The East Bay Anarchist Bookfair will include conversations and books during the day. The main room of the hall will house booksellers, distributors, independent presses, and activist groups from all over North America but with an emphasis on the Bay Area and California

Anarchists talk more about living than dying, but raging all around us is a debate about whether we have entered a new age, what has become known as the Anthropocene. While academics debate when this age might have started, it is beyond debate that homo sapiens have dramatically and permanently altered the planet. Despite living in an age where we are faced with the horrors of mass extinction, global climate catastrophe and the increased desperation of governments to secure resources and borders, anarchists have made few contributions to these discussions. They remain largely in the realm of scientists, academics, politics and business.

Non-anthropocentric views and values are few and far between in regional anarchist scenes. Is the “non-human” an inhuman topic? These topics are so taboo that even approaching them with other anarchists can elicit accusations of fascism, genocide apology, and counterrevolutionary armchair misanthropy. Objections of cruelty, abjection, and horror invariably accompany contemporary talk of the “non-human” aspects of our “crisis,” but do they have to? Can there be an anarchism that lives outside the box of the human social project?