Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus presents six important new books on climate, food, waste, Venezuela’s communes and basic income.
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By Chris Van Tulleken
WW Norton, 2023
Look at the list of ingredients in any packaged food — most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances, specifically engineered to be addictive, driving excess consumption. Almost all our staple foods contain chemicals that are leading causes of early death and environmental destruction, but for most people, Ultra Processed Foods are the only available and affordable options.
By Antonello Provenzale
Polity Books, 2023
This comprehensive history of the climate and climate change explains how the planetary climate system works and how the climate has evolved over millions of years.
Starting from the catastrophic events that marked the early history of the Earth, including seas of magma, global glaciations and mass extinctions, he demonstrates how the climate has fluctuated between hot and cold periods, shows that today’s changes are different from any that humans have ever experienced.
By Colin McFarlane
Verso Books, 2023
A call to action on one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. McFarlane outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city.
Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “the right to the city”, he argues that sanitation is an urbanising force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.
By Shannon Cram
University of California Press, 2023
What will it take to truly clean up this contaminated world? Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, Cram investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, home to the majority of the high-level nuclear waste in the United States, and explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative condition.
By Chris Gilbert
Monthly Review Press, 2023
Opens a window on one of the most ambitious revolutionary projects of our time. As author Gilbert shows, the Venezuelan people have not been passive in the face of imperialist attacks. Resisting the pressures of capitalism, a significant segment of the population persists in pursuing the strategy that Hugo Chávez developed in his final years in dialogue with the popular movement — building socialism with the commune as its basic cell.
By Anton Jager & Daniel Zamora Vargas
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state’s policy-in-waiting. The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty — now known as basic income — is one of today’s most controversial proposals, drawing supporters from across the political spectrum. Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global, revealing the most significant shift in political culture since the end of the Cold War.
[Reprinted from . Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]