Disaster Communism
with Ashley Dawson & Ajay Singh Chaudhary
Please join Ashley Dawson and Ajay Singh Chaudhary for a discussion and celebration of their new books Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements are Leading the Fight for Our Planet (Haymarket) and The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater) which investigate the movements that have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, these grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.
As Chaudhary explains, Climate change is not only about the exhaustion of the planet, it’s about the exhaustion of so many of us, our lives, our worlds, even our minds. He shows how a new politics particular to the climate catastrophe demands a bitter struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of “business-as-usual” and all of us, those exhausted, in every sense of the word, by the status quo.
And 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.
Praise for the books
"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 New York Times and international bestselling author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
“Have you felt exhausted lately? In this wonderfully rich inquiry into late climate politics, Ajay Singh Chaudhary zooms in on exhaustion as the predicament of a world too long subjected to the ‘extractive circuit’ of capital: the constant sapping of energies, returning to the planet as excess heat. The wretched of the Earth are today the exhausted — and if there is any way to fight back, it is, as Chaudhary so convincingly argues, with southern resources, assembled by everyone from Frantz Fanon to Imam Mahdi. Bristling with ideas on every page, this book is the energy drink you need.”—Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
About the authors
Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.
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 Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common 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.