Brian Morris’s work as an academic over many decades has taken in everything from how cultures name things to how they interact with nature, religion and the concept of self. Since the 1960s he has also been active as an anarchist and has taken a particular interest in social ecology.
Sep 12th 22 from Freedom News via thefreeonline

Brian has written for many publications including Freedom and has published several books on figures such as Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin and Murray Bookchin, as well as taking on the topic of anarchism and ecology in a series of books such as Anthropology, Ecology, and Anarchism (PM Press) in 2014 and Visions of Freedom: Critical Writings on Ecology and Anarchism (Black Rose) in 2018.

Tell us about your early life and influences
I am at heart a working-class lad from the Black Country, with a fascination for the natural world. I have had a somewhat odd academic background. I failed my eleven-plus and left school at the age of 15 to work in an iron foundry in West Bromwich, like all my male forebears.

While working in the foundry I severely damaged my right hand in a machine. For that I was awarded £120 working men’s compensation – a lot of money in those days.
This enabled me to leave home aged 20, after undertaking my two-year National Service as a seaman-navigator in the RASC. In October 1957 I sailed from Amsterdam to Cape Town, and after hitch-hiking around South-Central Africa for about five months I eventually obtained employment as a tea planter in Malawi (then Nyasaland). I worked as a tea planter for more than seven years, eventually sitting and passing five GCE “O” levels at the age of 29

I then returned to the UK. Failing to get into university to study biology (ecology) – my cherished ambition – I trained as a teacher at Brighton College of Education in the late 1960s. It was there that I first engaged in socialist politics.
The main intellectual influences on my life were not philosophers, nor even academics, but popular naturalists such as Charles Darwin, Ernest Thompson Seton Gordon and W. H. Hudson. As a teenager I avidly read their nature writings.
Apart from Darwin, all have been forgotten. My intellectual outlook on life has therefore always been one that is realist, historical and ecological – a form of evolutionary naturalism.
How did you get into anarchist politics?
Although I have always been something of a rebel – even as a boy I flouted the law of trespass – I became an anarchist largely due to two events in my life.
The first was that my wife, Jacqui, sensing, perhaps, my rebellious spirit, gave me as a birthday present in October 1965 George Woodcock’s Anarchism. Although much derided these days – quite unfairly – this book opened my eyes to what to me then was a completely new political vision.

The second event was a meeting on comprehensive education that I attended in February 1966, at Conway Hall in London. It was to hear a lecture on “Education or Indoctrination” by Madeline Simms. After the lecture a lively debate ensued during which a rather large Bakunin-like working class bloke spoke out forcibly about the rights of children. He appeared to be quite a misfit. I overheard one person remark, rather disparagingly: “Oh he’s only an anarchist.”
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