Journal for the Protection of all Beings

Journal for the Protection of all Beings, No. 1
Edited by Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and David Meltzer.
San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1961
Subtitled A Visionary and Revoutionary Review.

Similar in spirit and philosophy to Sandar Russell's The Ark, published in 1947 and The Ark II/Moby 1 (combined with Michael McClure's first magazine), the Journal for the Protection of All Beings was one of the first radical ecology journals. Invented by McClure and Meltzer, it melded the anarchist thought of the fifties (The Ark), with the pacificism evidenced in the very early mimeo journal, The Illiterati, published in the late forties by Willliam Everson, interned at the Camp for Conscientious Objectors in Waldport Oregon. The newest element in the mix was work from the San Francisco Renaissance poets. The first issue leads off with Thomas Merton's “Chant to be used in procession around a site with furnaces” and includes work by all three editors as well as and interview of Ginsberg by Gregory Corso, and an interview of Ginsberg and Corso by William Burroughs as well as Gary Snyder's “Buddhist Anarchism.” This issue reprints two famous document's, Percy Shelley's “Declaration of Rights,” and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce's last and famous statement.
----------------from A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (Granary Books, 1997)

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