I'm Giving Away Copies of My First Book

Upcoming events, recent interviews, reflections on recent readings, and a giveaway

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts, such as this one.

Here’s my latest video update. I discuss the construction of the border wall in southern Arizona and impacts this is having on Jaguar, Ocelots, and other wildlife. I reflect, in the context of a multi-week heat wave in my region, on speaking out and taking action against the crisis of global warming for the last 20 years. And I share my thoughts on a book I finished last week, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse by Richard Smith.

Book giveaway

I’m giving away 20 free copies of my first book, an essay collection titled “We Choose to Speak” that was originally published in 2018. These books aren’t available for sale anywhere else, and I stopped selling them a number of years ago.

These are the last few copies I have, and I’d like them to go to people who will actually read them, so please comment on this post if you’d like to be entered in the drawing. You can also comment on this post, since only paying subscribers can comment on this paid post. I’m setting a cut-off date of Friday, July 25th for this.

If less than 20 people request a copy, you’ll each get one. If more than 20 request a copy, I’ll use a random method. I’ll ship a copy to you for free if you live in the United States, but if you live overseas, I’d ask you to cover shipping (or send you an eBook version) because I can’t afford that.

A final invitation to Monday’s event

As a final reminder, I’m helping to organize a free, online event coming up on Monday, July 21st, “Solidarity Against Tyranny: Frontline Resistance Insights from the Philippines and Appalachian South.”

The event will feature speakers working in anti-mining activism, human rights law, and grassroots mutual aid from the Philippines, a speaker who focuses on organizing in the black community in the Appalachian South, and my colleague Terry Lodge, who works in environmental (rights of nature) and activist defense law.

You can learn more about the event, and register to attend, by clicking here:

There’s also a Facebook event if you’d like to share that. If you’re not already following my other Substack project,

Truth and Reckoning

, be sure to do so. That’s the best way to ensure you stay up to date on my work with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Thoughts, Reads, and Projects

• Stephen Carr Hampton
  ’s recent piece on parallels between U.S. responses to the Trails of Tears in the late 1830’s and public responses to the ongoing genocide in Palestine is incredibly powerful.

• One of the journalists I respect most is Adam Federman, who’s done extensive reporting on government surveillance, harassment, and crackdowns on radical environmentalists. His latest piece is well worth reading: "The War on Protest is Here: I Am Not Afraid: The Trump administration is attacking protesters from all angles. Activists refuse to back down."

• On July 16th I gave a presentation to the Canadian Club of Rome:

• In late May,

  Fairytales From Ecotopia
  interviewed me about the dreams and visions that inspired the Protect Thacker Pass campaign. This isn’t a story I’ve told in full before this interview.

I need your help. I’ve left all social media to focus my attention on organizing, coordinating resistance actions, and writing. That means I rely entirely on readers like you to share this content online. If you appreciate what you read here, please take the time to share your reasons why on social media, discussion forums, and in direct messages to friends. Thank you!

• This brilliant podcast about Dean Barlese, Peehee Mu'huh, and resistance to the Thacker Pass lithium mine was just released.

• Here’s a bunch of recent pieces and podcasts I was interviewed for:

  • The Real News Network: “This lithium company is trying to sue Indigenous land defenders into silence”

  • TRT Global: “North America’s largest lithium mine is key to EV transition. Why are environmentalists opposing it?”

  • PRISM Reports: “Despite global repression, Indigenous-led environmental movements fight on”

  • With

    Paulo Kirk
    : Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge

• I was also featured in this artistic video created by Claude Buettner:

• On the marriage of normalized porn culture and user-created content as a hyper-escalation of new forms of patriarchy: “Disney doesn’t make stars anymore; stars make themselves, and TikTok profits when they do. TikTok, like Disney before it, makes its money from teenage girls, and those girls hope to get fame back from it. Some, like Addison Rae, may get everything they want from it, and emerge unscathed. But most who idolize and emulate her will not be so lucky.” From TikTok is the New Disney Channel.

• Justin McAffee
  ’s piece on the destruction of ecology in post-revolution Vietnam shows clearly that liberation from social injustice does not necessarily lead to ecological well-being. Our movements must be deliberately ecological.

• The book China's Engine of Ecological Collapse by Richard Smith is, in many ways, similar to Bright Green Lies — it exhaustively documents environmental destruction taking place in China, and is a must read, especially for those who lionize China’s “ecological civilization” propaganda project.

• Another interesting book I read recently, The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner, is a fascinating story of the first-ever study to look at evolution in real time, among several species of finches in a small island in the Galapagos.

• Malaysian Tigers are now on the brink of extinction.

• “Defending Human Rights Is Dangerous. Defending Nature Makes It Even Riskier.” Over the past decade, there have been more than 6,400 attacks on human rights defenders, with three-fourths carried out against environmental defenders.

• Fascinating piece on youth culture: “Supporting Palestine and opposing Israel’s genocidal atrocities is just what’s cool now. This is a massive cultural development, because it means we are seeing the emergence of actual, meaningful rebellion in western counterculture for the first time arguably since the Vietnam War.” From The Empire Has Accidentally Caused The Rebirth Of Real Counterculture In The West

• Jeffrey Epstein Had More Than 1,000 Victims and Why MAGA is Right about Jeffrey Epstein are two timely reflections on the dangers of putting partisan politics over holding those in power accountable.

• The Weaponization of Waymo by

  Brian Merchant
  is a good piece on why people are burning Waymos at protests.

• Climate deaths are being severely and chronically under-reported in Pakistan, one of the nations hardest-hit by global warming.

• Meet the older activists hoping to save Washinton’s legacy forests is a nice story about some brave, small-scale direct action.

And finally, Tiokasin Ghosthorse is finally ending his long-running show, First Voices Radio, due to some health problems he’s been experiencing. He interviewed me many times over the years. Tiokasin’s friends are fundraising to help pay his medical bills, you can contribute here.