Southeast Convergence for Climate Action ~ Aug 8 - 14

The Southeast Convergence for Climate Action, near Asheville, North Carolina, will bring together activists across the region who are fighting mountaintop removal mining and coal and nuclear power plants.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is currently devastating the ecologically diverse southern Appalachian Mountains. The coal companies have literally flattened hundreds of square miles of mountains, destroyed thousands of miles of our life giving streams, and terrorized countless communities in the process. Meanwhile southern utility companies are planning a blitzkrieg of new dirty coal plants, despite our regions already dismal air quality. To add insult to injury these same utility companies are using climate change as a justification for building a new fleet of dangerous nuclear reactors.

With extreme weather, massive species extinctions, and melting ice caps becoming a more urgent and dire reality each day, it is high time for us to come together to take direct action against the root causes of climate change. This summer, environmental and social justice groups throughout the Southeast will come together for the Southeast Convergence for Climate Action, a gathering to learn and take collective action against climate Change.

The convergence will consist of a week of information and skill-based workshops, strategy sessions, and direct action aimed at building a no-compromise climate justice movement. With some of the Big Green environmental groups selling out to the nuclear and "clean" coal industries, and large, corporate-led climate initiatives designed to preempt any meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions being pushed in DC, grassroots groups need to join forces with affected communities to fight the fossil fuel empire and create truly sustainable, community-based solutions outside of the capitalist system.

The Convergence for Climate Action will be a space to gain necessary skills for fighting climate change in your region; to network with a broad range of environmental and social justice activists; to engage in intensive strategy sessions aimed at mapping out effective approaches to fighting climate change on a regional level; to confront oppression in our organizing; and to take action.

The Convergence for Climate action aims to promote a just, rapid transition away from fossil fuels; promote environmental justice by supporting communities that are fighting dirty energy developments in their backyards; encourage direct action as a means for challenging dirty energy and empowering the movement to stop climate change, and to increase networking and strategizing amongst the diverse social justice and environmental movements fighting climate change and the energy industry.

Workshops will include Direct Action 101, Climbing Trainings, Strategic Action Planning, Anti-oppression, Sustainable living skills, Debunking False Solutions, Blockades, Media, and much more. The convergence will culminate in a coordinated day of direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure projects.

Please join us for this exciting week of learning, networking, fun, and action. Due to requests of our hosts we ask that you please pre-register for the convergence. We'll see you in August.

www.climateconvergence.org
risingtide@mountainrebel.net
828-675-1792

Igniting A Revolution ~ The Voice of AK Press

Igniting A Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth

AK Press
674-A 23rd Street
Oakland, CA 94612

Derrick Jensen (Contributor), John Zerzan (Contributor), Robert Jensen (Contributor), Marilyn Buck (Contributor), Jeff Luer (Contributor), Robert Thaxton(Contributor), Ann Hansen(Contributor), Steven Best, and Anthony J. Nocella, II

For decades, environmental groups have been resisting the destructive trends set by industry and government, but as the social and political climate has changed, popular protest movements have become less and less effective. As the earth's situation worsens, those opposing its destruction have out of necessity become increasingly militant. Corporate and federal properties have been vandalized, set ablaze-even bombed-and the government is meeting this new brand of environmental militance with an increasingly heavy hand.

Whether you're drawn by frustration with environmental strategies that, to date, have been ineffective against this growing ecological crisis, or simply by curiosity (Who are these people? Why are they doing this? What do they hope to gain?), Igniting a Revolution offers a fascinating and compelling look at the emerging movement of revolutionary environmentalism.

Includes essays by Marilyn Buck, Robert Jensen, John Zerzan, Ashanti Alston, Jeffrey "Free" Luers, Derrick Jensen, Ann Hansen, and a preface by Bron Taylor.

"This volume will interest any reader who wishes to hear directly from some of the leading intellectuals, activists and prisoners involved in these movements. The insights gained by listening directly to these voices...can hardly be overestimated"—Bron Taylor, from the preface.

"There's no way that anyone can agree with everything laid out in this collection. But there is no way, either, that we can afford to ignore these varied voices, because the one sure path to destruction is that of business as usual."—Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature

"As we face unprecedented ecological crises, along with growing political violence and state repression, revolutionary enivronmentalists claim that another world is possible. This book promises important insights into radical alternativesw and principled resistance"—John Sorenson

"Can extralegal means justify an end? The future of terrestrial life itself may depend on whether or not serious debate on that very point is put back on the public agenda. Igniting a Revolution threatens to do just that."—Chris Hannah, Propagandhi

Energy as the Basis of all Human Activity

Bataille’s Peak Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability
by Allan Stoekl

Penn State University

327S Burrowes Building

University Park, PA 16802 814.863.7499

ais3@psu.edu

$20.00 paper

An audacious exploration of Bataille’s philosophy of energy within current conservation debates.

As the price of oil climbs toward 100 dollars a barrel, our impending post-fossil fuel future appears to offer two alternatives: a bleak existence defined by scarcity and sacrifice or one in which humanity places its faith in technological solutions with unforeseen consequences. Are there other ways to imagine life in an era that will be characterized by resource depletion?

The French intellectual Georges Bataille saw energy as the basis of all human activity—the essence of the human—and he envisioned a society that, instead of renouncing profligate spending, would embrace a more radical type of energy expenditure: la dépense, or “spending without return.” In Bataille’s Peak, Allan Stoekl demonstrates how a close reading of Bataille—in the wake of Giordano Bruno and the Marquis de Sade—can help us rethink not only energy and consumption but also such related topics as the city, the body, eroticism, and religion. Through these cases, Stoekl identifies the differences between waste, which Bataille condemned, and expenditure, which he celebrated.

The challenge of living in the twenty-first century, Stoekl argues, will be to comprehend—without recourse to austerity and self-denial—the inevitable and necessary shift from a civilization founded on waste to one based on Bataillean expenditure.

Allan Stoekl is professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University. His interests include twentieth-century French intellectual history, contemporary literary theory, theories of energy, and the history of energy production and use. He is the author of Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition and translator of Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939.

280 pages November 2007

University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401

Publicist - Heather Skinner

612-627-1932

presspr@umn.edu