Red & green reading

Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2020

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New books on fungi, climate & capital, food, bluefin tuna, & Cuban agriculture. PLUS new translations of Facing the Anthropocene, and two recent C&C book reviews

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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 brief descriptions. Books 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.


Merlin Sheldrake
ENTANGLED LIFE
How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Random House, 2020
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. These metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes are changing our understanding of how life works.

Diana Stuart, Ryan Gunderson, & Brian Petersen
CLIMATE CHANGE SOLUTIONS:
Beyond the Climate-Capital Contradiction

University of Michigan Press, 2020
The authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction and the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. In their view, alternatives like degrowth can offer new systemic arrangements that confront and move beyond the capital-climate contradiction

Jennifer Clapp
FOOD 3rd Edition
Polity, 2020
The fully revised and expanded third edition of this popular book explores how the rise of industrial agriculture, corporate control, inequitable agricultural trade rules, and the financialization of food have each enabled powerful actors to gain fundamental influence over the practices that dominate the world food economy and result in uneven consequences for both people and planet.

Jennifer E. Telesca
RED GOLD
The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

University of Minnesota Press, 2020
With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why are the big bluefin tuna on the verge of extinction? Telesca shows that the regulators manage the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires. To save marine life we need to transform the dominant culture that consents to this slaughter.

Louis A. Pérez Jr.
RICE IN THE TIME OF SUGAR
The Political Economy of Food in Cuba

University of North Carolina Press, 2020
How did Cuba’s long-established sugar trade result in the development of an agriculture that benefited consumers abroad at the expense of Cubans at home? Perez examines the 150-year relationship between the rice and sugar, as Cuban efforts to expand rice production were met with keen resistance by U.S. rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as sugar growers were on the U.S. market.


Ian Angus’s pathbreaking book

FACING THE ANTHROPOCENE
Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth Syste
m

Monthly Review Press

is now available in Italian, German, and French

DI FRONTE ALL’ANTHROPOCENE
Capitalismo Fossile E Crisi Del Sistema Terra

Asterios Editore

IM ANGESICHT DES ANTHROPOZÄNS
Klima und Gesellschaft in der Krise

Unrast Verlag

FACE À L’ANTHROPOCÈNE
Le capitalisme fossile et la crise du système terrestre
Éditions Écosociété


Recent book reviews in Climate & Capitalism

Nick Estes
OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE
Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Resistance

reviewed by Simon Butler

Ashley Dawson
PEOPLE’S POWER
Reclaiming the Energy Commons

reviewed by Martin Empson