Reading from green to red

Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2017

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Six new books on climate change and neoliberalism, movement strategy, surviving the Anthropocene, science and religion, Gaia, and energy security

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Ecosocialist Bookshelf is an occasional 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 excerpts from the publishers’ descriptions. Titles listed here may be reviewed in future.

Please note Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that we agree with everything (or even anything!) the book says.


Brian Elliott
NATURAL CATASTROPHE
Climate Change and Neoliberal Governance

Edinburgh University Pres, 2016
Brian Elliott radically revises our conception of climate change as a political problem, not a natural phenomenon. Environmental politics in the west needs to renew the Marxist challenge to the global market’s benign production of social utility and construct a new non-apocalyptic politics of nature.

Jeremy Brecher
AGAINST DOOM
A Climate Insurgency Manual

PM Press, 2017
Now that Trump has jammed his foot on the global warming accelerator, is there any way for the rest of us to put on the brakes? Climate insurgency is a strategy for using people power to realize our common interest in protecting the climate. It uses mass, global, nonviolent action to challenge the legitimacy of public and corporate officials who are perpetrating climate destruction.

Mark Denny
MAKING THE MOST OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
John Hopkins University Press, 2017
Theoretical physicist Mark Denny tackles burning questions: How did we reach our present technological and ecological state? Will we come out of this, or are we doomed as a species? Is there anything we can do? Denny envisions a future that balances reaction and reason, in which those of us who are prepared can make the most of the Anthropocene.

Yves Gingras
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
An Impossible Dialogue

Polity Press, 2017
Today we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion returned, and what is at stake? Yves Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them.

Bruno Latour
FACING GAIA
Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime

Polity Press. 2017
We have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Philosopher Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of Nature.

Roland Dannreuther
ENERGY SECURITY
Polity Press, 2017
Energy security is a value that is continually in dynamic conflict with other core values, such as economic prosperity and sustainability. The physical properties of the key energy resources – coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewables – are of course critical but it is the social, economic and political contexts, developed over time and place, which are essential for a fuller appreciation of contemporary energy challenges.