Climate & Capitalism can’t review every book we receive, but this column lists and links to those that seem relevant to Climate & Capitalism’s mission, along with brief descriptions. Titles described here may be reviewed in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that we agree with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
David Wallace-Wells
THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
Penguin Random House, 2019
If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Edward B. Barbier
THE WATER PARADOX
Overcoming the Global Crisis in Water Management
Yale University Press, 2019
Water shortages are fast becoming a persistent reality for all nations, rich and poor. Barbier draws on evidence from countries across the globe to show the scale of the problem, and outlines the policy and management solutions needed to avert this crisis.
Philipp Blom
NATURE’S MUTINY: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present
W.W. Norton, 2019
In the ‘Little Ice Age,’ climate change destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, and transformed the social and political fabric of Europe. A timely examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change.
Greg Beckett
THERE IS NO MORE HAITI
Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince
University of California Press
In this gripping account, anthropologist Greg Becket shows what it feels like to live and die with a crisis that never seems to end. It is about the experience of living amid the ruins of ecological devastation, economic collapse, political upheaval, violence, and humanitarian disaster.
Frédéric Neyrat
THE UNCONSTRUCTABLE EARTH
An Ecology of Separation
Fordham University Press, 2018
Against the capitalist and technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against social constructivism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming that escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it.