Robbery of nature; Choosing a future; Neoliberal lives; Indigenous resistance; Canadian oil vs the climate; Environmental justice in danger; Agrobiodiversity; Cars and capitalism
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 brief descriptions. Titles listed 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.
John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark
THE ROBBERY OF NATURE
Capitalism and the ecological rift
Monthly Review Press, 2020
Foster and Clark examine how capitalism plunders nature, leading to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. They show that the ecological crisis extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. Highly Recommended.
Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac
THE FUTURE WE CHOOSE
Surviving the climate crisis
Alfred A. Knopf, 2020
The authors, who played leading roles in negotiating the 2015 Paris Agreement, offer two scenarios, describing what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if that emissions aren’t slashed, and what a carbon neutral, regenerative world could be like. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, and outline what they believe governments, corporations, and individuals must do to fend off disaster.
Robert Chernomas, Ian Hudson & Mark Hudson
NEOLIBERAL LIVES
Work, politics, nature, and health in the contemporary United States
Manchester University Press, 2019
Over the past 35 years, capitalist logic has expanded into previously protected spheres of life, with devastating effects on the potential for human development. This is a manifesto of sorts for the range of processes that need to be confronted if human potential is to be freed from the increasingly cramped quarters to which neoliberalism has confined it.
Nick Estes
OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE
Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the long tradition of indigenous resistance
Verso, 2019
At once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance. Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the No Dakota Access Pipeline campaign, he largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century — so far.
Donald Gutstein
THE BIG STALL
How big oil and think tanks are blocking action on climate change in Canada
Lorimer, 2018
Gutstein traces the origins of the Canadian government’s climate change plan back to Big Oil. He shows that in the last fifteen years, Big Oil and right-wing ideologues have manipulated media, politicians and public opinion to promote new wells and pipelines and prevent the effective measures required to create a zero-carbon world.
Julie Sze
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN A MOMENT OF DANGER
University of California Press, 2020
Environmental injustices are manifesting across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Sze examines how mobilizations and movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself.
Karl S. Zimmerer & Stef de Haan, editors
AGROBIODIVERSITY
Integrating knowledge for a sustainable future
MIT Press, 2019
The increasing simplification of food systems, the continuing decline of plant species, and the ongoing spread of pests and disease threaten biodiversity in agriculture as well as the sustainability of food resources. From a range of disciplines, the contributors examine the challenges of agrobiodiversity and sustainability and propose an framework for future research, scholarship, policy, and practice.
Hans A. Baer
MOTOR VEHICLES, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
Driving to extinction
Lexington Books, 2019
The world now has more than a billion motor vehicles, and this number continues to grow. Baer provides a political ecological perspective recognizes that motor vehicles embody the social, structural, cultural, and environmental contradictions of the capitalist world system. Moving beyond motor vehicles will require creating an ecosocialist world system based on social justice, democratic processes, environmental sustainability, and a safe climate, one termed.