Eco & Activist Book Recommendations

Amanda Luker
Arise! Bookstore

Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State by Mary Losure. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Minnehaha Free State, the longest urban occupation in US history. On the coldest night of the year in 1998, over 600 police brutalized and arrested over 35 residents of the camp on sacred land in south Minneapolis. This book chronicles the encampment from beginning to end.

Listen: The Story of the People at Taku Wakan Tipi and the Reroute of Highway 55 by Elli King (editor). At over 400 pages, King’s compilation of stories and photographs is a true people’s history of the Minnehaha Free State, a struggle that captured the hearts and lives of thousands of people both locally and globally. These emotional stories engage the mind and heart as they relate the struggle that failed to stop the highway but succeeded in saving Coldwater Spring.

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk. Ecofeminist activist Starhawk imagines a transformed San Francisco in which the pagans radicals, and all-purpose geeky types of the future construct a new society. Will our heroes keep their cherished streams flowing and survive a manufactured plague? Most importantly, will they manage to stay awake through another collective meeting? An affectionate document of the left in the shape of an environmentalist science fiction novel.

Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth by Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (editors). This anthology features a range of voices from academics to armed revolutionaries, looking at the emerging movement of militant environmentalism. It includes essays from Jeff “Free” Luers, Derrick Jensen, Ann Hansen, Marilyn Buck, Ashanti Alston and others.

Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth by Jeffrey St. Clair. From Iraq to “Cancer Alley” to the Columbia River, this book highlights brilliant and urgent dispatches from the front lines of the war on the Earth, chronicling a new green resistance.

Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos by Derrick Jensen and Karen Tweedy-Holmes (photographer). With stunning photographs of animals in captivity, Jensen critically and passionately examines what the prisons commonly known as zoos teach us about animals, including ourselves, and our relationship to the wild.

Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (editors). This infuriating and mobilizing book collects essays by urbanists, architects and historians, examining the bizarre and sinister “utopias” built by an unchecked neoliberalism.

As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial by Stephanie Macmillan (illustrator) and Derrick Jensen. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from vivisection as two girls figure out the secret to saving the world (and it isn’t by using energy-efficient light bulbs or recycling cans). This hilarious, rousing graphic novel will inspire you to do whatever it takes to stop ecocide before it’s too late.

And finally, we can’t leave out the Arise! Atlas! Arise! has published a pocket-sized map book of Minneapolis and St. Paul, with everything you (or visitors to our cities) need to know. Broken down by neighborhood, the atlas includes bike paths, collective and co-ops, vegetarian-friendly restaurants, radical history locations, day trips and all sorts of weird, obscure and interesting places.

Act Locally
Arise! Bookstore is located at 2441 Lyndale Ave S., Minneapolis
Open 11a.m.–9p.m. daily.
Book Recommendations

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