Environmentalism from Below - by Ashley Dawson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities--among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis--have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world's forests burn and our oceans acidify, grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.

Scholar and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity organizations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria, and beyond. Taking up the four critical challenges we face in a warming world--food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and conservation--Dawson shows how the unruly power of environmentalism from below is charting an alternative path forward, from challenging industrial agriculture through fights for food sovereignty and agroecology to resisting extractivism using mass nonviolent protest and sabotage.

An urgent, essential intervention, Environmentalism from Below offers a hopeful alternative to the gridlock of UN-based climate negotiations and the narrow nationalism of some Green New Deal efforts. As Dawson reminds us, the fight against ecocide is already being waged worldwide. Building on longstanding traditions of anticolonial struggle, environmentalism from below is a model for a people's movement for climate justice--one that demands solidarity.

Review Quotes

"Dawson's examples of communities organizing around truly living well (buen vivir), public rather than private affluence, and establishing peace with the Earth, offer hopeful seeds of such a radical and necessary future." --New Politics

"Environmentalism from Below requires us to face the ongoing damage of a colonial, racist, and economically exploitative history, as well as the deadly assumption common among those in "wealth-afflicted" groups that we know better and have a right to bend other people and lands to our image of what is due to us. I'm left with images of brightly colored houses in Cape Town, cable cars connecting poor folks to the center, women risking their lives to protect the land that supports their communities, and the suggestion that the struggle for clean energy must also be a struggle for popular power. While this book may not be for everybody, I commend it to those who have an appetite for understanding hard truths." --Friends Journal

Praise for Extinction:
"An elegant, controversial thesis" --The Guardian

"A welcome contribution to the growing literature on this slow-motion calamity." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"Dawson's searing report on species loss will sober up anyone who has drunk the Kool-Aid of green capitalism." --Andrew Ross

"Fusing social and ecological challenges to power is the only way forward ... a long-awaited, elegant and comprehensive expression of why the time is right to make these links." --Patrick Bond

"A great tool for anti-capitalists, climate change activists, and those still making sense of the intrinsic connections between the two." --Jasbir Puar

"Historically grounded, densely researched, fluidly written ... a powerful and painful exploration of human civilization's environmental irrationalities." --Christian Parenti

Praise for People's Power:
"For anyone wanting to understand what comes after oil and how we might get there." --Imre Szeman, author of On Petrocultures

"A gift to activists, providing a clear and accessible history of energy as well as a vision towards the publicly owned, democratically controlled, 100% renewable world we need." --Aaron Eisenberg, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

"A brilliant guide to building collective, equitable, and radical energy democracies in the here and now." --Lavinia Steinfort, Transnational Institute

Praise for Extreme Cities:

Named One of the Top 10 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Planetizen

"Extreme Cities is a ground-breaking investigation of the vulnerability of our cities in an age of climate chaos. We feel safe and protected in the middle of our great urban areas, but as Sandy and Katrina made clear, and as this fine book reveals anew, the massive shifts on our earth increasingly lay bare the social inequalities that fracture our civilization."--Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org

About the Author

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. He is the author of several books on key topics in the environmental humanities, including People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Public Power NY campaign and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist.
Dawson lives in Queens, New York.