Diane Lefer, co-author of The Blessing Next to the Wound, writes about Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, Hector Aristizábal performing in Colombia, and why nonviolent mass movements pose a threat in LA Progressive.

Hector Aristizábal lay on a table in Medellín, Colombia, his head covered with a black cloth. Twenty-eight years had passed since he was taken from his home by the US-trained military, secretly detained and tortured. Now he had returned to his birthplace after years in exile in the US to spend a month working with peace and justice groups and this night he was not in custody but onstage.

Lantern books is involved with prisoners in various ways: we have an author behind bars, have published books about prison, we have friends and fellow activists behind bars, and we try to send books and support to political prisoners. Because of this, we have gotten on some lists provided to people in prison of companies and organizations that are interested in their rights, and supporting them.

We often get letters asking for things we can't provide: zombie novels, comic books, publishing services for murder mysteries. Sometimes people even ask for financial or legal help, as if we have any money or legal expertise! But today I got a letter from someone in prison in Pennsylvania who has written a book, had it published, and would like our help getting the word out about it.

So, with the disclaimer that I haven't read this book and know pretty much nothing about it, you may be interested in:

Prison Humor
A Compilation of over 380 Jokes from Inmates in the State Department of Corrections
by Walter Allen [who my letter is from]

Released just this month and available from Amazon.

I'm here to tell you that book promotion is hard on a good day, so I can only imagine the challenges presented when one lives in captivity. If the book is awful, forgive me—just doing my part!

The Middle East and the country of Israel are roiled in a centuries-old struggle for self-determination and land. The following two books explore that conflict.

The twelve women of Jerusalem (whether Christians, Jews, or Muslims) who are profiled in Making Their Own Peace face the unique pressures of living in a city steeped in history and blood, resonant with revelation and absolutism, and needful of mutual respect. These women tell their stories of cooperation and support in their decisions not to wait for political negotiations to succeed in bringing their communities together but through the forging of their own ways to live and work in peace every day. They offer an inspiring message of hope in the midst of conflict.

In The Olive and the Tree, educator Dr. Ruth Westheimer uncovers the secret world of the Druze, the peoples of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, who are Arab in ethnic origin, Muslim by religious orientation, but maintain a different and secret identity in their various countries. Dr. Ruth concentrates on the world of the Israeli Druze, who have made a commitment as a minority within the minority to live within and fight for the state of Israel, itself a minority country in the Middle East. This book offers a fascinating insight into the politics and tensions of the Middle East.

For more on Jerusalem Day, click here.

Lantern has made a commitment to pursuing the central issues of non-violence in its publications from a variety of perspectives.

From the perspective of law enforcement, Lawrence Blum, in Force Under Pressure and Stoning the Keepers at the Gate, makes an impassioned plea for the peace officer community and society to understand the tremendous pressures that cops on the beat face on a day-to-day basis. He argues that extraordinary stress is often ignored by the police and civil establishment and that officers don't know how important relaxation, proper emotional and physical conditioning, and access to therapy and other forms of mental processing are in making sure that they do not overreact to situations and cause them and others harm, if they are placed in a life-threatening situation again.

Charles "Sid" Heal takes a more tactical approach. His concern is to stop violence happening before it starts. In Sound Doctrine and the more specialized Illustrated Guide to Tactical Diagramming, Sid, who is a SWAT team member and a long time police and military tactician, shows how officers and others involved in policing can monitor and control a situation (whether a rioting crowd or a hostage-taker) in such a way that as few people get hurt as possible.

Violence permeates our society: in Boys Will Be Boys, Myriam Miedzian looks at the cult of masculinist violence that forces boys into roles where they deny their own and others' vulnerability and need for connection. That lack of connection may, indeed, have played a role in the murderous rampage that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on at Columbine High School in 1999. Brooks Brown knew them both, and in No Easy Answers, written with journalist Rob Merritt, he explains how a culture of bullying and factionalism in high school (in some ways mirroring the society outside) led these alienated kids to commit the unthinkable.

How does one cope when one has been violated? In Aftershock, psychologist pattrice jones reveals how activists who have been subject to trauma, whether being arrested by the authorities or seeing those whom you are advocating for beaten up or killed, or even simply living in a violent world.

Finally, it would be remiss not to point out that violence against animals takes place every day, in a systematized and almost entirely ignored way on factory farms and in slaughterhouses around the world. We encourage you to look at other titles on our website to find out more about this "acceptable" form of violence.

For more on Peace Officer Memorial Day, click here.

I went to the Denver Earth Day fair in Civic Center park on Earth Day, mostly out of a sense of curiosity but also just to be a witness to whatever it is that the environmental movement can put forward. For anyone who understands the urgency of our situation, the event was obviously disappointing. The fair was rather small (I counted 27 different tables) though tolerably well attended.

Greenpeace, probably the most radical group, was there.  They had a "photo petition" of people willing to say that they want to ban the slaughter of whales and have their picture taken holding one of several signs which they provide. Save the whales? Isn't this where the environmental movement came in decades ago?

Confusing laws and confusing situations do not encourage more bicycle riders. In Denver it is technically illegal to ride your bicycle on the sidewalk. You are supposed to ride your bicycle on a bike path or on the streets. Laws in different municipalities are quite different —Portland has a completely different situation. 

In general, staying off sidewalks is a very good idea. Pedestrians need to have some protection, and because of driveways, riding a bicycle on a sidewalk is often much more dangerous than riding in the street.  Some urge the idea of riding a bicycle on a sidewalk as quite logical, but there are actually some bicyclists who point out safety issues for cyclists in riding on sidewalks.  I avoid sidewalks about 99% of the time.

As if there aren't already enough difficult problems in the world, suddenly climate change activists are themselves divided over the right way to deal with climate change. The hot issue now is "cap and trade."

Oh wonderful, you're probably saying to yourself. How much do we need to know about climate change — do we need to worry about all this? Yes.

We desperately need radical changes to meet the challenge of resource shortages and global warming; but there's no political will to do so. Until this happens, two potential economic futures are likely: a slow decline, or a dramatic, quick crash. These alternatives were covered marvelously in a brief talk by Gail Tverberg, mild-mannered actuary by day but also an editor at TheOilDrum.com.

"Slow slide" looks like the default choice. As oil becomes more difficult and expensive to extract, energy becomes more expensive, people stop buying, and we go into a recession (as happened in 2008). The downturn causes oil prices to fall, but as soon as the recovery starts, oil consumption rises and the price of oil spikes again: wash, rinse, repeat.

Will renewables like wind and solar power help get us to a renewable energy economy? At the recent ASPO-USA conference, Jeff Vail, a regular at TheOilDrum.com and a former Air Force intelligence officer, presented a thought-provoking paper on "the renewables gap" which threw this whole idea into question. Vail’s point was not that wind power wasn’t a good idea, or that it wasn’t technically feasible, but that it wasn’t politically feasible, because of the need for up-front investment.

The estimated EROEI ("energy return on energy invested") for wind turbines varies widely, all the way from 4:1 (pessimistic) to 24:1 (optimistic) — comparable to other forms of energy generation with fossil fuels. But unlike generating electricity from coal or natural gas, for wind almost all of the energy investment is up front, namely, in the manufacture and set-up of the wind turbine. This up-front investment will have to be huge and will take a big chunk out of the rest of the economy. This chunk is the "renewables gap."

There’s good news and bad news about oil depletion. The good news is that the International Energy Agency (IEA) and our government are both a lot smarter than we thought!

Two senior IEA officials (one current, one former) recently told the Guardian, a prominent newspaper in the U. K., that key oil data is being distorted by the IEA under American pressure, and that the reality is that we are much closer to oil shortages than we think. We’ve known for years that the official IEA figures are silly; that’s not news. What is news is that the IEA itself knew this.

How can livestock respiration contribute to global warming — a key conclusion of the recent WorldWatch article on livestock and global warming?

It’s confusing because we’ve learned that in a "natural state," carbon dioxide breathed out by animals is balanced by carbon dioxide taken up by plants. There is no net effect on greenhouse gas emissions from respiration by livestock, and everything is in balance, right?

To see the fallacy here, let’s back up to the time before you add that cow to the landscape. There are wild animals and humans breathing CO2, but also a lot of plants taking it up, so you have a balance. Then, along comes the cow — and boom, there goes your balance. With livestock agriculture we have bred so many animals that we have upset this natural balance. We have too many animals and not enough plants.

Many people will find this hard to believe. Don't the livestock just replace wild animals, who also breathe out CO2? And if we had too many animals, wouldn’t plants be eaten and start to disappear?

Vegetarians haven’t been much aware of peak oil, and I am continually annoyed at things like "The Vegetarian Travel Issue" in vegetarian magazines. Oil underlies our economy, including our food system. Peak oil means that we are entering a new era, the era of limits. 

Peak oil is simple concept: it is the maximum rate of oil production. Our economy only works well when it’s expanding — and there are no cheap and easy substitutes for oil.

Peak oil would be a tremendous economic shock, or I should say: it is a tremendous economic shock. Most likely, we passed peak oil in July 2008 and still haven’t really absorbed the economic damage. If we do somehow go over our production of oil in July 2008, it probably won’t be by very much. After that, it’s downhill all the way.

The oil shocks of the 1970's, caused by the OPEC embargo of 1973 and the Iranian revolution of 1979, are our only real precedent for what the world will look like post-peak. These oil shocks produced several trends: expanded bicycle sales, high food prices, a lot of talk about world hunger, and . . . a lot of talk about vegetarianism.

In the 1970's, vegetarians had virtually no organizations and inferior literature to that today; and yet vegetarianism became a big deal, pretty much out of nowhere, rather quickly. Why? Of course there were a lot of factors, ranging from the hippie counterculture to Diet for a Small Planet; but the underlying reason was economics.

What the oil shocks of the 1970's really provided was a taste of what a world of resource shortages would feel like — a world in which people paid a lot more for food, they worried about natural resources, and world hunger was a serious international issue. It didn’t just appeal to everyone’s higher ethical sensibilities: it hit them in their stomach and their wallet.

A world of resource shortages is a world in which, suddenly, food can't be taken for granted by anyone. Vegetarians have something to contribute to this discussion, and that’s why they should pay attention to peak oil.

Today is 80 years after the "Black Tuesday" which signaled the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The Great Depression was caused, basically, by a credit bubble: by living beyond our means.

Hey, that's what we're doing now! We are close to (or most likely past) the peak of world oil production, and our economy can't function without oil.

Certainly an oil depletion crash would be bad news for all the people who lose their jobs, houses, or worse. But this is a problem with the transition, which we should handle with utmost compassion, not with where we're ultimately headed.

In terms of our destination, it's good news. This economy, while good at some things, is pretty stupid with the really important things. It promotes consumerism, destruction of animals, war, pollution — and don't get me started about drivers talking on their cell phones.

There’s even more good news today: high government officials are aware of this issue. "(Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy) was my boss. He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it." (From David Fridley, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.)

We’re in a massive credit bubble right now. Total U. S. debt (credit cards, business loans, government debt, etc.) went from $2.4 trillion in 1974, to $17.2 trillion in 1994, to 44.7 trillion in 2006. It is now over $50 trillion. Uh, where is this all headed? Has anyone ever heard of "Limits to Growth"?

Oil depletion is not the only problem that our perpetual growth economy has created, by the way — think soil erosion, deforestation, global warming, and all the rest. Oil depletion is merely the first insurmountable problem. We can’t "save" our perpetual growth economy, nor should we try. We need to prepare for, and welcome, the era of limits. "Simple living" is a good thing, and we're going to see more of it.

I may have a vested interest in the person giving the lecture (she's my life partner), but the subject matter of the lecture given by Mia MacDonald, Executive Director of Brighter Green, at a recent Climate Week NYC conference, is very important. Her talk offers the clearest exposition I've seen in a while of how we're going to have to grapple with the issue of intensive animal agriculture if we're going to deal seriously with the challenges of climate change. Moreover, we need to do this on a worldwide scale, and not simply here in the United States, although as Mia states: The example we set matters.

Mia and I knew we wouldn't see much. We knew it would be cold. We knew there'd be a lot of standing around and that we'd have to get up early and go to bed late. But we had to be there—not only because we supported Barack Obama as a candidate; not merely because we admired him as a man and shared his vision of a transformed American polity that understood the power of communitarian radicalism; not even because we knew it would be an historic event and wanted to be a part of it, no matter how small. We wanted to go because, sometimes, you have to show up—to bear witness, to speak out, to be present to the possibilities that such a moment opens up. A chance for change.

We took the Shuttle from NYC to DC—astonishingly enough one of the cheaper and more efficient options of getting there. We arrived in DC at 8 am, and then got ourselves onto the Metro, which took forty minutes to get us to Farrugat West across the Potomac in DC proper. While we were delayed on the Metro, and squeezed so tightly that you almost didn't need to hold on to anything when the train moved because other peoples' bodies kept you upright, no one lost their temper, and there was almost a party atmosphere on board.