a review of
Black and Green Review #4, Winter 2016 BlackAndGreenPress.org, 214 pp., $10
Kevin Tucker started the Black and Green Network in 2000 to create a centralized place where green anarchist and anarcho-primitivist projects, both nationally and internationally, could connect. After years of successful gatherings, Tucker launched Black and Green Review (BGAR) which he co-edits with five others.
The magazine’s Cassandra-like warnings about the collapse of eco-systems appear closer than ever, but BGAR doesn’t take pleasure in what they and others predicted. Tucker writes, “We are fighting to defend and foster wild existence through grounding within passionate resistance.”
This battle is expressed admirably in BAGR #4 with a strong opening editorial by Tucker where he frighteningly says we are “…at the end of this dying civilization.” No more time for empty discussions. We know the enemy, he tells us.
Grim. Why bother with anything if we’re all doomed to a planet burned to a crisp and overcome by rising tides? The writers inside BAGR aren’t giving up. In the “Field Notes from the Primal War” section, they chronicle the campaigns against the carnage that civilization and technology has created including articles about struggles against pipelines.
The interesting “Discussions” sections features essays by Tucker and one by Zerzan, “Meaning in the Age of Nihilism,” along with Ian Smith and Sine Cultis. There are “Essays” and “Reviews” sections giving expression to both the depth of despair, but also a willingness to fight it out to the end; hopefully not the planet’s.