Bad photocopy of David Lewis’s self-portrait
While many of the thinkers on whom our institute bases its work are well-known figures like Vladimir Lenin, Andre Gunder Frank, Edward P Thompson, William Blake, Derek Jensen, Irene Silverbladt, Hannah Arendt, the author of the Gospel of Matthew and others, a crucially important contributor is the obscure philosopher, David Lewis, a twentieth-century climate change activist from British Columbia, who styled himself a “firewood collector.” We do not know whether David is alive or dead or where he is.
But here is a set of shitty scans of the incredibly important and prescient things he wrote:
The Thought of Director Bookchin, Lewis’s lampoon of the Social Ecology movement and its founder
David purchased a nineteenth-century snake oil merchant stand with telescoping legs to hawk empty bottles of “Sustainable Development” at the UN’s Globe 90 conference in Vancouver. Here is some of the promotional material
David served as an official spokesperson for the BC Green Party 1989-91 and 1999-2000. During that time he made incisive, prescient criticisms of BC’s New Democratic Party and the environmentalists who chose to do business with it.
Here is his piece on the Jobs and Environment Accord (1990).
Here is a bunch of material David sent the party office in 1991 about his efforts to stop the NDP pushing Green Party candidate Andrea Wright out of the election. It is extraordinarily prescient in a number of ways, especially because he pushes back against the emerging politics of emotional affect that have enabled the elite capture of the left in the present.
In 1991, the BC Green Party was one of four parties to meet CBC’s criteria to participate in the provincial leaders’ debate. So CBC changed its criteria. This part of a continuing effort by a broad consensus in the mainstream media as long as the Greens opposed economic growth and offered an economic analysis of climate change. Here is David’s opinion piece on the subject from 1991, indicting BC’s environmental movement.
It is almost certain that David suffers(ed?) from bipolar disorder. The prophetic voice he was capable of speaking in was characteristic of hypomania afflicting an intelligent, driven person, a kind of supernatural quality that can temporarily puncture the boundaries of a discourse. This piece, apparently written in a depressive episode, a tone-deaf and kind of appalling guest column for a feminist magazine, is one of his few pieces of public writing in which he attempts to come to grips with the complex relationship between his mental health and his activism.
This page will be periodically updated with David’s other visionary writing.
