By Dave RileyBen Courtice who has posted here on a occasion has begun a blog ( or at least is running one I only just now discovered!)
[BCC: Words]:Eco-socialist political commentary by BCC (Ben Courtice) ...plus a few food articles and music reviewsBen's an activist in the Socialist Alliance's environment group and has notched up quite a CV building the campaign against global warming in Victoria.
But it's the recipe bit that gets me.I'm all for it as so much good politics has been created over good food, and so much campaign funding has been generated by selling access to good food cooked up for the sake of good politics.
Maybe LeftClick could start a recipe of the month feature?
However, like all the environment work the Alliance does,you'll find Ben's commentaries on issues to do with the environment movement very much to the point since he also writes on that topic for Green Left Weekly.
As Derek Wall, a leading figure and founder of the English Greens wrote on the Socialist Unity blog yesterday,
from my amigos in Australia….a country with a radical Green Party, a Socialist Alliance that values ecology and the excellent Green Left Weeekly…..what with the indigenous revolution and a tradition of working class ecosocialism, it could be the new Latin America…lets not mention the Labour government and spoil things.We must be living in political heaven down here down under.
But Derek's comment does suggest a certain political uniqueness -- despite the fact that positiveness isn't quite on the mark in terms of immediate prospects [for one thing the Greens may indeed back the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)]. But Ben Courtice and Green Left Weekly and the Socialist Alliance are all products of a process that goes back now almost 25 years -- to a time that coincides with the great victory against the damming of the Franklin River. That particular political convergence was the catalyst that began the alternative party dynamic to the left of the ALP. The immediate registration of the potency of the campaign against the Franklin Dam outside Tasmania was the "No Dams" slogan that 42% of voters wrote across their ballot papers for the 1982 Flinders By Election in Victoria. Then the rise of the "Tasmanian Independents" was followed, in 1984, by the formation of the Nuclear Disarmament Party. Driving this was split in the ALP's support base after the party's federal conference dropped the party's long standing opposition to uranium mining.
With the inspiration of the German Greens at the time, the rest, as they say, is history.
The DSP actively responded to these break out issues and along with an aggressive orientation to environment politics ( examples of which are too many to review here), in 1991 Green Left Weekly was launched. This greening up on the left -- at least a section of it -- has been a very conscious approach engineered by the DSP and the fact that Ben can be just as comfortable blogging about the union movement as he is about the environment suggests a perspective that has been worn with a lot of comfort for some time.
- My own Cook Book Blog full of occasional preferred recipes, designed for catering purposes (like for 50-200 diners) lives here.*
