A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the
frontlines of the climate crisis.
Environmentalism
from Below takes readers
inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the
Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but
also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the
forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the
world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, grassroots movements
are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just
and sustainable ways of living on Earth.
Scholar
and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these
movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity
organizations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International
to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria, and
beyond. Taking up the four critical challenges we face in a warming
world—food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and
conservation—Dawson shows how the unruly power of environmentalism
from below is
charting an alternative path forward, from challenging industrial
agriculture through fights for food sovereignty and agroecology to
resisting extractivism using mass nonviolent protest and sabotage.
An
urgent, essential intervention, Environmentalism
from Below offers a
hopeful alternative to the gridlock of UN-based climate negotiations
and the narrow nationalism of some Green New Deal efforts. As Dawson
reminds us, the fight against ecocide is already being waged
worldwide. Building on longstanding traditions of anticolonial
struggle, environmentalism
from below is
a model for a people’s movement for climate justice—one that
demands solidarity.