Amplifying the Ecological Resistance: A Request for Proposals from Biocentric Media and the Earth First! Journal on Next Steps Forward

A request for proposals from Biocentric Media and the Earth First! Journal on next steps forward. Originally posted to Earth First! Journal.

Being an Earth First!er has never been a walk in the park. Maybe something more like a steep slog up a muddy hillside, half clearcut and ready to erode down into a valley at any moment. We’ve slogged and slipped, rolled around in the mud a bit (maybe we even pretended to wrestle imaginary opponents in it, drunk and naked, on occasion), And we still usually got back at it before dawn, to stay ahead of the construction crews…

But this moment in the movement is, well, a little different.

The pandemic year of 2020 was the first of forty years with no summer gathering, first decade with no newswire, and the first time since the late 80s that there has not been a full-time Collective running a Journal office.

It sounds dramatic, but in other ways, the Journal is also in better shape than it has been in some years past. Namely, a new business entity was created to resolve some long-standing business issues. Merchandise and subscription sales have been increasing steadily, and the bookkeeping is currently on point.

Those of us who love and care about Earth First! and the larger movement for ecological resistance have been doing what we can for the last 2 years. But it’s time to hand the Journal project off to a new entity that wants to shape it. We have had to face the reality that publishing full magazines on a quarterly schedule is not enough of a movement priority to keep the project afloat–and coupled with steeply increasing production, shipping and material costs, we have accepted that it is no longer a realistic goal. But there are a multitude of ways that our infrastructure above could be applied towards impactful movement projects that build off what the Earth First! network has cultivated for decades.

This is a request from the current board of Biocentric Media for proposals from the frontlines to take the torch and run wild.

In the past, this would have looked like an application process to join the existing Collective. However, our only full-time collective member is leaving the project in the spring. Essentially, the Journal has a clean slate in 2022.

There is infrastructure in place, but no cohort to facilitate putting it into motion. That’s where you and your team could come in. Interested in using Journal resources to start a new road show? Make or sell merchandise for the movement? Expand our prisoner outreach? Refresh the Newswire as a blog, RSS feed, or newsletter? Coordinate with other radical media collectives? Keep the Journal in print? Anything else? It’s up to you!

We, the board writing this request for proposals, informally represent an intergenerational presence made up of several thousand people (who are reflected in the EF!J database and public reach as well as those who come to gatherings) that have shown we’re willing to put in time and money to support a small team of people to get paid for doing the heavy lifting of managing communications and network maintenance across “the country” and sometimes beyond it.

To apply online, click here.

Basically, if you want to get paid to develop movement work in this vein, send a proposal to the Biocentric Media team with the following details:

Contact Name: (individual and/or collective)

Phone:

Address:

Emails:

Website or social media sites for you and/or your current/recent projects:

Primary relevant movement interests or passions:

History of EF! Involvement:

What are your ideas for revitalization focused on what you can do? Please describe a plan for what you’d create using the existing EF! media infrastructure (800-1,000 words):

Proposals accepting on rolling basis; no later than May 1, 2022.