rEvolution in America
The Fall 1978 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly is not, per se, an issue of CoEvolution Quarterly. Instead, the magazine is fully given over to serve as the third issue of the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, an old City Lights-affiliated journal of Beats and biologists with an extremely intermittent publication schedule (the first issue came out in 1961, the second in 1968.)
This issue of the Journal is dense and esoteric, even by CoEvolution Quarterly’s standards. In its pages there are the standard environmentalist essays and pop-scientific glosses that would typically constitute CoEvolution Quarterly’s feature well, of course—there’s a great essay on threats to the Endangered Species Act from cetacean intelligence scholar Sterling Bunnell, for example—but in between these dispatches the Lawrence Ferlinghetti-led editorial team fits in a bracing mix of poetry, experimental text-art, and, in the issue’s climax, a list of endangered species that includes not just bald eagles and chimpanzees but also a litany of assassinated journalists, poets, and editors killed over the tumultuous years of the mid-’70s.
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann is an ecologist, writer, editor, and technologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento--San Joaquin River Delta. Their work focuses on technologies of ecological sensemaking and the interplay between aquaculture systems and wild fish populations.