Environmentalism from Below

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. He is the author of several books on key topics in the environmental humanities, including People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Public Power NY campaign and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. Dawson lives in Queens, New York.

"Dawson’s examples of communities organizing around truly living well (buen vivir), public rather than private affluence, and establishing peace with the Earth, offer hopeful seeds of such a radical and necessary future." —New Politics"Environmentalism from Below requires us to face the ongoing damage of a colonial, racist, and economically exploitative history, as well as the deadly assumption common among those in “wealth-afflicted” groups that we know better and have a right to bend other people and lands to our image of what is due to us. I’m left with images of brightly colored houses in Cape Town, cable cars connecting poor folks to the center, women risking their lives to protect the land that supports their communities, and the suggestion that the struggle for clean energy must also be a struggle for popular power. While this book may not be for everybody, I commend it to those who have an appetite for understanding hard truths." —Friends JournalPraise for Extinction:“An elegant, controversial thesis” —The Guardian“A welcome contribution to the growing literature on this slow-motion calamity.” —Los Angeles Review of Books“Dawson's searing report on species loss will sober up anyone who has drunk the Kool-Aid of green capitalism.” —Andrew Ross“Fusing social and ecological challenges to power is the only way forward … a long-awaited, elegant and comprehensive expression of why the time is right to make these links." —Patrick Bond“A great tool for anti-capitalists, climate change activists, and those still making sense of the intrinsic connections between the two." —Jasbir Puar“Historically grounded, densely researched, fluidly written … a powerful and painful exploration of human civilization's environmental irrationalities.” —Christian ParentiPraise for People’s Power:“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 InstitutePraise for Extreme Cities:Named One of the Top 10 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Planetizen“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.”—Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org