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.

Tad Delay
FUTURE OF DENIAL
The Ideologies of Climate Change
Verso Books
Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War. Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?

Miriam Lang, Mary Ann Manahan and Breno Bringel
THE GEOPOLITICS OF GREEN COLONIALISM
Global Justice and Eco-social Transitions
Pluto Press
The green growth and clean energy plans of the Global North require  large-scale extraction of strategic minerals from the Global South, sacrificing not only territories, but sustainable ways of inhabiting this world. This book provides a platform for the voices that have been conspicuously absent in debates around energy and climate in the Global North.

Timothy Neale
HOW TO CONTROL FIRE ON A BURNING CONTINENT
Duke University Press
A critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia, one of Earth’s most fire-prone countries, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty.

Joshua Frank
BAD ENERGY
The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future
Haymarket Books
Taking readers from copper mines in Montana and Bolivia to wind farms in Wyoming to the geopolitical battle over deep-sea mining in the South Pacific, Frank offers a stark assessment of the costs of the rush for renewables and the demand for endless growth. As Frank makes clear, we cannot consume our way out of climate chaos.

The Zetkin Collective
THE GREAT DRIVING RIGHT SHOW
Cars, Climate Collapse and the Inverted Crisis
Verso Books
The political right has invented an ‘inverted crisis’ in which climate action, not climate change, represents the gravest existential threat. They are powered not only by fossil-fuel and automobile interests, but by moral panics about climate and racial justice protesters, trans people, and migrants. With the planet at stake, we must confront the new climate denialism and the violent mobility regime fuelling the rise of fossil fascism.

William I. Robinson
EPOCHAL CRISIS
The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism
Cambridge University Press
This bold effort to synthesize the economic, social, political, military, and ecological dimensions of the global crisis, concludes that the conditions for global capitalist renewal are becoming exhausted.

James Bashford
NATURE WITHIN
How the Natural World Shapes Our Minds, Bodies & Health
Pelagic Publishing
Our bodies are shaped by our environment, yet we still see ourselves as separate from the natural world. Neuroscientist and doctor James Bashford argues that to protect human health, we need to reawaken our inner connection with nature and prevent the destruction of our environment and the countless species we share it with.

“Metabolic processes govern relations between matter and energy, society and nature—or at least they did until the cleaver of capitalism sundered them. So argued Marx and so argues Ian Angus, who deepens and updates the theory of metabolic rift with a superb dive into the sciences, history, and politics behind planetary disruption.” —JULIA ADENEY THOMAS, Professor of History, University of Notre Dame; editor of Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right Available now from most booksellers, including these.