Article Archive

From ISE board member and outstanding singer/songwriter Ben Grosscup:

Boston Tragedy Reveals Inevitability of Vulnerability
By Ben Grosscup

Public acts of inexplicable and horrific violence such as what we saw in Boston on Monday reveal basic vulnerabilities that are painful but necessary to face.

My whole family converged in Boston [...]

A review of  Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, by Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen and James Davis (Oakland: PM Press, 2012, 178 pp.).  Also available at  Toward Freedom and  ZNet:

The year 2012 didn’t bring us the [...]

Tuesday, March 5th was Town Meeting Day in Vermont and, following a long tradition of our towns taking a stand on issues of wider importance, at least 29 towns, including Montpelier and Burlington, overwhelmingly passed resolutions opposing the proposed transport of tar sands oil through our region. The resolutions also supported efforts to eliminate oil [...]

Author/journalist Debbie Bookchin and ISE Board member Bea Bookchin offer this in-depth review of Andy Price’s new book, Recovering Bookchin (New Compass Press, November 2012):

In his important new book Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price has set himself a formidable task: he takes up the corpus of criticism of Murray Bookchin that developed during the last 20 years of his life and disentangles the valid, content-based criticism, from the many ad hominem and polemical attacks against Bookchin, showing how the latter were used to almost completely obscure the former and cast aside Bookchin’s substantive critique. Equally important, Price addresses the content-based criticism, in the process illuminating the richness of Bookchin’s theoretical and political philosophy and restoring him to his rightful role as one of the most important radical thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century…

At Least for a Day: The Fight Against Tar Sands Oil Unites Indigenous Activists, Occupiers, and Big Environmental NGOs

On Sunday, February 17th, nearly 50,000 people ventured out into the icy morning to gather at the Washington Monument in Washington, DC. There, braced against the biting February wind, the Forward on Climate Rally swelled into the largest climate march in history. The focal point of the rally was to challenge President Obama to reject a proposal by the multinational corporation TransCanada to transport tar sands oil across the U.S through their under-construction Keystone XL pipeline…

A new essay from Dan Chodorkoff, co-founder of the ISE:

Occupy your Neighborhood

by Dan Chodorkoff

Summer fades to Fall and more than one year has passed since Occupy Wall Street  entered the public arena.  Occupy’s message highlighted capitalism’s inherent injustices, and resonated with a broad cross section of the public.  The initial [...]

Counterpunch this week features an interview with molecular biologist James Shapiro, whose new book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, seeks to offer a comprehensive view of current work in evolutionary biology and concludes that concepts of innovation, self-organization, and self-directed evolution have now overtaken traditional Darwinian views of evolution driven by [...]

This commentary by Brian Tokar will appear in the winter issue of Broadcast, the newsletter of SEEDS, the Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School, based in Seattle and Vashon, Washington:

Since mid-September, actions inspired by the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York have awakened the imaginations of people [...]

by Peter Prontzos (Langara College, Vancouver, BC)

Research has now clearly established that economic, and social variables – more
than individual or family behavior – are the most salient factors overall in
determining a child’s well-being [...]