A Localist’s Call to Rebel
Review: In Defence of Life
If Julian Rose hasn’t pushed you outside your comfort zone, or made at least one proposition that you might not agree with, then I don’t think he achieved his object. Because this is more than the admonishments of someone who made his mark in Europe promoting organic foods and protecting small scale agriculture.
Starting with questioning the military nature of the industrial complex and the emergent surveillance state, In Defence of Life digs and pokes. Kind of like a localist manifesto in a globalist world run amok.
And more importantly, these aren’t just the armchair musings of some cloistered academic. Julian Rose converted his English estate in the ’70s to organic farming; last week he presented a declaration of Real Farming and Real Food at the Polish Presidential Palace. In the 40 odd years in between he has engaged in successful fights to ban GMOs in Europe, promote raw milk in England, save family farms in Poland.
So when he encourages and admonishes you to question, resist or completely change how you eat, and even your life, he’s done it himself. And it is amazing what individuals and small groups of focused individuals can achieve. In Defence of Life offers some signposts.
And they are also not the musings of someone entrenched in the PC thinking of whatever the environmental cause du jour is. Screw your endless well-intentioned foreign wars, and your organic foods flown in from the other side of the world. Distributed decision-making is far superior to entrenched bureaucracy in Brussels. The national level is better, and local community is even better than that. Whoever thought we should turn all of Europe into a giant wind farm just to feed the insatiable industrial needs of modern consumerism, was simply not thinking it through.
Julian Rose could by many people be considered an environmentalist or an organic farming activist, but he’s offering more, and he’s not owned by the left or the right. Refreshing in these very polarized times.
You can find In Defence of Life on Amazon, or better, order it directly from the source at www.julianrose.info.
