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From Spectacle to Empowerment: Grass Roots Democracy and the Peace Process

(Green Program Project pamphlet reprinted in The Vermont Peace Reader, 1983) Will the present-day peace movement repeat the errors of the 1960s anti-war movement by placing its primary focus on carefully orchestrated and highly centralized national actions in cities like Washington or New York? Or will it try to percolate into the localities and neighborhoods […]

The American Crisis (part 1 and 2)

The American Crisis part I and II was written Feb. and Aug. 1980 and published in COMMENT vol. 1, no. 4 and no. 5 (1980). This online version brings together part I and II.

Anarchism Past and Present

Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the Critical Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles on May 29, 1980. My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme importance today of viewing Anarchism in terms of the changing social contexts of our era – – not as […]

Toward a post-scarcity society: the American perspective and the SDS

The twentieth century is the heir of human history – the legatee of man’s age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new vision of the […]

Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 5)

CHAPTER FIVE: ENVIRONMENT AND CANCER The Importance of Environment One of the most challenging problems in public health involves the influence of man’s environment on the incidence of cancer. Differences of opinion concerning the extent of this influence are likely to have important practical consequences. If a specialist believes that cancer is caused primarily by […]

Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 4)

CHAPTER FOUR: The Problem of Chemicals in Food The Consumer and Commercial Foods With the rise of an urbanized society, the production of food becomes a complex industrial operation. In contrast with earlier times, when very few changes were made in the appearance or the constituents of food, much of the food consumed in the […]

Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 6)

CHAPTER SIX: RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH The Effects of Radiation It is hardly necessary to emphasize that since the explosion of a nuclear weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 ionizing radiation has become the most serious threat to man’s survival. If nuclear weapons are further developed or increased in number, it is quite […]

Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 7)

CHAPTER SEVEN: HUMAN ECOLOGY Survival and Health Despite mounting problems and difficulties, most official statements on environmental change tend to be reassuring and optimistic. We are told repeatedly, for example, that the amount of strontium-90 in a quart of milk or the quantity of DDT in a fruit is “trivial”; that in order to ingest […]

Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 3)

CHAPTER THREE: URBAN LIFE AND HEALTH The Changing Urban Scene Man’s environment attains a high degree of simplification in the modern metropolis. At first this may seem surprising: We normally associate metropolitan life with a diversity of individual types and with variety and subtlety in human relations. But diversity among men and complexity in human […]

Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 2)

Our Synthetic Environment CHAPTER TWO: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:28 AM PST Contributed by: murray By: Murray Bookchin Problems of soil and agriculture seldom arouse the interest of urban dwellers. Town and country have become so sharply polarized that the city man and the farmer live in widely separated, contrasting, and […]