Recent books on water, capitalism and nature, anti-environmentalism, the Amazon, and Einstein’s socialism
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, 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.
Filippo Menga
THIRST
The Global Quest to Solve the Water Crisis
Verso Books
Two billion people worldwide are without access to safe water. A leading expert on water politics chronicles the massive impact of climate change; the insatiable water demands of industry and agriculture; and the widespread lack of state investment in infrastructure. To escape the deadlock that bedevils access to clean water, we have to reconsider the market and our relationship with nature.
Alyssa Barristoni
FREE GIFTS
Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
Princeton University Press
Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, recovering and reinterpreting the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking.
John Hultgren
THE SMOKE AND THE SPOILS
Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States
MIT Pree
Tracing the trajectory of anti-environmentalism from the nineteenth-century frontier to the 1950s suburb, from the shuttered shops of Main Street to the extractive economies of Trump country, Hultgren offers a historically grounded theory of anti-environmentalism, to help idebtify and combat the forces standing in the way of environmental progress.
Albert Einstein, John Bellamy Foster
ALBERT EINSTEIN’S “WHY SOCIALISM?”
The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay
Monthly Review Press
Written during the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the United States, Einstein’s essay was an act of defiance, making a case for socialism unrivaled in its time or ours. Foster’s introduction to this short volume tells the story of Einstein’s life-long commitment to socialism and shows the importance of his essay as we enter a time of planetary crisis and new threats of world war.
Dom Phillips with contributors
HOW TO SAVE THE AMAZON
A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers
Chelsea Green
Journalist Dom Phillips traveled deep into the Amazon rainforest searching for solutions to the problem of deforestation, a threat to the local ecosystem, native tribes, and the global climate. When he was murdered by a group of environmental criminals, a team of journalists and activists took up his work to finish his book and share his important message.