33. Climate Memo Mondays, July 26, 2021
WHO’S
YOUR FAVORITE REPORTER OF THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE? Here’s one of mine: ASHLEY DAWSON
2016 Extinction: A
Radical History
2017 Extreme Cities:
The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change.
2021 People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons
ASHLEY DAWSON. EXTINCTION: A RADICAL HISTORY. 2016.
Publisher’s description:
Some thousands of years ago, the world was home to an immense
variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to giant
ground sloths and armadillos the size of automobiles, these spectacular
creatures roamed freely. Then human beings arrived. Devouring their way down
the food chain as they spread across the planet, they began a process of
voracious extinction that has continued to the present.
Headlines today are made by the existential threat confronting
remaining large animals such as rhinos and pandas. But the devastation summoned
by humans extends to humbler realms of creatures including beetles, bats and
butterflies. Researchers generally agree that the current extinction rate is
nothing short of catastrophic. Currently the earth is losing about a hundred
species every day.
This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer
that combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global
attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as
well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been
regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole.
This attack has its genesis in the need for capital to expand
relentlessly into all spheres of life. Extinction, Dawson argues, cannot be
understood in isolation from a critique of our economic system. To achieve this
we need to transgress the boundaries between science, environmentalism and
radical politics. Extinction: A Radical History performs
this task with both brio and brilliance.
Publication July 2016 • 132 pages
Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-40-1 • E-book 978-1-682190-41-8
“Ashley Dawson’s slim and forceful book …
makes a case for being the most accessible and politically engaged examination
of the current mass extinction … a welcome contribution to the growing
literature on this slow-motion calamity.” —Matthew Schneider-Mayerson,
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Yale University, in the 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, author of Creditocracy and the Case for
Debt Refusal
“Dawson has summed up the threat to
our fellow species on Earth with clarity, urgency and the finest reasoning
available within the environmental justice literature. He explains how
capital's appropriation of nature cannot be 'offset,' nor solutions found in
financialization. Fusing social and ecological challenges to power is the only
way forward, and here is a long-awaited, elegant and comprehensive expression
of why the time is right to make these links.”
—Patrick Bond, Professor of Political Economy, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and author of Politics of Climate Justice:
Paralysis Above, Movement Below
“A succinct and moving account of the
co-evolution of capitalism, imperialism, and climate change. Dawson
demonstrates not only how capitalism created climate change but also why the
former must be challenged in order to halt the latter. Offering not only
critique but also solutions, this rousing book is a great tool for
anti-capitalists, climate change activists, and those still making sense of the
intrinsic connections between the two.”
—Jasbir Puar, Associate Professor, Graduate Program Director
Women's and
Gender Studies, Rutgers University, author of Terrorist
Assemblages
“Historically grounded, densely
researched, fluidly written, Ashley Dawson’s book on extinction is a powerful
and painful exploration of human civilization's environmental irrationalities.
Yet Dawson does not see annihilation as inevitable and he even points towards
an alternate path.” —Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate
Change and the New Geography of Violence
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age
of Climate Change. 384 pages / January 2019.
Publisher’s
description:
A cutting exploration of how cities drive climate change while
being on the frontlines of the coming climate crisis
Named One of the Top 10 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly
and Planetizen
How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts
be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming
chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are
ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the
atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the
majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of
them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their
shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the
elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify
carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels
rise.
In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future
of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and
Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland’s models for defending
against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after
Hurricane Sandy. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, he argues.
Rather, it lies with urban movements already fighting to remake our cities in a
more just and equitable way.
As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is
a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of
the cities of the world.
Reviews
“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
“A substantive
contribution to the growing dialogue about our response—or lack thereof—to
climate change.” – Kirkus
Reviews
“The way we design and
live in cities will determine humanity’s ability to avoid an anthropogenic mass
extinction event in the coming century. Dawson makes this vividly clear
in Extreme Cities, laying out in detail the nature of the problem
and some possible positive actions we can take. Crucial to his argument is the
fact that technological solutions will not be enough, so that we need to
drastically reform the capitalist economic system to properly price and value
the biosphere and human lives. His point that social justice is now a necessary
survival strategy makes this not just a meticulous history and analysis of our
situation, but also an exciting call to action.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The
Red Mars Trilogy and New York 2140
“Dawson makes a
convincing case that, unless urban dwellers and civic leaders engage in a
fundamental reconceptualization of the city and whom it serves, the future of
urban life is dim.” “Many books have
elucidated the ever-increasing dangers of climate change, particularly the
disastrous impact that rising sea levels will have on coastal regions, but Dawson
goes further as he outlines some potential solutions to this crisis. Massive
technological projects may not be what’s needed, he finds; instead, the solution may already exist in radical
movements to forge a more just and equitable society.” – Publishers Weekly
– Publishers Weekly
(★ Starred Review)
“Cities both in the
North and the South are already suffering the effects of climate change.
Government and business fitfully recognize and respond, but in ways that
reinforce existing injustices and as often as not make things worse. Dawson
shows how social movements have combined action on disaster relief with forms
of equitable common life to produce models for radical adaptation from which we
can all learn. This is a brillant summation of what we know and what we can do
build a new kind of city in the ruins of the old.” – McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular
Red: Theory for the Anthropocene
“A powerful argument in a dire situation: that
we revise our cities to the new game changer, or climate change will revise
urban existences as we know it.” – Kazi
Khaleed Ashraf, director-general of Bengal Institute of Architecture,
Landscapes and Settlements
“A revelatory confrontation between two forms
of ‘surplus liquidity’: the rent-seeking excess of circulating global capital
and the more literal liquidity of the rising tides of climate change. The
setting is the city and this meticulously researched and argued book probes the
nexus of myopia, greed, environmental disaster – and hope – that has placed the
urban habitat of billions of us in extremis.”
– Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map: Writing on
Buildings and Cities
“A must-read for
everyone who wants to understand the politics of climate change in an
increasingly urban planet, and to explore the possibilities for radical change
beyond all technological fixes and governmental adjustments that only reproduce
the system as it is.” – Marco Armiero,
director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of
Technology, Sweden
“An ultimate call to
action.” – Joep Janssen, author of Living
with the Mekong: Climate Change and Urban Development in Ho Chi Minh City and
the Mekong Delta
“A superb essay of
political ecology, Extreme Cities demonstrates that there is
nothing more depending on nature than the city, offering both a diagnosis and a
possible therapy for one of the greatest challenges of our time.” – Serenella Iovino, editor of Material
Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene
“Extreme Cities takes
the critical long view to challenge city decision-makers to deal seriously with
the clash of business-as-usual development, threats from climate change, and
persistent social inequality to develop real transformations to drive cities
toward sustainability and resilience.” –
Timon McPhearson, Director, Urban Systems Lab at The New School, New York City
People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy
Commons. OR Books, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8
From the Publisher:
“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
BUY
THIS BOOK
Publisher’s description
The science is conclusive: to avoid irreversible climate
collapse, the burning of all fossil fuels will have to end in the next decade.
In this concise and highly readable intervention, Ashley Dawson sets out what
is required to make this momentous shift: Simply replacing coal-fired power
plants with for-profit solar energy farms will only maintain the toxic illusion
that it is possible to sustain relentlessly expanding energy consumption. We
can no longer think of energy as a commodity. Instead we must see it as part of
the global commons, a vital element in the great stock of air, water, plants,
and cultural forms like language and art that are the inheritance of humanity
as a whole.
People’s Power provides
a persuasive critique of a market-led transition to renewable energy. It
surveys the early development of the electric grid in the United States,
telling the story of battles for public control over power during the Great
Depression. This history frames accounts of contemporary campaigns, in both the
United States and Europe, that eschew market fundamentalism and sclerotic state
power in favor of energy that is green, democratically managed and equitably
shared.
274 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-300-6 • E-book
978-1-68219-244-3
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