Environmentalism of the Rich, A Scientist’s Fight for a Nuclear Test Ban, Limits to Capitalist Nature, Cocoa, Extracting Profit from Africa, Indigenous Struggles in Peru
New books for reds and greens
Archive | Books & Reports
Books for Lefts
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2018, Part 2
Three highly recommended books in the Democratic Marxism series: Marxisms in the 21st Century, Capitalism’s Crises, and The Climate Crisis.
Author Focus
Sustainable Food Systems: An interview with Robert Biel
Conventional farming destroys the complex soil ecosystem and ultimately the soil itself, so the risk of not changing it is too great. (Free book available for download)
Reading matters
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2018
Six new books for reds and greens … climate change and disease … capitalist power and the planet’s future … brain, body, and environment … oceanic art and science … essential fungi and life … the political economy of water.
Book Review
14 Billion Years of Revolutionary Change
‘Quarks to Culture’ is an important but flawed account of emergence in history, of 12 major transitions that created the world we live in, from the Big Bang to the Geopolitical State.
New books for reds and greens
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, March 2018
Six new books on the science for the people movement, health care under capitalism, the criminalizing of poverty, Yemen in crisis, the origins of everything, and communism and democracy
Le Devoir
Uniting ecology and revolution: ‘Facing the Anthropocene’ featured in leading Québec newspaper
Le Devoir, the francophone newspaper of record in Canada, reviews new French translation of Facing the Anthropocene, and interviews its author, Ian Angus
Facing the Anthropocene
‘A contribution to a genuinely materialist ecology’
Éric Pineault’s preface to the French edition of Facing the Anthropocene: “Ian Angus offers a critique of capitalist modernity based on a vision of liberation shaped by the recognition of substantial and real ecological limits”
Reading, red and green
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, February 2018
Five important books on famines and world hunger, on Ebola and other deadly epidemics that spread from animals to people, and on the pesticide poisons in our food.
Environmental philosophy
New materialism: ‘Idealism of the most useless sort’
Following my review of The Progress of This Storm, a reader comments on a philosophical fad that is ‘burning through academia faster than a forest fire’
Book Review
The progress of this storm:
Nature and society in a warming world
Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action
Book announcement
Face à l’anthropocène: Le capitalisme fossile et la crise du système terrestre
Facing the Anthropocene, by Ian Angus, will soon be available in French, published by Éditions Écosociété
Book Review
How to create an ecological society
Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams make a powerful case that ecological disaster can be only be overcome by a revolutionary transformation on socialist principles
Reading for reds and greens
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2018
Seven new books on the new terrain of class war, social reproduction theory, limits to NGO radicalism, ideas for change, shrinking the technosphere, technology and inequality, and property formation in colonial North America
Book Review
Do seven cheap things explain the history of capitalism?
Ian Angus says a new book by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore replaces concrete analysis with an artificial schema that reduces the complex organic relationship between society and the rest of nature to cheap things
Essential reading
Paul Burkett on Kohei Saito’s ‘Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism’
The author of Marx and Nature evaluates and introduces an important new book on the deep connections between natural science and political economy in Marx’s work
Book Review
Ecological science fiction: Two hits and a miss
Three novels by Kim Stanley Robinson: Aurora is monumental and Shaman is a great evocation of the past, but New York 2140 understates both the climate crisis and the solutions needed
Facing the Anthropocene
“An accessible and convincing case for ecosocialism”
“This necessary book details the full spectrum of environmental issues facing us today, demonstrates their scientific and political causes, and delivers a sobering warning”
reading, red and green
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, December 2017
Six new books on democratic eco-socialism, war and the environment, genes and intelligence, climate change and the Roman Empire, the little ice age in North America, and views of the Anthropocene
Two views
Debate: Should ecosocialists oppose population growth?
In ‘A Redder Shade of Green,’ did Ian Angus unfairly criticize people who believe overpopulation is a major environmental problem?