Five book announcements and three book reviews. Origin of Covid-19; History of pollutions; Collapse of US farming; Capital today; Social justice and the environment
Red & Green Reads
Archive | Books & Reports
Reading matter
Review: ‘China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse’
China’s reckless mode of development has savaged its environment and ecology. Is a new revolution the only way to prevent disaster?
Biodiversity
Capitalism – not ‘humanity’ – is killing the world’s wildlife
The new Living Planet report grimly documents global environmental destruction, but lets the responsible systems and institutions off the hook
War Communism?
Book Review: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency
Gradual reforms can’t do the job: only profoundly radical measures can ensure human survival in an epoch of global sickening.
Book Review
Nature and Society, from Karl Marx to Rachel Carson
In ‘The Return of Nature,’ John Bellamy Foster documents the chain of people and ideas that connects Marx and Engels to the 20th century’s greatest ecological thinkers
Reading Matters
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, September 2020
Five new books and an essential magazine! Science for People; Katrina’s History; Small Farm Future; Mass Migration; Energy and Work; China’s Environmental Crisis
Book Review
Ecosocialist critique lacks a concrete program for radical change
‘Climate Change Solutions’ shows that capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis, but the alternatives it offers don’t meet the challenge
Red & green reading
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2020
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
Reading matters
Ecosocialist Bookshelf: Mid-July, 2020
Six new books … Greta Thunberg’s story; Fighting corporate food systems; Revolutionaries on climate; Food and revolution; A case for meat; Our carbon world
Time to change course
False Promises: The ‘Green Revolution in Africa’ is failing on its own terms
The Gates Foundation’s billion dollar project is a vicious circle that drives small-scale food producers further and further into poverty
Lockdown reading
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, Pandemic Edition (July 2020)
A special edition of Ecosocialist Bookshelf: six books we recommend for understanding the deadliest global health crisis of our time
Reading in Lockdown
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2020
Books we’re reading this month … The Life of V. Gordon Childe; The Tragedy of US Science; Four Billion Years of Life; Marx and Climate Crisis; Tell the Bosses We’re Coming; Essays on Red Rosa
Reading matters
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2020
Six important new books: The Return of Nature … Deaths of Despair … Rebel Cinderella … August Bebel … The Green New Deal and Beyond … The Triumph of Doubt
Book Review
Making room for humans in scientific ecology
20th century ecology moved from racism and eugenics to studies of undisturbed natural ecosystems. Today, ecological science must integrate social sciences.
Book Review
Making the case that green politics must be ecosocialist
Essays by pioneering ecosocialist Joel Kovel argue that radical social change is the only way to prevent ecocatastrophe
Reading, red and green
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, March 2020
Six new books to read while maintaining social distance. Yellow Earth; Socialist Practice; Friedrich Engels; Chicken History; Traveling Plants; Coal and Empire
Global climate report
Confirmed: 2015 to 2019 were the five hottest years on record
Meteorologists agree that temperatures will continue to rise, and record years like 2019 are becoming the new baseline
Eight new books
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, February 2020
Robbery of nature; Choosing a future; Neoliberal lives; Indigenous resistance; Canadian oil vs the climate; Environmental justice in danger; Agrobiodiversity; Cars and capitalism
Behind the noise
The phony war over inequality statistics
Methodological nitpicking obscures the undeniable fact that a ludicrously small number of individuals hold the same amount of wealth as billions of others
Reading in a new decade
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2020
Mining in late capitalism; Green New Deal; The Pentagon and climate change; Big Oil vs democracy; Climate justice; Nature in Canada; History of human labor