by the Editor
I probably did enough editorializing this month in my response to Dennis Dunleavy’s The Internet: One View , so I’ll just mention a few other pieces I think are particularly important on the site this month and shut up. (And by the way, welcome, Dennis, welcome.)
Brian Griffith’s Desertification and World Security sounds as a dry as a desert, but, come to think of it, like a real desert, it’s teeming with the kind of activity you have to look for with all your attention. Brian is the author of the book The Gardens of Their Dreams, whose thesis is that it was environmental degradation in the earlier days of our history as a historical species that caused a lot of our destructive values: domination over partnership, hierarchy over equity, the mean spiritedness of scarcity over the benevolence of plenty, men over women, rich over poor, the powerful over the weak. Brian shows that not only are such values not inevitable, they’re not even very useful. Surprise. As this is an issue that greatly concerns EAP (and should concern everyone, come to think of it), we sought Brian out. He has another book coming out soon – and more about that, with Riane Eisler’s foreword to it, next month – but this month he’s shared a summary of his first book. I really urge you to read it. If you want to pursue the ideas further, The Gardens of Their Dreams is available at the usual places, and on Amazon.
Another writer I’ve long admired shows up this month, too. Some of you may know John Ross as one of the hardest working reporters committed to social justice today. His beat is Latin America, explaining it to us gringos, and he has kindly let us put up his report on the women of the Zapatista revolution . It’s a great piece, about these women’s creative and witty approach to social change. I’m going to try and get as many of his Zapatista reports from John as possible to run on EAP, but if you’d like to get on his mailing list, too, just email him at johnross@igc.org.
Walter Lomax contributes a short piece, on the 1 year anniversary of his release from a forty year prison sentence for a murder he didn’t commit. It must have been hard for him to write, so thank you for that, Walter.
Mike Madrid keeps using his own particular form of analysis on Pop’s culture in The Bad Girls – it’s all about villainesses and what they are and aren’t allowed to do in the mirror world of American comics. And I’ve always got a soft spot for anything David Budbill writes, since not only is it lovely on its own, but it’s born out of his outrage at any kind of inequity and lack of compassion. He’s been doing monologues drawn from people around him lately. This month: JIMMY.
There’s other good stuff, too. But you can find that, poking around the site. And if you’ve got anything you want to say back, just email me.
Welcome back.