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Reposted from Climate & Capitalism
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) it says. Climate & Capitalism has received review copies of some of these books, but we do not receive any payment for reviews or for reader purchases.
Troy Tassier
THE RICH FLEE AND THE POOR TAKE THE BUS
How Our Unequal Society Fails Us During Outbreaks
John Hopkins University Press
Can we make society more resilient to disease outbreaks and avoid forcing the poor and working class to bear the brunt of their harm? Tassier argues that we can leverage lessons learned from historic and recent outbreaks to design better economic and social policies and more just institutions to protect everyone in society when inevitable future epidemics arrive.
Aaron Eddens
SEEDING EMPIRE
American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa
University of California Press
From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the world’s largest biotechnology companies, agribusinesses aims to impose genetically modified crops on millions of small-scale farmers across Africa., Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.
Adrian Johnston
INFINITE GREED
The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital
Columbia University Press
Does innate human selfishness make capitalism inescapable? Johnson argues that the relentless pursuit of profits is not fundamentally animated by human acquisitiveness. Instead, capitalism’s strange “infinite greed” demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, their well-being, and even themselves to serve inhuman capital.
David N. Livingstone
THE EMPIRE OF CLIMATE
A History of an Idea
Princeton University Press
Livingstone maps the tangled histories of an idea that has haunted our collective imagination from the ancient Greeks to the crisis of global warming today, Climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control and race relations; been used to explain industrial development, market performance, and economic breakdown; and as an indicator of national character and cultural collapse.
Rebecca R. Scott
LAND OF EXTRACTION
Property, Fracking, and Settler Colonialism
New York University Press
Scott explores fracking’s dual impact on settler colonial culture and sustainability, unravelling the complex web of relationships between humans, places, and the environment, all bound by the concept of private property. A thought-provoking analysis of how settler colonial culture imposes limits on environmental politics.
Grace Blakeley
VULTURE CAPITALISM
Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
Simon & Schuster
Blakeley exposes the corrupt system that is failing all around us, pulling back the curtain on the free market mythology we have been sold. Corporate and political power brokers have used planned capitalism to advance their own interests at the expense of the rest of us. She argues for democratizing the economy to stop the shift towards monopoly and oligarchy.
Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016). His latest book is A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 