Archives: Books
Ashley’s published books.
Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet
January, 2024
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.
Publisher's SitePraise for Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet
“Environmentalism from Below is a much-needed and important book. In it, Dawson goes beyond narrow and technocratic imaginaries rooted in the nation-state, but also takes us past abstract romantic appeals to clearly trace the emancipatory potentials of global peoples’ environmental movements. Carefully researched and accessibly written, the book connects food, cities, energy, conservation, debt, and borders in a narrative that manages to be both a sharp wake-up call and an optimistic assessment of what our common liberation can look like. This book is a must-read for anyone who feels there must be more to environmental justice than climates accords.”
—Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Director of the Urban Democracy Lab, New York University, and author of We, the Sovereign
“Environmentalism from Below offers a politically erudite and passionate cacophony of momentum drawing from the world’s variegated yet articulated grassroots, all attempting in solidarity to upend the transgression of key planetary ecological relations. Deploying an intersectional form of analysis and mobilization, the book powerfully examines the interplay among how food is produced, cities inhabited, space enclosed, and energy generated in an effort to abolish the debilitating indebtedness of the majority to capital’s voracious calculations and their entrapment amidst borders. The book embodies the exigencies for the synergies of multiple movements underway—of people, affordances, collective capacities, rights, and resources—toward more just dispositions and the prospect of attaining a livable world.”
—AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, and author of The Surrounds, Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture
“Environmentalism from Below brims with fresh insights and new approaches to some of the most vexing issues of our time. In lucid, passionate prose, Ashley Dawson charts the global alliances forged from below against unregulated plunder and ecocide. Few scholars can match Dawson’s vast transnational experience as an environmental scholar-activist. His global yet textured understanding of resistance movements from Bolivia, South Africa, India, Brazil, the US, and far beyond makes this a profound contribution to our understanding of how common struggles are forged. Environmentalism from Below is sure to become a staple in the environmental classroom as well as a guiding light for activists.”
—Rob Nixon, Barron Family Professor of Environment and Humanities, Princeton, and author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
“Ashley Dawson takes us on a wondrous tour of communities working for life after capitalism. These grassroots ecologies are so potent, their promise so profound, they’ve elicited lethal violence from the state and private sector. For that reason, Environmentalism from Below is also an atlas of the world’s most important struggles.”
—Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin, and coauthor of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
“On a global scale humankind faces multiple existential crises as a result of climate change and the systematic environmental degradation that has brought us collectively to the brink. Populations in the Global South are most at risk, owing to decades of austerity measures imposed on peasant and Indigenous communities by the cruel alliances of neocolonial and neoliberal authoritarian governments, transnational corporations, and a host of multilateral NGOs. Ashley Dawson reframes these grim realities to emphasize how grassroots communities proactively resist the privatization and toxic exploitation of the natural world in innovative and empowering ways. Altogether, their examples stand as road maps for what many more of us will likely face in the coming years.”
—Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock
“True to its aim, this book celebrates ideas and actions that come from below. It is a book that deserves to be celebrated as it presents clear evidence of active organizing and resistance by climate victims and the dispossessed against manifestations of neocolonial and oppressive policies and actions. Environmentalism from Below is a book that fossil fuel tycoons and other purveyors of fictional environmental optimism will hate.”
—Nnimmo Bassey, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa
“Though debates rage on the climate Left about what language or strategy ought to be taken in order to confront the climate crisis, those involved in such conversations frequently seem to have their minds in the clouds and no grounded connection to existing class struggle. Dawson stands these critics on their heads by foregrounding the wildly diverse, actually existing, and ineluctably global people’s movements for climate justice. In these scattered movements of urban squatters, migrants, industrial workers, peasant farmers, feminists, and Indigenous nations, one finds more comprehensive strategies for confronting imperialism and capitalism, which are the roots of environmental crises. Environmentalism from Below is a readable, practical, and inspiring guide to building ecological counterpower.”
—Kai Bosworth, author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century
“Ashley Dawson’s book focuses on environmentalism from below and enlightens us on all those central issues, such as the food model, agroecology, the debates on the just energy transition, the question of the sustainability of life in big cities, and climate debt. Written with commitment and elegance, this is an indispensable book for understanding the re-existence process and the organizational fabric, especially in the Global South.”
—Maristella Svampa, Ecosocial and Intercultural Practice from the South
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change
March, 2017
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.
Publisher's SitePraise for Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change
“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.”
“A substantive contribution to the growing dialogue about our response—or lack thereof—to climate change.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A sophisticated and provocative exploration of the unfolding impact of climate change on urban environments.”
“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.”
“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.”
“An ultimate call to action.”
“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.”
“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.”
“With the majority of humanity located in cities, it behooves us to consider urban ecologies as recent and future sites of non-natural disasters as well as inspiring places of collective resilience and struggles for justice. Dawson’s book is a guiding light.”
“The definitive study of an urban – and planetary – system pushed to the breaking point. Extreme Cities paints a terrifying, but also hopeful, picture, weaving together accounts of iron-fisted states, greedy real estate developers, and the communities that challenge their rule.”
“A profoundly sobering picture of climate change’s uneven urban toll, both across global expanses and within particular neighborhoods, while also spotlighting instances of radical, on-the-ground resistance to such trends.”
“[Ashley Dawson] is well attuned to the ways that upheavals and disasters disproportionately affect the socioeconomically disadvantaged. As Donald Trump continues to roll back protection measures and disavow the U.S.’s role in global cooperation to mitigate the effects of climate change, this book is a clear-eyed reminder of who, and what, will be left most vulnerable as a result.”
“Dawson’s book destroys the comforting global discourse of climate change, resilience and adaptation and introduces the key words of our time: the dramatic ‘climate apartheid’ currently unfolding in front of us. A shrewd analysis of the prodigious contradiction of capitalism at the time of the anthropocene: what happens when coastal cities, the great capital sinks of capital, literally sink.”
“Books on climate change are a dime a dozen now, but few, if any, truly reckon with the potential scale of the disasters that await. Dawson reveals the inadequacies of current plans to deal with the problems that cities around the world will face. Forget such buzzwords as ‘green cities,’ ‘resilience,’ and ‘sustainable development’ — the age of ‘disaster communism’ is here.”
“Extreme Cities is a sobering account of how planetary urbanization has put us on a collision course with the natural world.”
“Extreme Cities is an angry book—as it should be … Ashley Dawson outlines the existential dilemma facing coastal cities, and the refusal of various powerbrokers to acknowledge that reality, in bold and frequently horrifying terms.”
“Invoking terms such as ‘climate apartheid,’ he greatly expands what people traditionally think of as relevant climate policy language. Recognizing that climate change mitigation and adaptation are interwoven with—and exacerbated by—social inequities and other problems plaguing modern cities is sobering, but this realization provides hope that humanity can move toward greater resilience to environmental problems by addressing non-climatic factors that will improve cities in the presence or absence of climate change.”
“Extreme Cities takes on the needed work of slowing down to chronicle and consider this meantime, without shying away from its messiness…More than simply lay out the existence of disparities, it illuminates the relationship between them.”
“[Ashley Dawson] cuts through the green capitalist hype and shows instead that life under climate change has grown increasingly precarious for working-class people living in major urban centers in the twenty-first century … A sweeping narrative that ties together disparate calamities.”
Extinction: A Radical History
July, 2016
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.
Publisher's SitePraise for Extinction: A Radical History
Dawson’s searing report on species loss will sober up anyone who has drunk the Kool Aid of green capitalism. For a bonus, readers will learn a lot from his far-sighted, prehistoric survey of extinction.
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 Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below
People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons
September, 2020
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.
Publisher's SitePraise for People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons
“An elegant, controversial thesis”
—The Guardian on Ashley Dawson’s Extinction
“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
The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature
January, 2013
In The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature Ashley Dawson identifies the key British writers and texts, shaped by era-defining cultural and historical events and movements from the period. He provides:
- Analysis of works by a diverse range of influential authors
- Examination of the cultural and literary impact of crucial historical, social, political and cultural events
- Discussion of Britain’s imperial status in the century and the diversification of the nation through Black and Asian British Literature
Readers are also provided with a comprehensive timeline, a glossary of terms, further reading and explanatory text boxes featuring further information on key figures and events.
Publisher's Site