Austerity Ecology The Collapse Porn Addicts A Defence Of Growth Progress Industry And Stuff

Author : Leigh Phillips
Publisher : John Hunt Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1782799613
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts written by Leigh Phillips and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic. Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance. In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway. We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.

Author : Leigh Phillips
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786635186
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The People's Republic of Walmart written by Leigh Phillips and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the demise of the USSR, the mantle of the largest planned economies in the world has been taken up by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and other multinational corporations For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

Author : Abhijit V. Banerjee
Publisher : PublicAffairs
ISBN 13 : 1541762878
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Good Economics for Hard Times written by Abhijit V. Banerjee and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it. Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable. In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

Author : Chris Hedges
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501152688
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America: The Farewell Tour written by Chris Hedges and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chris Hedges’s profound and unsettling examination of America in crisis is “an exceedingly…provocative book, certain to arouse controversy, but offering a point of view that needs to be heard” (Booklist), about how bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in a culture of sadism and hate. America, says Pulitzer Prize­–winning reporter Chris Hedges, is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair, and a civil society that has ceased to function. The opioid crisis; the retreat into gambling to cope with economic distress; the pornification of culture; the rise of magical thinking; the celebration of sadism, hate, and plagues of suicides are the physical manifestations of a society that is being ravaged by corporate pillage and a failed democracy. As our society unravels, we also face global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change. All these ills presage a frightening reconfiguration of the nation and the planet. Donald Trump rode this disenchantment to power. In his “forceful and direct” (Publishers Weekly) America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges argues that neither political party, now captured by corporate power, addresses the systemic problem. Until our corporate coup d’état is reversed these diseases will grow and ravage the country. “With sharply observed detail, Hedges writes a requiem for the American dream” (Kirkus Reviews) and seeks to jolt us out of our complacency while there is still time.

Author : Holly Jean Buck
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786637995
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book After Geoengineering written by Holly Jean Buck and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductive idea. We are right to fear that geoengineering will be used to maintain the status quo, but is there another possible future after geoengineering? Can these technologies and practices be used to bring carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels? Are there possibilities for massive intentional intervention in the climate that are democratic, decentralised, or participatory? These questions are provocative, because they go against a binary that has become common sense: geoengineering is assumed to be on the side of industrial agriculture, inequality and ecomodernism, in opposition to degrowth, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate justice. After Geoengineering rejects this binary, to ask: what if the people seized the means of climate production? Both critical and utopian, the book examines the possible futures after geoengineering. Rejecting the idea that geoengineering is some kind of easy work-around, Holly Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that would be necessary to enact a programme of geoengineering in the first place.

Author : Gabriele Balbi
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110740281
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Digital Roots written by Gabriele Balbi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

Author : Aaron Saad
Publisher : Fernwood Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1773635867
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Worlds at Stake written by Aaron Saad and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-31T00:00:00Z with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intensifying climate crisis has put the world on high alert. For those living in the high-consuming, high-polluting swaths of the world, it is clear that something about our society, our politics, our economy — our very way of life — must change. But the nature of those necessary changes is a source of seemingly intractable dispute. Does the answer lie in stimulating the dynamism of capitalist market forces with a carbon price, or in the deployment of new, climate-engineering technologies? Or does it lie in still more radical changes — something akin to a wartime-like mobilization to rapidly build a more just post-carbon world, or a shift to an ecologically bounded society that has transcended perpetual capitalist growth? Our ideologies — the competing ways we believe the world should be — powerfully affect how we see the problem of climate change and what we think ought to be done about it. In this highly original and accessible book, Saad presents an erudite survey of political perspectives and ethical arguments about how we should respond to the climate crisis. By arranging these approaches into two broad categories of “system preserving” and “system changing” frameworks, Saad takes the reader on a journey through competing ideas about how we can address our collective responsibility to create a livable global future.

Author : Cory Doctorow
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781515098522
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book With a Little Help written by Cory Doctorow and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a Little Help is my first serious experiment in self-publishing. I've published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with publishers, and it's all been very good and satisfying and educational and so on, but it seems like it's time to try something new. With a Little Help consists of 12 stories, all reprints except for "Epoch" (commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth).

Author : Matthias Schmelzer
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1839765860
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Future is Degrowth written by Matthias Schmelzer and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars. Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it. Not only in society at large, but also on the left, we are held captive by the hegemony of growth. Even proposals for emancipatory Green New Deals or postcapitalism base their utopian hopes on the development of productive forces, on redistributing the fruits of economic growth and technological progress. Yet growing evidence shows that continued economic growth cannot be made compatible with sustaining life and is not necessary for a good life for all. This book provides a vision for postcapitalism beyond growth. Building on a vibrant field of research, it discusses the political economy and the politics of a non-growing economy. It charts a path forward through policies that democratise the economy, “now-topias” that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth. Degrowth perspectives offer a way to step off the treadmill of an alienating, expansionist, and hierarchical system. A handbook and a manifesto, The Future Is Degrowth is a must-read for all interested in charting a way beyond the current crises.

Author : Bill Adams
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136734694
Total Pages : 667 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Green Development written by Bill Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of sustainability lies at the core of the challenge of environment and development, and the way governments, business and environmental groups respond to it. Green Development provides a clear and coherent analysis of sustainable development in both theory and practice. Green Development explores the origins and evolution of mainstream thinking about sustainable development and offers a critique of the ideas behind them. It draws a link between theory and practice by discussing the nature of the environmental degradation and the impacts of development. It argues that, ultimately, ‘green’ development has to be about political economy, about the distribution of power, and not about environmental quality. Its focus is strongly on the developing world. The fourth edition retains the broad structure of previous editions, but has been updated to reflect advances in ideas and changes in international policy. Greater attention has been given to the political ecology of development, market-based and neoliberal environmentalism, and degrowth. This fully revised edition discusses: the origins of thinking about sustainability and sustainable development, and its evolution to the present day; the ideas that dominate mainstream sustainable development (including natural capital, the green economy, market environmentalism and ecological modernisation); critiques of mainstream ideas and of neoliberal framings of sustainability, and alternative ideas about sustainability that challenge ‘business as usual’ thinking, such as arguments about limits to growth and calls for degrowth; the dilemmas of sustainability in the context of forests, desertification, food and farming, biodiversity conservation and dam construction; the challenge of policy choices about sustainability, particularly between reformist and radical responses to the contemporary global dilemmas. Green Development offers clear insights into the challenges of environmental sustainability, and social and economic development. It is unique in offering a synthesis of theoretical ideas on sustainability and in its coverage of the extensive literature on environment and development around the world. The book has proved its value to generations of students as an authoritative, thought-provoking and readable guide to the field of sustainable development.