Growth for Growth's Sake is the Philosphy of Cancer

Edward Abbey, late eco-anarchist and prolific author, wrote one of my favorite books Desert Solitaire as well as the much beloved The Monkey Wrench Gang. His books make for great reading at this time.

Others also make the grade. If you want the real enviromental and economic doom book, try Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. But I liked his first book The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest ( Vintage, 1991,$14.95). The Seattle correspondent for the New York Times (still) covers the whole gamut of problems facing the Pacific Northwest--from the man-made demise of the salmon, the plight of the Indian reservation near Takoma, the no-growth movement in Seattle, the displaced New Jerseyan who raises the nearly extinct wolf, the bitter wars during the Depression over FDR's rural electrification program, and the on-going assault by the timber industry against old growth forests. At least he covers the still-existing natural glories of the Pacific Northwest while documenting the doom.

James Howard Kunstler mentioned in a previous entry on dystopians is the well-known author of The Geography of Nowhere, Homes from Nowhere and the Long Emergency. In his novel World Made by Hand, the national infrastructure has collapsed and cars are no more. Robert Earle and his fellow citizens in Union Grove, a little town in upstate New York,try to create a New America in a time of social collapse.

If you have glanced through the Library of America's volumes of Jack London, you'll notice the glarring omission of his political writings. Jack London died at the age of 40 at his Beauty Ranch situated on 129 of prime acres in Glen Ellen, California. he had resigned from the Socialist Party because it was too reformist and couldn't compare to his friends the Wobblies in terms of political action. He viewed his ranch as an environmental experiment, even marketing his brand of apple juice. His missing writings are in The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution, edited by Jonah Raskin, (University of California Press, 2008). Raskin's long introductory essay "Jack London:The Orphan at the Abyss" is the best short synopsis of London's politics and its relationship to his life I have read.