- The Guardian
- Issue #2069
Big Bad Fix: The Case Against Climate Geoengineering
A report by ETC Group, BiofuelWatch and
Heinrich Böll Foundation
Available at etcgroup.org
As this report details, each of the proposed geoengineering technologies threatens people and ecosystems. Holistic assessments of the technologies also show that if deployed they are highly likely to worsen rather than mitigate the impacts of global warming. The irreversibility, risk of weaponisation, and implications for global power dynamics inherent in large-scale climate geoengineering also make it an unacceptable option.
Green Strategy: Path to Fundamental Transformation
by Marc Brodine
(2018)
Available at cpa.org.au/shop
Shelves groan with books describing the existential crisis of climate change. Too often these books baulk at the final hurdle. Mobilisation is called for, a sustainable world is demanded, but what to do and how to do it remains a stumbling block. Brodine fills the gap that so many leave unplugged. He calls for building political power to implement fundamental change. He calls for a political struggle for nature that would merge with other struggles. This book looks beyond that final hurdle towards socialism as the only rational solution.
How to Fix a Broken Planet: Advice for Surviving the 21st Century
by Julian Cribb
How to Fix a Broken Planet describes 10 catastrophic risks that menace human civilisation and our planet, and what we can all do to overcome or mitigate them. It explains what must be done globally to avert each mega-threat, and what each of us can do in our own lives to help preserve a habitable world. It offers an integrated world plan of action for a more sustainable human society – and fresh hope.
The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
John Bellamy Foster
(2020)
Foster explores the developing ecological theory of the 20th century. He lays out the radical and socialist origins of the environmental movement, and the deep debt owed to Marx and Engels in their dialectical approach to nature, ecology and capitalism. Foster calls for a revolution that will both save the planet and meet the needs of humanity – a “science for the people.” As he says, “what we must dethrone today is the idol of capital itself, the concentrated power of class-based avarice, which now imperils the ecology of the earth.”
Wisdom of the Elders
by Peter Knudtson & David Suzuki
(1992)
Two notable Western scientists explore the First Nations knowledge of our world and the universe and develop a profound respect for the intellectual insights they gained. In a global perspective, the authors, Peter Knudtson, a biologist, and David Suzuki, a professor of genetics, reflect on the stories and traditions of Indigenous peoples encompassing the Inuit of the Arctic, the Arunda of the Australian desert and peoples in the tropics – Africa, Asia, and South America and beyond. The pages of this book are full of enlightenment and “provide the foundations for a new global environmental ethic.”
The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People
by Tim Flannery
(2002)
As a noted ecologist, Tim Flannery, seriously questions the rate resources are being consumed without taking sufficient account of future needs. Controversy has arisen over his propositions about the effects of firestick farming, the equating the coincidence of the extinction of megafauna such as the diprotodon, with the arrival of humans in Australasia where people are now living beyond the land’s “population carrying capacity.”
Dialectics of Nature
by Friedrich Engels
Easily available online, this book describes very clearly how people think what they do to nature will have no effect, but it comes back to bite them. Explains a lot about invasive species.
