Melanie Jarman
This book transcends glib positions about the internet and social movements (eg ‘social media cause revolution’ or ‘the internet should be discounted altogether in resistance’) to offer a rich and considered analysis, backed up by engaging case studies from a range of issues, communities and continents.
Hill doesn’t downplay the net’s influence, noting that social media sites such as YouTube have made it easier ‘to see the truth…
High Tide is the result of three years spent travelling the world in search of evidence that climate change is taking place now.
Lynas's travels include the experience of ducking England's increasingly excessive downpours; surveying the damage of melting permafrost whilst gathering local opinion on the oil industry in “baked” Alaska; and sealing all windows as unprecedented dust storms whirl in China.
Alongside excellent photos, Lynas's stories show that…
In a somewhat eccentric version of a road movie, Human Shields follows the 25 people who left England on double decker buses on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
Featuring plenty of interviews with the “shields”, the film shows some of the tensions and anxieties that inevitably began to unfold. Apart from a few admirable exceptions, the voices that we hear at the end of the film are not the same as those we heard at the beginning, illustrating how it was not necessarily those who…
This, eighth in the series of SchNEWS annuals, follows a predictable formula laid down in its predecessors, and is predictably fantastic.
The standard compilation (of approximately 50 issues of the weekly Brighton-based SchNEWS newsletter, alongside longer features, interviews, cartoons, photos, and material from around the world largely ignored by the mainstream media) covering April 2002 to April 2003 is distinct from previous annuals in the coverage it gives to the anti-war…
Both Wainwright and Monbiot are in search of a way out of the world's neo-liberal quagmire. Both are concerned with an expansion of democracy, yet their searching takes quite different directions. While Monbiot presents a blueprint for a different world order, Wainwright heads to Brazil, and through England, finding practical grassroots “experiments” that may give sustainable roots to a global movement for social justice.
Wainwright sets off with more than airline tickets and a bus…
The US describes Colombia as harbouring the hemisphere's biggest terrorist threat. Not surprisingly, the plan it supports to solve Colombia's social ills, Plan Colombia, will have a significantly detrimental effect on the region as a whole. Both these books not only provide a coherent critique of Plan Colombia and offer alternative proposals for dealing with the drugs issue, they delve beneath Colombia as merely an exporter of cocaine or a perpetrator of terrorism and explore the political,…
On 3 February, dozens of foreign civilians marched in Ramallah to deliver a message to the Israeli occupation forces.
Recognising that the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine is the root of violence in the region, and witness to the illegal and brutal policies of the Israeli occupation army, foreign civilians urged the Israeli soldiers to refuse the serve the occupation.
The Israeli forces attacked the international civilians with tear gas and concussion grenades…
We'moon on the Wall is a full colour, beautifully illustrated, month at a glance lunar calendar. With “Priestessing the Earth” as its theme, the 2002 version celebrates the work that women are doing all over the world to heal and tend the Earth, to empower women, and to make the world a safer place.
This focus on women's activity draws together the calendar’s poetry and exquisite pictures – the burst of gold that heralds July's “Sun Priestess”; the dynamism of March's “Amazon…
“Only one thing can reverse the corporate take-over of Britain. It's you” ends Captive State and, wow,given the extent of corporate capture of public life that the book describes, what a task you will have. A long road ahead then, butat least mapped and made so much more comprehensible by Monbiot's Manifesto of Multinational Malevolence.
That's not really a fair reference - whilst the book makes compelling reading and calls for some response, Monbiot avoids painting a cliche'd…
