As any readers of this column will have noted my preoccupation with the war in Iraq continues unabated. From the September 2002 Mountain Echoes onwards (No. 86) this has been almost a singular obsession. Of the last 35 numbers 26 of them have been specifically on the war or some aspect of it and actions to be taken against it or I have at least mentioned some aspect of it in detail. As well as this for the last 12 months I have been publishing an Irregular Gippsland Peace Newsletter (IGPN) which was initially 4 quarto pages and is now 6 which continues to place increasing demands on my time. Collecting information for this small publication requires about 2 hours online every day plus another hour or two editing, producing and promoting it. All this, combined with trying to 'earn a quid' (not too much as I begrudge the military machine every tax penny) and household chores, has meant that I have decided to finish the Mountain Echoes column.
Looking back over the last ten years is interesting and the essays, until the recent obsession, were on a wide variety of topics - history, politics, economics, the occasional book review and other obscure, apolitical and perhaps eccentric matters - all from a near pacifist, left libertarian perspective. Many of these essays I still quite like and many of their arguments are still valid today. Some, hopefully, will still be valid in ten or fifty years. Those of a mainly historical perspective such as the biographical material on Orwell or O'Dowd seem to have some enduring features. On the other hand some of the political, and especially many of the economic, predictions have proved hopelessly wrong. Economic depressions predicted in various numbers have so far failed to materialise. The demise of John Howard predicted in ME No.57 was unfortunately well wide of the mark. To counter this I have occasionally got the economics right as with my prediction of the high tech crash in ME No.55 just a few months before the event!
I also particularly like my "In Praise of" series - essays on various subjects including "Walking", "Trees" and "Libraries" and had marked down for possible future essays on amongst other topics "Simple Things", "Common Sense", "Pacifism", "Good Works", "Voluntary Poverty" and "Local History".
Ironically it was an article on the latter subject by Bob James which prompted me to write the first Mountain Echoes. It is most unlikely that any of these essays will now be written. Columns I intended to write but somehow never got around to, included a comparison of Orwell and Huxley's Brave New World Revisited, biographies of Proudhon, Chummy Fleming, Thoreau, Edward Hyams, Tolstoy, Germaine Greer, E.J. Brady and other diverse subjects such as "Religion and Anarchism".
With regards the 'big picture' items - war, climate change, the depletion of petroleum resources and overpopulation - I remain a committed pessimist. I have seen no reason to change the views and opinions I have expressed in the various columns I have written on these subjects. In particular the liberation and education of women as a long term solution to population problems seems as distant as ever and in some places, notably Iraq and other Muslim nations, appears to have gone backwards. The absence of solutions means the death rate solution as predicted in the Club of Rome's Limits of Growth treatise in 1970 and which I dealt with in some detail in ME No. 67 is most likely to occur. I then wrote: "their 'World Model standard run' (p.124) predicts the following:- that world population will peak at 9 billion in 2050 and then decline again to 6 billion by 2100 and continue declining thereafter. The above scenario is almost too horrific to contemplate - but essentially (it) means that between 1 in 3 and 1 in 2 people will die in the second half of the century." The harbinger of such a grim reaper is impossible to predict - perhaps it will be a special strain of bird flue or a super AIDS virus or some natural or man made occurrence setting off a 'nuclear winter'. In this respect, like the Club of Rome, I remain the 'prophet of doom'.
Hints of what I will be doing now are found in various numbers. My major effort in the short to medium term will be concentrated on IGPN. It will probably expand in size and become a more sophisticated production. The email version will eventually become more streamlined and possibly a web site of some description organised. Amongst other things Joe Toscano's 'Murdoch Boycott' will be featured every month. No boycott is going to occur with one, or even a hundred voices, in a society as diverse as ours. It is therefore essential to repeat the message, as often as possible, and in an endless variety of ways. Perhaps the space left by the cessation of this essay can be utilised as a more permanent boycott site. I have made many web searches and been unable to come up with a site that specifically deals with this political action.
The IGPN will eventually reach more than a thousand people (at the moment about 200) and hopefully will be a catalyst, co-ordinator and publicist of increasingly widespread, and effective, local actions. It is a interesting, and perhaps sad, fact that already I receive more feedback on a single issue of IGPN than I have had in the 10 years of Mountain Echoes. Feedback from the column, especially after it went online only when the Anarchist Age monthly ceased publication, has been virtually non existent. The one exception was the number on the Middle East (ME No.80)which attracted some comment and sympathy, from peace workers in Israel.
In the longer term I have still some work to do on local history and am currently putting together a series of reviews and recent essays on the Kurnai. I also have some hopes of creating, or helping to create, an "Ethel Mannin Library" which will contain a wide variety of otherwise difficult to obtain works on and by pacifist libertarians as outlined in ME No.107. I am still working on it as, and when, time permits.