"A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Scholar and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity organisations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria and beyond. 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." –Green Left
"Ashley Dawson takes us on a wondrous tour of communities working for life after capitalism. These grassroots ecologies are so potent, and 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 global struggles." –Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin
"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 struggles. Dawson stands these critics on their head 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
"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
"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, an indispensable book for understanding the re-existence process and the organizational fabric, especially in the global sou
