The ‘Issues’ section provides a categorized list of information, on-line resources, and links, based around certain key themes that the FFree Range Network structures its work around. They are not exhaustive, or detailed, but are a simple beginner’s guide to that issue, intended to provide a door towards Aself-exploration and education.
Below are the current list of issues covered in this area. Note that these pages and the topics covered in this list may be updated at any time. For details see the UUpdates area.
An introduction to anarchist theory, what it does and does not mean, and more importantly looking at anarchism as a ‘philosophy for living’ rather than as an historical tradition.
Though derived from classical anarchism, anarcho-primitivism is an approach that proposes a critique not simply of Industrial Society, but of the ways in which our domination of nature following the rise of settled agriculture fundamentally damaged our relationship to each other in equal measure.
Deep ecology arose as a field of academic study in the 1970s, but with the realization of the scale of the ecological crisis it now provides a critical framework to look at not only human society, but also society’s failure to address the destruction of the natural world.
Arising as a field of critical study within economics since the late 1970s, ‘degrowth theory’ seeks to provide a pathway to resolving the ecological crisis through the deintensification of human activity on the planet; albeit, one diametrically opposed to the conventional or ‘green’ economic theories which are based within the maintenance of affluence.
Given the political mess that now exists in Britain, with rights to protest and free association having been stripped from the public over the last four decades, this is a guide to the legal framework around direct action in Britain – building upon the Free Range Network’s ‘Free Range Activism Kit’ (FRAK).
‘Ecological limits’ represents a broad area of academic study that seeks to measure the capacity of the natural environment to support the human species, and our historic failure to address the limits to human expansion within a Neoliberal economic framework that fetishizes ‘economic growth’.
Through most often reduced to a simple examination of ‘gas fracking’, ‘extreme’ energy sources (including some, such as biomass burning, which are classed as ‘renewable’) represent the intersection of Neoliberal economics and the fanatical pursuit of economic growth which present a fundamental risk to human well-being and the natural world.
The political economy of Neoliberalism surrounds us, and dominates our lives, yet rarely are the theories or political ideology which underpin it questioned within the mainstream of politics, economics, and the mass media. This page seeks to address that omission.
A relatively recent concept, the theory of ‘Neofeudalism’ explains how the intersection of new technologies, and the recent concentration of economic power amongst a few immensely wealthy oligarchs, creates a whole new political and economic framework which is slowly gaining power across society – most often summarized by the phrase, “you will own nothing and you will be happy”.
A development of Classical Luddism, Neoluddism provides both a deep ecological critique of Industrial & Technological Society, and advances a practical project for self-reskilling to try and extract ourselves from the invisible cage that ‘high technology’ throws around our lives.
‘Rewild the People’ is a project from the Free Range Network – based around English land rights (or rather, the lack thereof) – which seeks to both a critique, and extend the current debate over ‘Rewilding’ by arguing that it is not nature which needs to be restored, but human nature through allowing people to live low-impact lifestyles in rural areas.
A critique of how technology and economics have symbiotically created new structures for human exploitation – examining the ways in which technology increasingly enslaves people due to the its greater capacity for psychological manipulation, and how this exerts economic control over the population.
