Get to Know Me: Stephanie McMillan

Stephanie McMillan is a cartoonist and writer who lives in Florida. She is also a radical environmentalist and a Marxist. Actually, I'm not even sure if "radical environmentalist" is an apt moniker. She thinks that we need to not let the vast majority of life on this planet (including most humans) die, and is willing to do anything to stop it. Is that radical? Is that even environmentalist? She's also anti-civ, in the sense that she thinks that industrial capitalism, and moreover industrial civilization (defined as massive cities that import food, not defined as music, before anyone leaps to defend civilization because they like ballet) is inherently hierarchical and destructive to human flourishing, and unsustainable. And she draws cute bunnies! Definitely worth checking out.

I found out about her at a live reading I went to at a radical bookstore in NYC. I had gone to hear Ted Rall speak and to buy his latest book, but was so taken with her presentation that I bought her book as well and have been following her ever since.

That book, which is her best in my opinion, she wrote with Derrick Jensen. It's called "As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial", which is a mouthful of a title. The book is written as a response to the "small changes to save the world" lifestyle activism that is so popular in the United States. The good news is that the book is being serialized a page at a time here by Seven Stories Press. It's a great way to get introduced to her style.

After that you can read an interview with her here or listen to one here.

Finally, here are her two current webcomics. The first is her long-running comic Minimum Security, which is a reference to a quote from a prisoner who was released from jail after being found to have been innocent, namely that he wasn't "freed" because he was still in the racist society with racist cops that had tortured him and locked him up in the first place -- he had just been moved to the minimum security wing. The comic used to be a joke-a-day, observational kind of thing which was quite funny (you can read it in the archives) and which got her into trouble when she published the home phone of a congress person in it. Read that one here (click on it and it will be bigger):

Recently though it's switched focus to follow the same characters, but grown up, and dealing with grownup problems. She is using the comic as a format for discussing whether and how different kinds of activism, from movement-building to solitary acts of violence to protests to working in the system, can save us. It's really interesting for a political philosophy work from a Marxist perspective to be done in a graphic medium, let alone as a fictional plot with characters to identify with.

I may not be selling this properly. Just go read it.

...and the other is a one-panel political cartoon called Code Green. It's new and still a bit hit-or-miss for me, but sometimes quite good.

So go learn about her, and Bunnista, the rebel bunny! He is cute and good with dynamite.