increases as reserves dwindle. Wars and coups are planned and executed to ensure the minority world gets what it considers “our oil”, no matter where it is. And those who complain about polluting coal based energy, also from a non renewal…
This collection of essays and speeches by India's award winning writer ranges across the world on many important issues from globalisation to AIDS.
Roy's acceptance speech for the USA Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom urges her US audience to remember their history of brave resistance. She speaks as “a subject of the American Empire” when she says the change has to begin in America. She calls on its citizens and says, “The only institution more powerful than the US government is…
This useful summary and overview is part of a series of beginner's guides published by Oneworld. I'd like to see the others also - on Genetics, PalestineIsrael and particularly Postmodernism, a subject on which I shall always be a beginner.
Tormey presents a well-organised schematic look at the modern anti-capitalist movement in recent years. He believes that the last five years since WTO Seattle in 1999 calls for a redefinition of anti-capitalist movements - essentially the hopeful…
Many activists have taken a crash course in US history thanks to Bill Blum. In Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2002, see http://peacenews.info/issues/2441/2441351.html ) he took us through the unvarnished history of interventions, sabotage and deceit by the US government.
Now his 1986 book on the CIA, updated in 1995, has again been updated to bring us up to the end of 2003, incorporating new…
When a member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, returns to a prison to interview, and finally to know, one of the behind-the-scenes murderers in the dreaded secret police, she faces not only a man who committed unspeakable deeds in his country, but she faces the universal questions of the nature of evil and human violence, the possibility of transformation and the human capacity for forgiveness.
The story of this…
Few people know that Canada provided most of the uranium for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Even fewer know the devastating effect that the uranium ore extraction had on the Dene people of Great Bear Lake.
Peter Blow travelled to the north to record this story. White men came to the Dene land and found the “money rock”, as the residents called it. In the 1940s they started mining it, using local people for labour. At the same time the Dene…
In his introduction to this beautiful memoir, the late Edward Said says: what gives this book an unmistakeable stamp of profound authenticity is its life-affirming poetic texture. This is no surprise as Barghouti is indeed a poet of great sensitivity, he is the author of nine books of poetry; few of his poems are translated into English. For us in the English-speaking minority world, the idea that there is a body of Palestinian literature is probably as remote and unbelievable as…
Few writers can take two seemingly different subjects like river dams and the war on terrorism and turn them into a coherent, informed, impassioned indictment of the nation state, elitist greed and militarised globalisation. Arundhati Roy can, and does.
India is a country where 70% of the population has no electricity and where more than the total population of Canada might be displaced and made homeless from their villages and farms by dam building. I say might because as Roy states…
The fragile peace of the impoverished African country of Mozambique rests uneasily on caches of thousands of weapons left over from 16 years of civil war.
Albino Forquilha, coordinator of the Transforming Arms into Ploughshares project of the Christian Council of Churches, recently explained to Canadian peace and development activists how this project helps his country.
After the devastation of the civil war, Mozambique has a high level of unemployment and of violent crime. Ex…
