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• Egypt in flames

Warm spiritual greetings, With the recent presentation of "Anarcho-spective" in Berkeley, CA by Tristan Anderson, and the arrival of Earth First! musicians David Rovics and Casey Neill & The Norway Rats this week, there is more conversation by radical environmental frontliners than usual.  The big topic environmentally this week in the San Francisco bay area, is the idiocy of the COP-16 climate conference in Cancun, Mexico in which 190 governmental representatives attempt to reverse global climate destabilization "by consensus".  I dropped by the food collective in SF where I was once a manager, and we couldn't believe that any group of that size would attempt to agree on anything by consensus.  Indeed, we had enough difficulty at Other Avenues running a medium size grocery business by consensus, and OA was the bay area's first worker collective, and all of the workers had significant prior experience with collective process.  The ridiculousness of the attempt at COP-16 has led to some very interesting conversations with Earth First!ers and our Rising Tide faction this week.  Dig this: We believe that the green anarchism of the past has outlived its usefulness.  At the initial Earth First! meeting in Berkeley which I attended in 1980, we rationally understood that our primary social function would be to get media attention on underreported environmental issues.  We never drank so much home brew to believe that we were were going to save the planet.  That was 30 years ago.  That was before anybody (except climatologists) ever heard of global warming.  Today, globalization has rendered world society into a disconnected, dangerous, materialistic free-for-all, and coopted environmental groups to serve business interests.  Okay, with Casey Neill and The Norway Rats scheduled to perform tonight at The Starry Plow Irish Pub, here's the basic conclusion that everybody hereabout has reached: Earth First!/Rising Tide needs to get based in the Washington D.C. area (yes Philadelphia, that includes you), and in addition to independent organizing and direct action, we need to prioritize DICTATING POLICY!  Think about it.  Contact me at craigstehr@hushmail.com