Climate and Capitalism’s Ian Angus presents five new books and an essential magazine for ecosocialists.
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SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE
Summer 2020
Every ecosocialist should subscribe to this magazine, now! The theme of the latest issue is A People’s Green New Deal — “affirming the need to pursue not only the development of visionary policies, but also the implementation of participatory knowledge production.” 110 pages, 18+ important articles. Now published in pdf format only. Highly recommended.
KATRINA: A HISTORY, 1915-2015
By Andy Horowitz
Harvard University Press, 2020
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. This thoroughly researched and clearly written book exposes the relationship between inequality and urban geography, offering a chilling glimpse of future disasters in the making.
A SMALL FARM FUTURE
Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
By Chris Smaje
Chelsea Green, 2020
Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje argues that organising society around small-scale farming offers the sanest and most reasonable response to climate change and other crises of civilisation — and humanity’s best chance at survival. A rigorous, original analysis of wicked problems and hidden opportunities.
THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION
The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
By Sonia Shah
Bloomsbury, 2020
Prize-winning journalist Sonia Shah examines the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans. Challenging anti-immigrant hysteria, she argues that mass migrations are not crises but solutions that create and disseminate the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon.
THE BIRTH OF ENERGY
Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work
By Cara New Daggett
Duke University Press, 2019
Excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only transforming the politics of work — most notably, the veneration of waged work — will solve the Anthropocene’s energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.
CHINA’S ENGINE OF ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE
By Richard Smith
Pluto Press, 2020
China is simultaneously the largest producer and user of solar cells and wind turbines, and the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Air and water pollution are endemic and deadly. Smith argues that those contradictions result from the country’s unique social-economic structure, a combination of capitalist and bureaucratic state control that drives expansionist tendencies more powerful than the drive for profit under “normal” capitalism.
[Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]