The New Dark Age

Ecosocialist Bookshelf is 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.

Kate Marvel
HUMAN NATURE
Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
HarperCollins
This year, climate scientist Kate Marvel resigned from NASA in protest against the Trump government’s war on science. Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, she uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. A beautifully written, informative, and powerful book. Highly recommended.

Maude Barlow
EARTH FOR SALE
The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet
ECW Press
The commodification of nature takes many forms: carbon trading; debt-for-nature swaps; water pollution trading; biodiversity credits; green, blue, and wildlife conservation bonds; plastics offsets; water futures; and more. Noted activist Maude Barlow argues the financialization of nature is dangerous and in detail unmasks this insidious new form of corporate plunder.

Gregory Salle
SUPERYACHTS
Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide
Wiley
There are now some 6,000 superyachts on our oceans. Some are longer than a football field. Some have helicopters and submaries. They epitomize the social exclusivity of the 0.01% and the environmental waste the richest people produce. From class struggle to over-consumption, from tax evasion to environmental destruction, from eco-bleaching to officially tolerated crimes — pulling the super yachting thread unspools the whole ball of capitalism.

Timothy Mitchell
THE ALIBI OF CAPITAL
How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow
Verso Books
The climate crisis is driven by an economic system that consumes the future, en­cumbering today’s generations with past ecological debts. Mitchell identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income, showing how the future has been squandered by destroying rivers, colonising territory, expanding infrastructure, and burning carbon.

Christen E. Civiletto
THUNDERING WATERS
The Toxic Legacy of Niagara Falls
Princeton University Press
In and around the city of Niagara Falls, corporate giants built their empires by poisoning a treasured natural wonder. Environmental attorney Christen Civiletto relates how they piled millions of tons of toxic and radioactive waste in the surrounding farmlands, rivers, and meadows and how, as in all such cases, the poor and marginalized bear the brunt of the injury.

Roger Hallam with Robin Boardman
SUICIDE
The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death
Perlego
In July 2024, a British judge sentenced Roger Hallam to five years in prison for protesting the climate crisis. From his cell, the co-founder of Just Stop Oil delivers a searing indictment of a legal system that punishes those who resist, while protecting those who destroy. Part memoir, part political reckoning, this is a radical call to rethink justice, truth, and duty in the face of extinction.

Philipp Markolin
LAB LEAK FEVER
The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society
Independent
A powerful and detailed exposure of the liars and media manipulators who sold the story that the Covid pandemic was created in a laboratory. Who profits from promoting scientifically unsubstantiated conspiracy theories? Markolin documents the network of actors, activists, and agendas that is still trying to sabotage serious scientific inquiry.