Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a new semi-regular feature. We can’t review every book we receive, but we will list and link to any that seem relevant to Climate & Capitalism’s mission, along with an excerpt from the publisher’s description. (Titles listed here may be reviewed in future.)
Alexander Reid Ross, editor
GRABBING BACK
Essays against the global land grab
AK Press
In this unprecedented collection, on-the-ground activists join forces with critically acclaimed scholars to document the commodification and consumption of space, from foreclosed homes to annihilated rainforests, from ecotourism in Sri Lanka to the tar sands of Montana, and to outline the strategies and tactics that might stop the destruction.
Marta Harnecker
A WORLD TO BUILD
New paths toward twenty-first century socialism
Monthly Review Press
Winner of the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought. Over the last few decades Marta Harnecker has emerged as one of Latin America’s most incisive socialist thinkers. In A World to Build, she grapples with the question that has bedeviled every movement for radical social change: how do you construct a new world within the framework of the old?
Dan Chodorkoff
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF UTOPIA
On social ecology and community development
New Compass
How can we avert ecological catastrophe? How can we build community? What is the practical relevance of utopia? These are some of the questions anthropologist Dan Chodorkoff explores in his essays on social ecology and community development.
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
WE MAKE OUR OWN HISTORY
Marxism and social movements in the twilight of neoliberalism
Pluto Press
This book marks a break both with established social movement theory, and with those forms of Marxism which treat the practice of social movement organising as an unproblematic process. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.
Glen Sean Coulthard
RED SKIN, WHITE MASKS
Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition
University of Minnesota Press
In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment.
Anthony D. Barnosky
DODGING EXTINCTION
Power, food, money, and the future of life on earth
University of California Press
Paleobiologist Anthony D. Barnosky presents compelling evidence that unless we rethink how we generate the power we use to run our global ecosystem, where we get our food, and how we make our money, we will trigger what would be the sixth great extinction on Earth, with dire consequences.
Álvaro García Linera
PLEBEIAN POWER
Collective action and indigenous, working-class and popular identities in Bolivia
Haymarket Books
Best known for his role as Evo Morales’s vice-president, Álvaro García Linera is also known across Latin America as one of Bolivia’s foremost intellectuals. Plebeian Power can be read as both an evolving analysis of Bolivian reality through periods of great social change, and as an intellectual biography of the author himself.