PM Press

Grandma Johnson lives alone in the forest and loves to knit sweaters and mittens for her grandchildren in the city. One day, when returning from a visit to the city, her solitude comes to an end when her mischievous forest neighbors reveal themselves in a delightfully colorful fashion. Who took her yarn, and what have they done with it?

The colorful mystery is solved when the birds, rabbits, snakes, trees, and other dwellers of Grandma Johnson’s neighborhood are seen playing with the yarn. Suddenly the forest doesn’t seem so lonely, and the visiting grandkids take great delight getting to know the inhabitants of Grandma’s forest. This picture book is a lesson for both young and old to connect with one’s surroundings and embrace the role of good neighbors with the rest of the natural world, whether in the city or in the forest.

We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray--not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil--the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.

Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

From Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame and The Culture of Make Believe, comes a prescient, thought-provoking collection of interviews with ten leading writers, philosophers, teachers, and activists.

To function in this society, we are asked to live by lies: that humans have the right to take what they want from the earth without giving back, that knowledge is limited to that which can be quantified, that corporations and governments know what is best for our future. Our instinctive outrage at environmental collapse, political conspiracy, and corporate corruption is stifled by the double-speak of popular opinion telling us that the “progress” of civilization demands unquestioning allegiance to those in power. But the brave voices in Truths Among Us seek to help us acknowledge the values we know in our hearts are right—and inspire within us the courage to act on them.

Among those who share their wisdom here is acclaimed sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, who shows us that science is but one lens through which we can discover knowledge. Luis Rodriguez, poet and peacemaker, asks us to embrace gang members as people instead of stereotypes, while the brilliant Judith Herman helps us gain a deeper understanding of the psychology of abusers in whatever form they may take. Paul Stamets reveals the power of fungi, whose intelligence, like that of so many nonhumans, is often ignored. And writer Richard Drinnon reminds us that our spiritual paths need not be narrowed by the limiting mythologies of Western civilization.

Following How Shall I Live My Life? and Resistance Against Empire, Jensen's third collection of interviews reinforces a simple premise with which he has long challenged his readers: if we shut our ears and eyes to the cacophony of consumption-oriented distractions and pause to listen to the wisdom of our own hearts, the truths among us will reveal themselves.

Interviewees include: George Gerbner, Stanley Aronowitz, Luis Rodriguez, Judith Herman, John Keeble, Richard Drinnon, Paul Stamets, Marc Ian Barasch, Martín Prechtel, and Jane Caputi.

One yellow April morning, a 17 year old girl asks herself, “Do I dare to eat a peach?" Three different answers will send her down three very different paths.

That morning is long past. Now she is 41.

Kitty Trevelyan has been happily married 23 years. Happily enough. Until her professor asks her for coffee and kisses her.

Dr. Katherine North's memory of two lovers chafes her like a hair shirt. After reading one has died, she contacts the other—only to discover that she has been renounced for God.

Ántonia searches the sea-horizon every evening. In the last light, she can glimpse it: a feminist Utopia built on an abandoned oil rig, led by her charismatic and bipolar lover. Her lost Eden made by Eves.

Who are we? Who haven't we been? Have we dared? Three of one woman's possible lives are about to collide.

A serial killer stalks the streets of Spokane, acting out a misogynist script from the dark heart of this culture. Across town, a writer named Derrick has spent his life tracking the reasons--political, psychological, spiritual--for the sadism of modern civilization. And through the grim nights, Nika, a trafficked woman, tries to survive the grinding violence of prostitution. Their lives, and the forces propelling them, are about to collide.

Derrick’s current project is a book called Possession, which asks the ontological question of who is responsible for the culture of domination that’s destroying the earth. Who actually benefits from a dead planet, the endgame that’s fast approaching? What if the answer is something way bigger than humans? Meanwhile, with motivations opposite to Derrick’s, the serial killer is asking much the same question of the women he kidnaps as his final act of possession--and Nika is next.

Derrick’s metaphysical explorations suddenly take on more urgency as visions both terrifying and sacred begin to intrude, and past and future collapse without warning. All Derrick knows is Nika’s name and her impending death. The only person who believes him is his partner Allison, a woman with both strengths and scars, whose past has led her to a commitment to justice no matter what the cost. As the visions intensify and the killer draws nearer, Derrick and Allison are compelled to act, making themselves the next targets. Derrick must learn to negotiate a world of spirits and demons, living and dead, before it’s too late. And what hangs in the balance is not just their lives, but also the fate of life on earth.

With Songs of the Dead, Derrick Jensen has written more than a thriller. This is a story lush with rage and tenderness on its way to being a weapon.

A scathing indictment of U. S. domestic and foreign policy, this collection of interviews gathers incendiary insights from 10 of today’s most experienced and knowledgeable activists. Whether it’s Ramsey Clark describing the long history of military invasion, Alfred McCoy detailing the relationship between CIA activities and the increase in the global heroin trade, Stephen Schwartz reporting the obscene costs of nuclear armaments, or Katherine Albrecht tracing the horrors of the modern surveillance state, this investigation of global governance is sure to inform, engage, and incite readers.

Full list of Interviewees:

• Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U. S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, is a guest scholar at the Brooking Institute and the director of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project.
• Katherine Albrecht is the director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), and is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on consumer privacy.
• Robert McChesney is the author of seven books concerned with the contradiction between a for-profit corporate media and the communications requirements of a democratic society.
• J.W. Smith is the author of The World’s Wasted Wealth and is the director of The Institute for Cooperative Capitalism.
• Juliet Schor is co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream, and has written three books focused on trends in work and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women’s issues and economic justice.
• Alfred McCoy is the author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and was winner of the Grant Goodman Prize in 2001.
• Christian Parenti is the author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, a critique the “incipient American police state.”
• Kevin Bales is an expert on modern slavery and is the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
• Ramsey Clark was Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, playing an important role in the history of the Civil Rights movement and continuing on as unstinting critic of US foreign policy.
• Anuradha Mittal is an internationally renowned expert on trade, development, human rights, democracy, and agriculture issues, and is the founder of The Oakland Institute, which works to ensure public participation and democratic debate on crucial economic and social policy issues.

Monsters is an illustrated collection of wild, weird, and whimsical tales with a twist. These stories are not about mythical creatures; here, the creatures speak for themselves. There’s an orc who hates Tolkien, a young demon awash in teenage angst, an angel abandoned by Jesus who finds the Fates. Jensen creates a world both delicately dreamlike and all too real, where the villain is sometimes the victim and evil is not always what we thought.

If stories teach us how to be human, then the stories in Monsters are the ones we need now. These are fractured fairy tales for grown-ups, where the roots of sadism are laid bare and the horrors of human supremacism are firmly faced. But as in all of Jensen’s work, love is both always possible and also a call to action. By turns macabre, melancholy, and magical, these stories and their accompanying images will leave you wondering who the real monsters are and how they can be defeated.

At the heart of a city, a river is dying, children have cancer, and people are burning with despair. From the safe distance that wealth buys, a corporation called Vexcorp counts these lives as another expense on a balance sheet. But that distance is about to collapse.

Malia is an activist who has fiercely fought the everyday atrocities of environmental racism. After years of watching countless children die, she’s lost faith in the possibility of systemic reform. Dennis is a lawyer who still believes that if enough people have the correct information they will do the right thing. Dujuan is a young street thug torn by a chaos of grief and rage at his little sister’s death. And Larry Gordon is Vexcorp’s CEO.

Their lives converge when Dujuan mugs Malia. Her scornful comparison of Dujuan to Vexcorp triggers a storm inside him. That storm only clears when he identifies the real agent of his pain: Larry Gordon. Injury requires justice, so Dujuan kidnaps Gordon and assembles a rough court to try him for murder. He picks Malia to be the judge because she knows the facts and because, as Dujuan says, “You want this as bad as me.” As bystanders become involved and time runs out, Malia is forced to make grueling moral decisions between survival and loyalty, safety and courage, agency and despair.

Derrick Jensen has written a novel as compelling as it is necessary: with our planet under serious threat, Malia’s decisions face us all.

The six women of the Knitting Circle meet every week to chat, eat cake, and make fabulous sweaters. Until the night they realize that they’ve all survived rape—and that not one of their assailants has suffered a single consequence. Enough is enough. The Knitting Circle becomes the Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad. They declare open season on rapists, with no licenses and no bag limits. With needles as their weapons, the revolution begins.

A cop is stabbed through a doughnut hole and into his heart. A country-western singer is found with knitting needles jammed into both ears and his no-means-yes hit song playing. A pedophile priest is killed in the sacristy. As the Circle swells, perpetrators learn to shudder at the sight of business women with knitted briefcases, students with knitted backpacks, roller derby queens with knitted kneepads. They also push back, as organizations of men—from the Chamber of Commerce to the Department of Agriculture to the Autonomous Federated Association of Coalitions of Anarchists for Spontaneous Insurrectionary Sexual Freedom (the AFACASISF, with their unique musical style: deathvomitnoise)—issue statements against the Knitting Circle. More sinister is MAWAR (Men Against Women Against Rape), with their Bible Scrabble and their beefcake Jesus calendar—and a plot to stop the Knitting Circle.

Will the Knitting Circle triumph? Or will Officer Flint learn to knit in time to infiltrate it? Will Nick the male ally brave Daisy’s Craft Barn to secure more weapons for the women? Will Marilyn put down her teenage attitude and pick up her knitting needles? Will Circle member Jasmine find true love with MAWAR’s Zebediah?

In this collection of interviews, Derrick Jensen discusses the destructive dominant culture with ten people who have devoted their lives to undermining it.

Whether it is Carolyn Raffensperger and her radical approach to public health, or Thomas Berry on perceiving the sacred; be it Kathleen Dean Moore reminding us that our bodies are made of mountains, rivers, and sunlight; or Vine Deloria asserting that our dreams tell us more about the world than science ever can, the activists and philosophers interviewed in How Shall I Live My Life? each bravely present a few of the endless forms that resistance can and must take.

Interviews include: George Draffan, Jesse Wolf Hardin, Vine Deloria, David Abram, Steven Wise, Jan Lundber, David Edwards, Thomas Berry, Carolyn Raffensperger, and Kathleen Dean Moore.

Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn’t even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing.

Until Earth at Risk.

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame, who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself.

The seven people in this film present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every angle: Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem. Earth at Risk includes Derrick Jensen, Arundhati Roy, Thomas Linzey, Waziyatawin, Aric McBay, Stephanie McMillan, and Lierre Keith. This collection is sure to inform, engage, and inspire.

Produced by Jai Jai Noire.

“In America, four hundred people own the wealth of more than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it.”
—Arundhati Roy

Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn’t even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing.

Until Earth at Risk.

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame, who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself.

The twelve people in this volume present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every angle: William Catton Jr. explains ecological overshoot; Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Jane Caputi exposes patriarchy’s mythic dismemberment of the Goddess; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem.

Earth at Risk includes:

• Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, A Language Older than Words, and many others.
• Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability; coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.
• Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist and photographer; correspondent for outlets such as The Electronic Intifada, Al Jazeera, and Truthout.org.
• Jane Caputi, author of The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture.
• William Catton Jr., sociologist, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, and Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse.
• Gail Dines, a founding member of Stop Porn Culture, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.
• Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
• Aric Mcbay, coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.
• Stephanie Mcmillan, cartoonist; author of The Beginning of the American Fall; organizer for the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist collective One Struggle.
• Riki Ott, marine biologist, author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
• Arundhati Roy, author of An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire; Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; and many others.
• Waziyatawin, historian and anti-colonial activist, author of For Indigenous Eyes Only; What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland; and other books.