Steve Booth

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Steve Booth is a British political activist and journalist, and was one of the defendants in the GANDALF trial.

He first became involved with the UK Green Anarchist magazine in 1990, and published a novel, City-Death, explaining his idea of green anarchism. In the mid 1990s he wrote 'Politics And The Ethical Void'. Booth contributed controversial articles to Green Anarchist, beginning with one titled The Irrationalists, which lauded indiscriminate violence against members of the public (such as the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway) as 'liberatory'. He has since renounced the views he expressed in The Irrationalists, as well as the primitivist movement altogether.

Starting in 1995, the Hampshire Police under 'Operation Washington' began a series of at least 56 raids, which eventually resulted in the August to November 1997 Portsmouth trial of Green Anarchist editors Booth, Saxon Wood, Noel Molland and Paul Rogers, as well as Animal Liberation Front Press Officer Robin Webb and Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group newsletter editor Simon Russell. The defendants organised the GANDALF Defence campaign. Three of the editors of Green Anarchist, Noel Molland, Saxon Wood and Booth were jailed for 'conspiracy to incite'. Eventually, all three were released on appeal [1]

In early 2001, Steve Booth broke with Paul Rogers [2]. He then began taking his version of 'Green Anarchist' magazine in a different political direction, trying to take the magazine back to what Booth saw as its roots and undo the harm he considered done to it by Richard Hunt and Paul Rogers. However, from 2002 Steve began to contribute to the BlueGreenEarth website, most notably with his article The Primitivist Illusion. He is still writing for BlueGreenEarth on a semi-regular basis.