Paul Messersmith-Glavin studied and became friends with Murray Bookchin starting in the late 1980s, when he attended the Institute for Social Ecology’s Summer Program at Goddard College. Those were hopeful, energized years of organizing, and Bookchin quickly became a mentor to Paul. During this period, Paul help found the Youth Greens, an organization that sought to bring a direct action, anticapitalist, social movement orientation into the Greens, before they went in the direction of focusing on electoral politics. The Youth Greens initiated the Earth Day Wall Street Action in 1990, which brought out over 1,500 people to protest capitalism’s role in ecological destruction and saw the first use of black bloc tactics in the US. Paul attributes much of his early political orientation to his time with Bookchin.
Paul went on to be a member of various political collectives, including AWOL (Anarchists With Out Lawyers) in Minneapolis in the ‘90s, as well as the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, both through AWOL and as part of the NYC local and the Love & Rage newspaper production group. Paul was a founding member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) and worked with them for their first twenty-five years. He is still a member of the collective that
publishes Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, the journal of the IAS, and is an editor of the forthcoming collection of writings from the first thirty years of Perspectives (AK Press, 2026). He was also a member of Hella 503, which grew out of Occupy Portland in 2011 and organized together for five years, including shutting down the Portland ports in solidarity with comrades in the Bay Area. After spending a year living and working in China, Paul helped found the Parasol Climate Collective, a study group that grew from looking at the causes of climate change into giving presentations at conferences and talking with aligned organizations about how climate changes might impact their work.
His piece “Activating the Emergency Brake: Saito’s Degrowth Communism” appears in the Summer 2025 issue of New Politics. He wrote the foreword to George Katsiaficas’ Eros and Revolution (Black Rose Books, 2023), worked as the IAS editor for Shane Burley’s No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis (IAS/AK Press, 2022), and his work appears in Dan Berger and Emily K. Hobson’s Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (University of Georgia Press, 2020). He worked as IAS editor and wrote the foreword to Javier Castro’s Imperiled Life: Revolution Against Climate Catastrophe (IAS/AK Press, 2012), and his essay, “Between Social Ecology and Deep Ecology: Gary Snyder’s Ecological Philosophy” appears in The Philosophy of the Beats (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). His writing has also appeared in Upping the Anti, Z Magazine, Waging Non-Violence, and The Oregonian.
Paul teaches and practices Chinese medicine in the Pacific Northwest, where he’s part of the Mutual Aid Acupuncture Collective. He’s an avid practitioner of Chen style TaiJi Quan, and is a bike commuter, dad, partner, fellow worker, Cubs fan, and ballplayer. His interests include organizing, strategy, climate change and the larger ecological crisis, analyzing the workings of capitalism and interlocking systems of domination and oppression (and the impacts of these structures and beliefs on people’s bodies and minds), and practices and structures of freedom and liberation.
