editor Ian Angus presents six new books for understanding and changing the world.
By Eve Darian-Smith
Stanford University Press, 2022
As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmentalism has become an essential political tool enabling the rise of extreme-right governments and energising their populist supporters.
Darian-Smith examines the out-of-control wildfires that have raged in Brazil, California and Australia, showing that they are closely linked through capitalism, colonialism, industrialisationĀ and resource extraction.
By Oliver Milman
Norton, 2022
Three out of every four of known animal species are insects. Milman dives into the torrent of recent evidence that suggests this kaleidoscopic group of creatures is suffering the greatest existential crisis in its remarkable 400-million-year history. These losses further tear at the tapestry of life on our degraded planet: even insects we may dread, including the hated cockroach, or the stinging wasp, play crucial ecological roles, and their decline would profoundly shape our own story.
Edited by Emily J Kirk, Isabel Story & Anna Clayfield
Lexington Books, 2022
Cubaās commitment to disaster preparedness and management has been praised by the United Nations, Oxfam and the World Health Organization. This comprehensive analysis of Cubaās model explores why Cubaās approach to emergency disaster response is such a success and the aspects that make it so distinct.
By Alice Mah
Polity Press, 2022
Petrochemical and plastics corporations have fought relentlessly to protect and expand plastic markets. From denying the toxic health effects of plastics to co-opting circular economy solutions to plastic waste and exploiting the opportunities offered up by the global pandemic, industry has deflected attention from the key problem: plastics production. We must tackle the problem at its root ā the capitalist imperative for limitless growth.
By Patrick Radden Keefe
Penguin Random House, 2021
Through Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family accumulated vast riches by promoting drug addiction, first to Valium, and then to deadly OxyContin.
In a powerful work of investigative journalism, Keefe documents the greed, arrogance and inhumanity of a corrupt capitalist enterprise in search of profits at any cost.
By Nick Hayes
Bloomsbury, 2020
In Britain, thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows ā 92% of the countryās land ā are blocked from public access, enclosed by fences and walls and āprotectedā by the law of trespass. Nick Hayes of the Land Justice Network has deliberately trespassed on much of that land. Here he describes his experiences, tells the centuries-long story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession, and argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.
[Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]