Reading list

Earth Day | Will It Ever Be The End of The End of The World?

Books on the climate crisis, the end of the world, and the struggle for collective life

Verso Books21 April 2026

Earth Day | Will It Ever Be The End of The End of The World?

It's another Earth Day where we mourn our dying planet. Those killing it continue to do so brazenly and with increasing tenacity.

Will we allow it to all be over or will we fight to reach the end of the end of the world?

Book strip #1

  • Half-Earth Socialism
    ‘Building a society that operates within ecological constraints requires an unleashing of our political imaginations, and this book helps us do just that’—Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecur...
    Paperback
  • Nuclear is Not the Solution
    The climate crisis has inspired new hope in nuclear energy. Its advocates claim we already have the technology of the future, ready to be perfected and deployed. But as M. V. Ramana argues in this ...
    Paperback
  • On Extinction
    On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching...
  • Thirst
    Two billion people worldwide are without access to safe water. But solutions are hard to come by when causes are not clearly defined. In a whirlwind tour of global water insecurity, one of the worl...
  • The End
    In this pathbreaking study, Joel Wainwright shows how deeply Darwin influenced Capital. Marx’s thinking about history and nature changed, generating a distinctive ecological critique of capitalism ...
  • The Imperial Mode of Living
    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 ...
    Paperback
  • Planetary Mine
    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...
    Paperback
  • The Secret World of Oil
    Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization, and the industry that supplies it has been the subject of intense interest and scrutiny, as well as countless books. And yet, almost no attention has be...
    Paperback
  • America's Kingdom
    Now newly updated, America’s Kingdom debunks the many myths that now surround the United States’s special relationship with Saudi Arabia, also known as “the deal”: oil for security. Exploding the l...
    Paperback
  • Where Vultures Feast
    On February 22, 1895, a naval force laid siege to Brass, the chief city of the Ijo people of Nembe in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. After severe fighting, the city was razed. More than two thousand people...
    Paperback
  • Fossil Capital
    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...
    Paperback
  • Land Grabbing

    Land Grabbing

    To the governments and corporations that are currently buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is called “land leasing.” To its critics this new era of colonization is nothing more than “land ...