Reading list

Climate, Environment, and Ecology: Verso Student Reading

Featuring Andreas Malm, Ann Pettifor, George Monbiot, and more.

Verso Books24 August 2023

Climate, Environment, and Ecology: Verso Student Reading

It is increasingly evident that the climate crisis is fundamentally linked to the regime of capital accumulation. How should we think through such looming climate catastrophe? Here we present a reading list which aims to tackle one of the greatest issues facing us today.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Climate Change as Class War

by Matthew T. Huber

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As ...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductiv...

The Future is Degrowth

by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter

Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalis...

Half-Earth Socialism

by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese

Over the next generation, humanity will confront a dystopian future of climate disaster and mass extinction. Yet the only "solutions" on offer are toothless cap-and-trade programs, catastrophic geo...

Ending Fossil Fuels

by Holly Jean Buck

Around the world, countries and companies are setting net-zero carbon emissions targets. But “net-zero” is a term that conveniently obscures multiple futures. There could be a version of net-zero w...

The Great Adaptation

by Romain Felli

The Great Adaptation tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to the con...

White Skin, Black Fuel

by The Zetkin Collective and Andreas Malm

In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilia...

The Imperial Mode of Living

by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen

With the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western ...

Planet on Fire

by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton

As we rebuild our lives in the wake of Covid-19 and face the challenges of ecological disaster, how can the left win a world fit for life? Planet on Fire is an urgent manifesto for a fundamental ...

Capitalism and the Sea

by Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás

Winner of the IPEG 2022 Book PrizeThe global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds a...

Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin

Edited by C.J. Polychroniou

The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful stat...

The Conservation Revolution

by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher

Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation...

Post-Growth Living

by Kate Soper

The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposa...

Feminism or Death

by Francoise d'Eaubonne

Translated by Ruth Hottell and Emma Ramadan

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but abo...

The Case for the Green New Deal

by Ann Pettifor

In 2008, the first Green New Deal was devised by Pettifor and a group of English economist and thinkers, but was ignored within the tumults of the financial crash. A decade later, the ideas was rev...

Planetary Mine

by Martín Arboleda

Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies em...

Our History Is the Future

by Nick Estes

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenou...

Climate Leviathan

by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright

**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize**Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. Th...

Extreme Cities

by Ashley Dawson

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 ci...

Mobility Justice

by Mimi Sheller

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and extreme challenges of urbanization. At the same time it is difficu...

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, gov...

Fossil Capital

by Andreas Malm

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began...

Capitalism in the Web of Life

by Jason W. Moore

Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a ...

Molecular Red

by McKenzie Wark

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that...

The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Fernbach

The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped int...

Carbon Democracy

by Timothy Mitchell

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the Wes...

Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

by André Gorz

Translated by Chris Turner

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological ...

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