From The Wild Will Project by John Jacobi
Desert, an anarchist pamphlet put out in 2011, has become something of a defining text for green anarchists and primitivists. It has the style of pop lit historical narrative texts like “Clash of Civilizations“ or “The Coming Anarchy,” but from a uniquely anarchist and uniquely ecological perspective. It influenced me profoundly when I was first delving into green ideas, but I didn’t realize quite how much until my recent re-read of it, prompted by its renewed popularity. Still, while the broad narrative of technological ivory towers and slums and rebels on the outskirts rings true, it suffers from a few problems worth critiquing. The most important of these are the author’s disregard for organized political responses and his position on wildlands conservation; but there are also a number of smaller historical and analytical inaccuracies, like his ideas on population.