Best of
Social-Change

2008

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders


Eric Etheridge - 2008
    The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights: it was illegal for bus and train stations to discriminate, but most did and were not interested in change. Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge "breach of the peace."The name, mug shot, and other personal details of each Freedom Rider arrested were duly recorded and saved by agents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a Stasi-like investigative agency whose purpose was to "perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi." How the Commission thought these details would actually protect the state is not clear, but what is clear, forty-six years later, is that by carefully recording names and preserving the mug shots, the Commission inadvertently created a testament to these heroes of the civil rights movement.Collected here in a richly illustrated, large-format book featuring over seventy contemporary photographs, alongside the original mug shots, and exclusive interviews with former Freedom Riders, is that testament: a moving archive of a chapter in U.S. history that hasn't yet closed.

How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization


Derrick JensenJesse Wolf Hardin - 2008
    Whether it is Carolyn Raffensperger and her radical approach to public health, or Thomas Berry on perceiving the sacred; be it Kathleen Dean Moore reminding us that our bodies are made of mountains, rivers, and sunlight; or Vine Deloria asserting that our dreams tell us more about the world than science ever can, the activists and philosophers interviewed in How Shall I Live My Life? each bravely present a few of the endless forms that resistance can and must take.

Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future


Melissa K. Nelson - 2008
    They’ve successfully managed complex reciprocal relationships between biological and cultural diversity. Awareness of indigenous knowledge is reemerging at the eleventh hour to help avert global ecological and social collapse. Indigenous cultural wisdom shows us how to live in peace--with the earth and one another.Original Instructions evokes the rich indigenous storytelling tradition in this collection of presentations gathered from the annual Bioneers conference. It depicts how the world’s native leaders and scholars are safeguarding the original instructions, reminding us about gratitude, kinship, and a reverence for community and creation. Included are more than 20 contemporary indigenous leaders--such as Chief Oren Lyons, John Mohawk, Winona LaDuke, and John Trudell. These beautiful, wise voices remind us where hope lies.

Community: The Structure of Belonging


Peter Block - 2008
    The various sectors of our communities--businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government--do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work towards it together. We know what healthy communities look like--there are many success stories out there, and they've been described in detail. What Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

Opa Nobody


Sonya Huber - 2008
    Then Sonya Huber turned to her long-dead grandfather, the family “nobody,” for help. Huber’s search for meaning and resonance in the life of her grandfather Heina Buschman was unusual insofar as she knew him only through dismissive family stories: He let his wife die of neglect . . . he used his infant son as a decoy when transporting anti-Nazi literature in a baby carriage . . . and so the stories went. What she actually discovered was that, like his granddaughter, Heina Buschman was a committed and beleaguered activist whose story echoed her own. Huber’s research not only conjured her grandfather’s voice in answer to many of the questions that troubled her but also found in his story a source of personal sustenance for herself. Based on extensive research and documentation, this story of Heina Buschman offers a rare look into the heart of the “average” socialist trying to survive the Nazis and rebuild a broken world. Alternating with his voice is Huber’s own, providing a rich and moving counterpoint that makes this deeply personal exploration of family, politics, and individual responsibility a story for all of us and for all time.

Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship


Gary Steiner - 2008
    Critically engaging the positions of Marc Hauser, Daniel Dennett, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, Steiner shows how the Western philosophical tradition has forced animals into human experiential categories in order to make sense of their cognitive abilities and moral status and how desperately we need a new approach to animal rights.Steiner rejects the traditional assumption that a lack of formal rationality confers an inferior moral status on animals vis-a-vis human beings. Instead, he offers an associationist view of animal cognition in which animals grasp and adapt to their environments without employing concepts or intentionality. Steiner challenges the standard assumption of liberal individualism according to which humans have no obligations of justice toward animals. Instead, he advocates a "cosmic holism" that attributes a moral status to animals equivalent to that of people. Arguing for a relationship of justice between humans and nature, Steiner emphasizes our kinship with animals and the fundamental moral obligations entailed by this kinship.

Resistance: A Childhood Fighting For East Timor


Naldo Rei - 2008
    He spent the first three years of his life in the jungle, where his family had fled for safety. After his father was murdered for his work in the resistance movement, nine-year-old Naldo was recruited by the clandestine Fretilin network and began his own extraordinary journey fighting for East Timor's freedom. Throughout his teenage years, Naldo was imprisoned and tortured regularly for his covert resistance to the brutal Indonesian regime. Eventually, in too much danger to remain in his homeland, he escaped to Indonesia and then Australia for several years.Now living in an independent East Timor, Naldo Rei can tell his incredible story. His life is proof that no amount of danger and loss can crush the human spirit.

Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change


Julia Sudbury - 2008
    imperialism, racial/gender oppression, and the economic violence of capitalist globalization? This book explores what happens when scholars create active engagements between the academy and communities of resistance. In so doing, it suggests a new direction for antiracist and feminist scholarship, rejecting models of academic radicalism that remain unaccountable to grassroots social movements. The authors explore the community and the academy as interlinked sites of struggle. This book provides models and the opportunity for critical reflection for students and faculty as they struggle to align their commitments to social justice with their roles in the academy. At the same time, they explore the tensions and challenges of engaging in such contested work.

Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the challenge of left unity


Mike Macnair - 2008
    In the present case, this means retracing our steps to the strategic debates of the early workers’ movement and the Second International, which defined the strategic choices available to socialists in the early 20th century, and in this sense led to the blind alley of 1918-91.

The Way - An Anthology of Native American Fition


Shirley Will Witt - 2008
    

Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster


Peter A. Victor - 2008
    The challenge is based on a critical analysis of the literature on environmental and resource limits to growth, on the disconnect between higher incomes and happiness, and on the failure of economic growth to meet other key economic, social and environmental policy objectives. Shortly after World War II, economic growth became the paramount economic policy objective in most countries, a position that it maintains today. This book presents three arguments on why rich countries should turn away from economic growth as the primary policy objective and pursue more specific objectives that enhance well-being. The author contends that continued economic growth worldwide is unrealistic due to environmental and resource constraints.If rich countries continue to push growth, poorer countries, where the benefits are more evident, will lag. Rising incomes increase happiness and well-being only up to a level that has since been surpassed in rich countries. Moreover, economic growth has not brought full employment, eliminated poverty or reduced the burden of the economy on the environment. By combining a systems approach with more conventional economic analysis, Peter Victor provides new insights into a pressing issue at the frontier of ecological economics in a way that will appeal to a wide audience. Academics, students, activists and interested lay readers will find this well argued book illuminating and compelling.