During a week when many people around the world are striking or demonstrating to demand action on climate change, it’s interesting to look at some of the zines in the Library created by people campaigning on climate change. The Library collects a wide range of independently-produced publications ranging from political pamphlets to hyper-local newspapers. Amongst these are many small journals or one-off publications that can be described as zines. Zines are typically self-published, counter-cultural magazines and booklets. They are generally low-tech, following a DIY ethic, and contemporary zine publishing broaches a very wide range of issues including sexuality, mental health, racism, food politics alongside the longer-established themes of fanzines focusing on music, football or film.

The items below are examples of zines focusing on climate change and environmental issues such as packaging and waste.

A guide to zero waste, It’s freezing in LA, Out of the city and into the Trees, Drax ten years on and Freaky Panda.

 

Alternative Green and Cracks in the Pavement

 

These publications are not only interesting and potentially inspiring, but they also form a useful research resource for anyone researching climate activism and campaigning. Because of the huge volume of material in the Library finding these types of materials in the catalogue is challenging.   This is true for all zines, in spite of recent changes in cataloguing practice with the introduction of a format heading ‘Zines’ in newer records.  

To find these zines I searched using different search terms, including ‘environmental change’ and ‘climate change’. I also tried individual words ‘green’ and ‘action’ – in each case narrowing the results by selecting the format ‘journals’. Some of the subject headings that feature in catalogue records for the materials pictured above are:

Environmental protection -- Periodicals; Environmental responsibility -- Periodicals;

Global environmental change -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Global environmental change -- Political aspects -- Periodicals; Global environmental change -- Economic aspects -- Periodicals;

Climatic changes -- Periodicals;

Sustainable development -- Periodicals;

Environmentalists -- Biography -- Periodicals;

Environmentalism -- Periodicals;

Alternative lifestyles – Periodicals.

I found that many of the zines the Library holds on environmental issues and climate change are stored at the Boston Spa site, which is good news for users in Yorkshire, but means that users wanting to see these items in London need to think ahead and order them at least 48 hours ahead of visiting reading rooms.   The zines I featured in this post are held in London. Reading room reference staff and curatorial staff are sensitive to the difficulties involved in identifying zines in the catalogue and are ready to help anyone wanting to use zines in their research.  No single Library can hope to collect all the zines produced by individual creators; collecting zines is a collaborative effort, and researchers wanting to use zines are encouraged to consult the directory of UK and Ireland zine libraries to find out about zine collections they can access.

Looking for examples of climate change zines in our collections, I also found that these represent quite a small proportion of the zines we hold, compared to football fanzines, music zines, and zines on feminism, sexuality, anti-racism, anarchism or other personal and political issues.  This can be seen as a reflection of the way zines often offer a more individual space for their creator to explore issues they confront in their own life, but it also made me feel that there must be many more environmentalist zines out there that are not finding their way into our collections. The Library is always pleased to receive a single copy of any zine published in the UK or Ireland (which may be sent directly to the Legal deposit office). Zines published in other countries may be offered as donations. The Library is grateful for the contribution made by producers of independent publications to its work to represent contemporary society and issues more fully.