We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Jonathan Safran Foer, Hamish Hamilton, 2019, pp. 272, ISBN 976-0-7352-3307-2 As wildfires spurred by global warming rage in Australia and California, as bigger, stronger and more dangerous hurricanes batter coastal communities, as sea levels rise and glaciers melt, as an
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Extinction: A Radical History, Ashley Dawson, OR Books / Counterpoint, 2016, pp. 126, $10.84, ISBN 978-1-944896 The non-human life that surrounds us is rapidly dying. The latest to depart was the 45 year old male white rhinoceros named Sudan. Sudan was living under constant armed guard at the Ol Pajeta
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History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, University of California Press, October 2017, pp. 312, $34.95, ISBN 9780520293137 It is often said not to judge a book by its cover, but a
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Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, Harvard University Press, 2018, pp. 393, ISBN: 978-0-674-98060-0 “Why is India so filthy?”, asked the Ugly Indian, a masked man giving a TED Talk in Bengaluru. The anonymous man posed a question that has grappled many
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The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945, J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 275, $19.95, ISBN 9780674545038 There is hardly anyone who has not heard of the word Anthropocene. Officially, Anthropocene has become a buzzword since Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist,
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Climate Leviathan: Towards a Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Verso Books, February 2018, pp. 224, $35.99, ISBN 978 – 1786634290 Increasingly, our hopes for saving the planet from destruction are placed in international conferences; gatherings of heads of states and their delegates aimed at
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Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?, Peter Dauvergne, polity, 2018, pp. 139, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-5095-2400-6 The Earth system is in crisis. Summer after summer, we are confronted with unprecedented temperatures that warm up the seas, leading to ever stronger and more destructive winds which fuel raging forest fires and destroy
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Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2009, pp. 256, paperback, $26, ISBN978-0-670-06398-7 ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ is a collection of essays and lectures, written and delivered by Arundhati Roy between 2001 and 2008, amidst global and domestic turmoil. The essays and lectures themselves stand as
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The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Andreas Malm, Verso, 2018, pp. 248, $33, ISBN 978-1-78663-415-3 Everywhere we go there is concrete; mirrors. Signs of modernity creep into the countryside and turn farmers into wage laborers, farms into ‘infrastructure developments’, thereby obliterating the difference between
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