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Strangely Like War   by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Foreword by Vandana Shiva Chelsea Green Publishing; 2003; 172 pages; $15

   Chelsea Green Publishing was sold to some new folks. The new folks fired much of the old staff; canceled some of their book projects, kept their books in print and want to raise a bit of hell. See, Chelsea was in the business of alternative building books as well as other sustainable solution-oriented books. The new owners want to change that a bit, especially in the post 9-11 climate. I totally agree, and the style of HopeDance has a changed a bit as well. Priorities need to be clarified and focused. What is happening politically can no longer be relegated to the small-time book publishers and the wearing-thin magazine publications like The Nation and Mother Jones. We all have to pick up speed to oust the Bush administration, to publish landmark treatises for the masses to read and to publish books and articles that articulate our need for organizing and action.

With this in mind, Chelsea Green has published "Strangely Like War." I am thrilled and delighted. This book is not only a plea to stop deforestation but it also puts the fight in a global sphere. Environmentalists meet the global justice movement.

Derrick Jensen is the author of "The Culture of Make Believe" and "A Language Older Than Words," two very powerful works that take environmentalism to a deeper level, to an animist level, to a sacred eco level where we all need to partake if we want to survive as a species.

Today three-quarters of the world's original forests are gone and the pace of cutting, clearing, processing, and pulping is ever-accelerating. As Mahatma Gandhi so rightly observed: What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a ... reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another." The team of Jensen and Darffan pull together the reason why there is the acceleration, why the solutions are not working: we are being lied to, the major institutions like the World Bank, WTO and the IMF need to be abolished. And with all these treatises that have been signed, if you look at them carefully they are "non-legally binding" and they always have the word "should." "Not will. Not must. Should. As usual, we get words while those in power get the forests." (p134)

The authors go on to say, "Eventually the decision about land and resource use needs to be controlled by local peoples who know, love and depend on the forests." Is this a utopian ideal? Do local people even care? And even if they care how can they own the land when in the US, for example, the top 5% of landowners (not 5% of the total pollution) own 75% of the land · and many of the largest landowners in the US and around the globe are timber corporations.

The first chapter begins with a quote from The Last Wilderness by Murray Morgan: "It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees."

This book is not just about the struggle of forests in the Pacific Northwest or Northern California. We read about the stories of activists throughout the world: in Cameroon, Cambodia, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.

From a signed statement by 61 tribal Dayak leaders in Malaysia: "Some people say we are against development if we do not agree to move out of our land and forest. This completely misrepresents our position. Development does not mean stealing our land and forest.... This is not development but theft of our land, our rights and our cultural identity."

And what about a solution? The writers speak again about the local solution: "We don't need 'public participation, consensus, and collaboration,' or 'community forestry' programs run by corporate and government elites; we need local control of land and markets. Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market only worked when the market was local, face to face, voluntary, transparent, low tech, and based on ethical, mutual relationships. It's been a long time since that was the case."

The final chapter deals with what people can do, and most of it is personal: eat locally-grown foods, make your own clothing, spend time in the forests, work to undermine the social and political system. The authors note that "We don't need to stop the forest crisis. Nature will stop it."

They continue: "We do not know how to stop deforestation. We do not know how to get deforesters out of the forests. No one else--forest dwellers or civilized--has figured that out either, or surely the deforesters would have been removed by now.

But we do know this. Once people see deforestation for the atrocity that it is, they will then stop those who continue to destroy. It is for this we wrote the book. It is this we have dedicated our lives."