So what’s been going on…

You may have noticed the Black and Green Press pages being awfully silent for nearly a year now. This page, itself, was down for I’m not even sure how long. Orders have been sitting, and I know frustrations are spiking and even outright anger.
So where do I start? I suppose I’ll clear the air: I started Black and Green in 2000. It’s been zines, pamphlets, books, a network, a resource, a publisher, and a face of green anarchy in all that time. Black and Green Press is going nowhere.
I started doing anarchist zines in 1993, have run distros and mailorder since about 1995: DIY is in my soul. Black and Green has always been an extension of myself, for better or worse. It is that anarchistic spirit, that need to scream out from street corners, to feel the overwhelming beauty of the wildness of this world and the utter devastation of the continued assaults upon it.
Black and Green never has been nor ever will be a business.
Again, for better or worse. That spirit can inspire great things, as I think our firm stack of anarchistic love and rage demonstrates. The problem is that it’s been a burden to carry for far too long. My attempts to distance my unfortunate disposition from holding back its efficacy have failed.
I haven’t exactly been silent about my struggles. They are, after all, the same wounds and traumas that we are attacking. They are civilization, in all of its brutality, at work. I suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and in the past years, I’ve had to confront living with that understanding, the unwinding that revealed it, and the nature of traumas in my own life, and the impact the depression, anxiety, and splitting have on my daily existence.
That is a lot, and on many levels. But, at its core, I have a disorder that clinically impacts my sense of time and can do things like partition B&G to a very specific part of myself that has been vastly overworked, overwhelmed, and unable to adapt significantly to changes in the way that mail order works.
Here’s the long story short: the weight of B&G’s stagnancy weighs heavily on me, every moment of every day. Tendencies I had developed from a lifetime of DIY approaches put me in a corner, one where outside help was generally lost and presumed unavailable. Effectively, I’ve made it harder on myself and it hasn’t gotten anywhere closer, that is until I’ve recognized that old methods and approaches are no longer effective.
I’ve needed help. I’ve had help offered and wasn’t in a place to take it. I’ve been endemically broke, no matter how hard I work or try, and the costs of B&G and its maintenance continually pull the rug out from beneath me. It’s a landslide, and my approach was to say that I needed to dig out the landslide all at once before I could say or do anything about it.
That has gotten me nowhere. It’s gotten Black and Green nowhere.
It means that people who want to read these books are getting agitated because they’re not getting the books in any real timeline, and rightfully so. It’s had people refuse to read my writing because they’ve gotten agitated waiting for books, which is an unfair burden, in my opinion, on the validity of my work outside from my ability to maintain a steady order flow.
I don’t want to go on with this. The point is clear: I needed help, I need help, and I’ve taken the steps to actually get help. The current site and methods for sending orders are painfully slow and arduous. It’s kept others from being able to help at all. I’m grateful to have had conversations with Detritus Books that can completely streamline the order processing and fulfillment. That means we can get to one click shipping and it means that others can step in and help keep up on it. It’s a game changer.
But I need help still. The costs of all these sites, the cost of transferring everything around and getting some necessary equipment (more packaging supplies, but also desperately looking for a label printer) are there.
I’ve had times before where my work was able to offset the costs of B&G, but now is not one of those times. I know some people think I make a living off of writing or seem to think that Black and Green makes money. I get that people might now know, but it’s pretty laughable. Black and Green has extraordinary debt, and entirely in my name. I can’t move almost anywhere since it tanked my credit. And the last move we had last year was horrifically slow and it’s taken nearly a year to dig out of the mess it left things in.
I don’t want to have to divulge all of this information. But I bust my ass working and have nothing to show for it here or personally. So I want to do everything possible to get Black and Green out of the dark and having the channels for order fulfillment be straightforward enough that it removes that responsibility from my plate.
Black and Green needs to be moving. It’s utterly crucial, at this moment in time, that this message gets as far and wide as it can. I’m working to make adjustments to expectations and processes, but I have to get out of this hole. We have an entire book from Natasha that’s been ready to go and held back by this. I’ve got one that’s about ready to go and a second shortly after.
I don’t think anyone can look at the past few years of our world and feel like we’ve come out of it better. We always knew the collapse would be messy and harsh, and it is. We need to putting the pressure on, not just having it heaping upon us.
And so we could use help.
If you’re located near Manheim/Lancaster, PA, we could use help physically packing orders. If you have a label printer, it could make a world of difference for us. If you have funds to help us pay for sites, postage and everything else, that is a huge leg up. If you have a distro and want to order books, please contact us.
I know there are going to be people more frustrated by this. Again, Black and Green is an underground radical publisher. It remains the longest lasting green anarchist press, and a steadfast corner of the anti-civilization milieu. This is not a business. This is not Amazon. It’s an untamed urge to keep rattling the cages and shouting at those who tell us only cages exist. It’s run by people who are fallible, but that is what it is.
What matters is that we are here. We’ll get through this.
I’ll be reaching out to people who have older orders standing to confirm addresses and will continue doing everything I can to get out of this. I’m not asking for anything more than understanding. Every order goes out.
If you can make a donation, there is a donation page on this site, also cashapp: $blackandgreenpress, venmo and paypal: blackandgreen
If you have a label printer to donate, please message us.
22 years of Black and Green Press, going on 23. Here’s to throwing fuel on the bowdrill fire.
For wildness and anarchy,
Kevin Tucker (and though this was written from me, Natasha is here for the long haul too)