Linda Pentz Gunter - No to Nuclear: Why nuclear power destroys lives, derails climate progress & provokes war

Proponents of nuclear power, whether politicians or representatives of the nuclear industry, have a long history of claiming that their technology will fix the latest of humanity's problems. Today they like to claim nuclear energy as the ultimate safe technology that can reduce carbon emissions and solve the climate crisis. It is a devious lie that must be challenged by those who want a just and equitable future for the planet and its people.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a long standing anti-nuclear campaigner. Her book, No to Nuclear: Why nuclear power destroys lives, derails climate progress and provokes war, is an excellent primer for those who want arguments against nuclear power. I suspect it will be widely read among those who oppose nuclear energy and that is a good thing, for reasons I will come on to. But it also should be read by the growing number of activists who are unsure how we are going to stop climate change or are seduced by the lies of the nuclear industry.

I was priviledged to interview Linda about her book during a recent book launch in Manchester for CND. Linda explained that the book came out of a growing need to tell the stories of those people, and animals, affected by nuclear power already. One of the great strengths of the book is how it explores the impact of nuclear power already. In particular, and probably of great interest to activists in Europe, Linda talks about the impact of nuclear power on indigenous people. She recounts how some of the poorest communities in countries like Australia and North America have been used as testing grounds for nuclear power, or sites for resource extraction. As she says, they get all of the danger and problems and none of the benefits.

But indigenous people are not just victims. They are also activists who have successfully mobilised against the nuclear industry. In telling the stories of how they have suffered and how they have resisted Linda gives us a new approach to nuclear power. One that sees communities as being sites that can demand a different approach to the environment and energy, free of corporate control. But these accounts also show a significant fact. Just like disasters and environmental crises impact worst along the fissures of capitalist society, nuclear power impacts the oppressed and exploited first and worst. Take the question of waste. It is black, indigenous and poor commuities that become the places where they want to dump it. As Linda writes:

Where does it go in the meantime? We must return to the lands of Indigenous peoples and communities of color. Yucca Mountain ripples acorss Western Shoshone land in Nevada. We are back in the dreamtim with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain "Serpent Swimming Westward." It is a sacred place. It was also never ceded to the US government. But, for a time, it was the chosen destination for America's high-level radioactive waste repository.

Two other arguments run through Linda's book. The first might seem counter-factual. Linda argues that nuclear power itself has been a distraction from action on climate change. Despite being portrayed as the solution to disaster, it's made it worse. Linda says:

Studies also clearly show that the political choice being made today to continue with or build nuclear power plants, rather than ceoncentrate on renewable energy, only further impedes progrss on carbon reductions, takes longer and of course costs far more. But because nuclear power got in the way of what could have been a global renewable energy revolution decades ago, there is a case to be made that it is far more a contributor to climat echange than it could ever be a solution to it.

I think this is an important argument against nuclear power. There has been a tendency to oppose nuclear power by highlighting its costs, or the amount of dangerous waste, or the technical problems associated with building reactors. What we must do is to look at the whole of nuclear energy within wider contexts. This flows then, into Linda's key argument, the one that opens the book and frames wider politics - the question of nuclear power, war and weapons proliferation.

Because nuclear energy plants always have the potential to be used to manufacture materials for nuclear bombs, building them in ever increasing numbers threatens the potential for more bombs. Indeed that has been the stated reason behind many a country's nuclear plans, the "pathway to the bomb" as Linda calls it. She writes:

Any country with a "civil" nuclear power program is in possession of the necessary technology, skills and materials to develop nuclear weapons. This was already demonstrated by India's transition to nuclear weapons and is responsible for the concerns today surrounding Iran's nuclear intensions, which led in part to the decision by Israel and the US to bomb Iran's nuclear faciltiies in the summer of 2025.

It was also the excuse that the US and Israel used to attack Iran the month that I write this, opening up an appalling moment of imperialist war. But the existence of nuclear weapon potential also encourages others. As Linda points out Saudi Arabia, a country with masses of fossil fuels and enormous potential for solar power, is looking at starting a nuclear energy programme. That's clearly to put it on the path, or potential path, for nuclear weapons. The existence of nuclear energy esclating the possibilities of nuclear weapons elsewhere.

This is a short, readable and polemical book. It places nuclear power in the context of a wider economic system geared to profit and the need to protect markets and resources. It is, in that sense, a frightening book that makes it clear that the threat of nuclear war is getting worse. At the same time it reminds us that in places were there have been accidents, or where uranium is mined, or bombs tested, ordinary people, particularly those from minorities, are already suffering horribly. But Linda also makes it clear that we can resist. Who knew that in Orkney mass movements in the 1970s stopped uranium mining? Linda gives us good numbers of other examples.

Nuclear power can be stopped and in doing so we can strengthen the struggle for more just society and a more rational energy policy. Linda Pentz Gunter's No to Nuclear is an important weapon in that battle.

Related Reviews

Ramana - Nuclear is Not the Solution: The folly of atomic power in the age of climate change
Walker - Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
Gates - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need
Lochbaum, Lyman, Stranahan & UCS - Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
Bird & Sherwin - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Commoner - The Poverty of Power: Energy & the economic crisis

Jungk - Brighter Than 1000 Suns

Alfred W. Crosby - Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900

In his infamous book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond tried to answer the question of why it was that European settlers arrived in the Americas, and not the other way around. His geographical determinism left many wanting in their quest for answers to these important historical questions. Before Diamond however Alfred W. Crosby asked similar questions, and while his book Ecological Imperialism is much better than Guns, Germs and Steel, it still is flawed in providing answers.

Crosby is, however, good at exploring what happened when Europeans arrived in the Americas. He begins with the brief arrival of the Norse and that will not detain us here. He then looks at various aspects of the arrival of Europeans after 1492. The impacts he discusses are primarily biological - disease, weeds, crops and animals. What was driven extinct? What survived well? What caused the decimation of the indigenous people?

The first thing that Crosby notes is the "striking paradox" that

The parts of the world that today in terms of population and culture are most like Europe are far away from Europe - indeed, they are across major oceans - and although they are similar in climate to Europe, they have indigenous floras and faunas different from those of Europe. The regions that today export more foodstuffs of European provenance - grains and meats - than any other lands on earth had no wheat, barly, rye, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats whatsover five hundred years ago.

While Crosby is very detailed in what happened and always sympathetic to the human cost of colonialism, his answers to the questions such as "why did so few of the natives of the Neo-Europes survive?" are often rooted in quite crude biological determinism. Take this point:

A very specific advantage of the Norse over the Skraelings, Eskimo or Amerindian, was the ability of their adults to gain nourishment from fresh milk. 

On the question of disease, and it's impact, he writes:

The Amerindians, Aborigines, and Australiasians were true isolates. They had been different from Europeans, Asians and Africans for thousands of years, and so, perhaps, were the capabilities of their immune systems. 

Essentially what Crosby argues is that for a number of reasons European biology was able to supplement and destroy indigenous people, flora and fauna. But while this is true in a general sense, it fails to explain why it happened. Here, for instance is Crosby's key argument around the queston of pathogens:

We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because they success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogepgraphical realities that underlay the sucess of European imperialists overseas. It wa stheir germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover.

But here Crosby plays a neat trick. He starts by saying we must examine colonial histories of pathogens. But then he doesn't and simply says that it is the biological realities that did the horrifc deads that saw enormous numbers of indigneous people in the Americas and Australisia die. What Crosby misses is that the diseases cannot be separated from colonialism. There are, for instance, multiple examples of settlers using disease to infect and kill (the infamous smallpox blankets for instance). But Crosby also misses something else - if the Europeans had not had smallpox and other diseases, they would have used the musket and gatling gun to murder their way to supremacy. In fact they did exactly this in many places were disease hadn't killed vast numbers. The Europeans did nothing to try and stop the spread of disease, and they did nothing to help its victims. They simply took the vacant land.

But there's a deeper problem. Crosby doesn't articulate any real understanding of what it was about (say) European culture that was different to that in the colonies. Part of this is that he doesn't really get how the economic dynamics of societies in Europe meant that they were much more productive - particular;ly after the 17th century. They could produce more to overwhelm indigenous people. Secondly the reshaping of the environment of the colonies was part of developing capitalism. The slave trade, the introduction of industrial agriculture and so on all strengthened Europe's ability to subsume the colonies.

Crosby does make some interesting points about the biological processes themselves. He argues, for instance, that European biology thrived in conditions of disturbance, and it was disturbance that was introduced by the Europeans. By this he means, "condition[s] of continual disruption: of plowed fields, rzed forests, overgrazed pastures, and burned prairies, of deserted villages and expanding cities, of humans, animals, plants and microlife that hav eevolved separately suddenly coming into intimate contact."

But really these conditions are not about "Europe". They are more about the particular mode of production of capitalism, and how capitalism treats the natural world and the humans it encounters. Those people were subsumed into the process of accumulation and either died, or were distorted by it. Crosby is not entirely ignorant of this. He notes, when discussing the horrific impact of sexual diseases on Native Americans, hat their economic world was turned upsidedown:

A physician serving the Sioux at Fort Peck toward the end of the last century assessed the tragedy of veneral infections among their women not simply as a result of immorality but as the result of a more general change: "They were chaste till the disappearance of the buffalo". 

What Crosby doesn't say here is that this is partly because Native American women, to survive, had to turn to sex work. Another example of biology following economic change, not the other way around.

In conclusion there is a tendency here for Crosby to end up blaming the victim's circumstance/biology for their misfortune, rather than the nature of the settler states that arrived in the Americas, Australia or New Zealand. Crosby has a tendency to associate more advanced societies with those in Europe which means there is an inevitability to his analysis of what happens. Crosby doesn't in any way celebrate the destruction of indigenous societies or people. But his conclusions are inadequate to explain what happened and why, and while there is much of interest here, the book is flawed.

Related Reviews

Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy
Cushman - Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History
Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'
Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion
Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature

In 1875 Karl Marx wrote a devastating critique of the programme of the United Workers’ Party of Germany. In its opening paragraph he dismissed their summary that “labour is the source of all wealth and culture” commentating instead:

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.

This was such a basic tenet of revolutionary ideas that Marx claimed that it was written in “in all children's primers”. We can forgive Marx’s hyperbole here, but his central point is a crucial starting point for understanding how capitalism functions today, and how capitalists themselves behave. 

Nature, as a source of value, has long been understood as a “free gift” to the capitalist production process. Alyssa Battistoni’s book is a detailed study of the phenomena of “free gifts” and how they are used. She begins from the classical political economists such as Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say who saw nature’s free gift in almost every part of the economy, developing the concept in part from the view that nature was a “gift from God”. She says however that “free gift” is an “odd” term. Gifts are, by definition, given freely with no expectation of reward. Indeed it is telling that the word processor I am writing these sentences is telling me to drop the word “free” as superfluous.  The addition of the word “free” by the classical economists is, Battistoni says, telling, because “it provides a clue that the free gift is not timeless or universal, but rather a category defined in relation to the market”. 

Marx had a different starting point. Nature’s “free” gift is a gift only to capital. Once the means of production are held in private hands then the only beneficiaries of nature’s gifts are the capitalists. Consider a river whose flow can drive a water wheel, the private ownership of the banks of the river, or the right to access the waterway, mean that the endless power of the river is accessible only to the capitalist who has bought access to it. Battistoni concludes:

The problem with capitalism… is not just that it destroys nature or unjustly distributes the material harms and benefits of production. Rather, these problems stem from another, second—order problem: that capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free git. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions. Put simply: capitalism limits our freedom.

While this might not seem to great an insight, and Battistoni doesn’t claim any originality, it’s importance lies in the fact that it locates the concept of the “free gift” central to the structure of capitalist production itself, rather than as a superficial outgrowing of particular functions of the system. There are plenty of writings that critique one aspect of neoliberal environmental policy of the other – the absurdity of assigning prices to particular aspects of non-human nature, or the creation of markets and trading in carbon and other forms of pollution. What is less common is the understanding that the possibility for these neoliberal expressions of capitalism arise out of the structure of capitalism itself. 

One further point on this theme by Battistoni is insightful. Discussing the famous comment by Marx that what distinguishes an architect from a bee is that an architect “raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality”. A more rewarding insight she says, comes from Harry Braverman, who notes that the significance of human consciousness is not just that humans can make the reality from their imagination, it is that they can communicate this to others making possible “capitalism’s particular organisation of production”.  In turn, she notes, this “makes possible the separation of control over the means of production from the producers”. 

Thus while human labour is very much, as Marx noted, a “manifestation of a force of nature”, it is different to the other gifts of nature. When purchasing labour power, the capitalists are able to deploy it in a myriad of different ways. A river, on the other hand, flows with gravity. Class rule is the ability of the capitalists to direct human labour in order to utilise nature in order to accumulate wealth. The capitalists are not however entirely free to make their own decisions. As Marx memorably pointed out, the capitalists are “compelled” to behave in a particular way by the competition at the heart of capitalism. “The market”, Battistoni points out, “is capitalism’s government body, the institution that structure action on a daily basis”. It is this that makes capitalism so destructive to humanity and nature. Because it means that the capitalists cannot escape the logic of production – a logic that places profit before everything else.

Nature, however, can form a barrier to capitalist accumulation. There are obvious physical limitations – for instance it might not be profitable to mine a particular resource. But there is a secondary form for this. Some aspects of production are not profitable enough. For instance, Battistoni notes that the persistence of peasant and small scale production, despite expectations to the contrary, is a result of capitalism’s inability to make enough profits from day to day agriculture. It is more profitable to invest upstream and downstream from farming through producing fertilisers, or distributing foodstuffs than to take over all aspects of production. 

This is, she notes, a point of critique of those such as the radical Republican movement in the 19th century, or anarchists today, who argue that production like this represents a bastion against capitalism. In reality, it not “the absence of capitalism” but “the result of a particular set of strategies adopted by capital in the face of intransigent natural obstacles to the total subordination of production”. She makes a similar point about fishing, which she says is one of the last remaining areas of “formally subsumed production” as opposed to areas of the economy which have experienced “real production”. While there is no doubt that small fishing fleets and individually owned boats do persist. I’m unsure its quite as stark as Battistoni suggests – the domination of massive trawlers and big corporations in the marine economy cannot be ignored.

Two other aspects of Battistoni’s discussion of “free gifts” are worth noting. One of these arises out of her discussion of pollution. The production of waste products and the dumping of them in the wider environment is a central part of capitalist production. Pollution in this sense, is “matter out of place” that has no use or exchange value. The inability of capitalism to monetarise this is what makes it pollution. Again Battistoni argues, it’s not enough to critique the individual factory or capitalist for this pollution. We have to see pollution as arising from the structure of the system itself. But one further “free gift” exists in this context. The ability of the human body to tolerate pollution or absorb it. Our ability to survive in polluted factories, or live in areas polluted by industry or cope with certain levels of poison in our water, is a gift to the capitalist. Pollution in this sense is another aspect of our lack from freedom within capitalism.

The labour that is central to the reproduction of labour – the bringing up of children and the feeding, clothing, providing for the family is another “free gift” to the system. Here Battistoni rejects the idea that “reproductive labour is devalued “because it has been ideologically ‘naturalised’.” Similarly, it is not enough to say, like Jason W Moore, that capitalism “defines nature as ‘cheap’ in order to better appropriate it”. Instead

Attending to the interaction of bodily and labour processes, and to their organisation within capitalist societies, is vital for understanding how and why certain kinds of human labour are perpetually devalued. 

She continues:

The relationship between human reproductive labour and the ‘free gifts of nature’, then is not merely analogical or isomorphic, but continuous: both reflect a similar collision of recalcitrant biophysical processes with capitalist social forms and relations. Instead of treating reproductive labour as an inherently distinctive type of activity of sphere of life, one always-already informed by gender, I understand it as a formal category naming a diverse array of concreate activities unified by their structural position as a remnant of capitalist abstraction.

For Battistoni nature’s gifts to humanity can only be understood in the context of the dominant economic system. The free gift concept is the “default form” in which nature appears to the capitalist system of production. It is this central insight, and the wider politics that Battistoni engages with, that make the book valuable at a time when concepts like “Natural Capital” are the dominant ones by which environmental movements approach nature. It is an analysis that points us towards the revolutionary strategy that the workers’ and environmental movement needs.

Related Reviews

Burkett - Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Smith - Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space
Foster - The Dialectics of Ecology
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Foster - Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

M.V.Ramana - Nuclear is Not the Solution: The folly of atomic power in the age of climate change

A few years ago I had the arduous task of reviewing Bill Gates' book on dealing with climate change. I noted that Gates' was obsessed with technological solutions to the climate crisis, in particular nuclear power - an industry which he has got a material interest in. The hunt for technological fixes to environmental crises has a long pedigree. Gates was just one of the billionaires who is most open about it.

The nuclear industry is both wealthy and adept at using the media to put across its case. The argument that nuclear is not a solution is not necessarily straightforward or obvious. So the environmental movement, and indeed the movement against nuclear weapons, should rejoice that M.V. Ramana's new book is available.

Ramana is a trained physicst, who has researched and written extensively on the nuclear industry. He is also greatly concerned about the climate crisis, and understands the intimate connection between the question of energy and reducing emissions. The book demolishes the case for nuclear in two ways. Firstly Ramana challenges the promises of the nuclear industry, both in terms of the potential for nuclear energy and in terms of the technology itself. More importantly though Ramana shows how nuclear power is closely connected with the very systems of imperialism and capitalist accumulation that drive the climate crisis. Let's look at his arguments in turn.

This review is not the place to rehash Ramana's arguments against particular corporations or particular types of nuclear reactors. If you want that I would urge you to read the book itself. But in general Ramana's book explains that

expanding nuclear power production is neither a desirable nor a feasible solution to climate change. Due to the use and production of radioactive materials at reactors, expanding nuclear energy to mitigate climate change will inevitably result in a variety of undesirable risks and environmental impacts. Not is it compatible with environmental and social justice. The consequences and burdens of such an expansion will fall primarily on ecommunities that are distant from the centers of power and economically and politically too marginal to figure in the calculations of decision makers.

Let's take one example - the cost of nuclear power. Ramana discusses research by the "financial firm Lazard" (not a hotbed of radical politics). 

Lazard calculated that the average construction costs of a utility-scale solar photovoltaic plant in the United States... was $875 per kilowatt of generation capacity. (For comparison, the cost of a residential rooftop photovoltaic system in the US was about $2,600 per kilowatt.) These estiamates are averages over many different projects and thus smooth over the peculiarities of individual locations, differential labour costs, and geographical variations. Lazard estimated that a nuclear plant costs around $10,300 per kilowatt - or nearly twelve times the corresponding cost for utility-scale solar photovoltaic plants. 

Interestingly while the cost of energy generated by renewables such as solar has dropped dramatically, that of nuclear has risen. The costs of "building a new nuclear reactor rose from nearly $6,800 per kilowatt in 2013 to $10,300 per kilowatt in 2021".

Given the problems of potential accidents, nuclear waste storage and the length of time taken to build new nuclear plants, the starting point for opposition to nuclear power should not be the costs. But Ramana's book makes the point that the costs matter precisely because nuclear continues to be touted as the solution by the industry, governments and politicians (of centre-left and right). In other words powerful groups remain committed to nuclear power despite its extremely high cost. Why is this?

One part of the problem is that these groups ignore or downplay the impact and threats of nuclear waste, potential accidents and the impossibility of deploying nuclear power plants on the scale and in the numbers to deal with the existing climate threat. But the real problem is that nuclear power is being promoted by people who have a lot to gain from the investment in nuclear power. Here Ramana's knowledge of the industry proves fascinating. In several examples he shows how nuclear companies have promised to build nuclear plants, then seen costs mushroom and profits leap. Sometimes the costs (and timescales) are astronomical. The now discredited company Westinghouse plannted to build a nuclear reactor in Georgia, which despite their claims it would cost $4 billion and take 36 months, ended up costing "$35 billion for such two reactors and a construction time of over ten years".

It doesn't take a genius to conclude as one commentator told the press, that "every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options". Indeed the "nuclear renaissance" that George W Bush launched in 2005 has cost $40 billion dollars, but "has not yet avoided a single molecule of carbon emissions".

This brings us to the second theme of Ramana's book: the wider context. I was intrigued to understand the cross over between nuclear power and the fossil fuel industry. Ramana shows how many nuclear companies also have investments in coal and oil. He points out that "talking about future nuclear power... is a strategy to shift attention away from their current energy mix". I would add though that it is also a way of maintaining the status quo. Such companies can claim they are reducing emissions elsewhere and continue with their fossil fuel activities. 

But the biggest example of how nuclear power is promoted and desired, despite its dangers and costs, is its links with nuclear weapons. Here, I must confess, I learnt a great deal. In fact my own writings against nuclear power have underplayed this angle. The argument is best made by a quote that Ramana has from the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhatten Project. Oppenheimer said of a proposal for the international control of nuclear weapons:

We know very well what we would do if we signed such a convention: we would not make atomic weapons, at least not to start with, but we would build enormous plants, and we would design these plants in such a way that they could be converted with the maximum ease and the minimum time delay to the produciton of atomic weapons.

As Ramana shows the nuclear power industry has often been used by countries as a stepping stone to nuclear weaponary. The intimate links between the industry and nuclear bombs, submarines and so on, are carefully documented. Ramana says, "it is remarkable that whenever the nuclear power industry is in trouble, the strongest argument that officials use in order to obtain government support is to emphasize the overlap with military uses." This overlap is in producing raw materials, skills and training. The industry however is wary. The Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University warned that the links must be "carefully managed to avoid the perception that civil and military nuclear programmes are one and the same". 

Those in favour of nuclear power argue for it against all logic. They do this because they recognise that nuclear power plays a role within a wider economic and political system. Ramana quotes the billionaire Sam Altman (who runs OpenAI). One of Altman's concerns is of course having enough power to run the computer banks that power AI systems. But his fears for the lack of energy are also about wider critiques of capitalism:

The alternative to not having enough energy is the crazy de-growth stuff people talk about. We really don't want that... I think it's insane and pretty immoral when people start calling for that.

What Altman says here is just what the capitalist class think. As Ramana concludes:

Nuclear energy is being promoted by powerful elites in governments and businesses precisely because it comes with the promise, even if it will be ultimately a false promise, that the economic system can continue more or less along the same path while avoiding large-scale climate change.... Talking about nuclear power from new reactors serves to delay dealing with the climate crisis. Procrastination might be the thief of time, but it is good business strategy for companies that profit from the current system.

Ramana's book is a comprehensive demolition of the lies and technological limitations of nuclear power. But it is particularly powerful because he places these lies within the wider context of capitalist society and the logic that has caused the current environmental crises. While I felt that some of his points could have been expanded - I would have liked more on the carbon costs of the nuclear cycle (from mining to storage of waste) - there is plenty of material here to arm those looking for a rational, and sustainable energy policy. You don't have to be anti-capitalist to oppose nuclear power on the grounds of danger, waste or cost. But understanding the position of the industry in wider capitalist society illuminates a great deal. MV Ramana's book is thus urgent and necessary.

Related Reviews

Lochbaum, Lyman, Stranahan & UCS - Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
Walker - Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
Caldicott - Nuclear Power is not the Answer
Commoner - The Poverty of Power: Energy & the economic crisis
Jungk - Brighter Than 1000 Suns

Gates - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need
Bird & Sherwin - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Vanda Felbab-Brown - The Extinction Market: Wildlife trafficking and how to counter it

In the midst of the environmental led biodiversity crisis, there is another tragedy taking place for global flora and fauna: poaching and wildlife trafficking. While many of us will only be dimly aware of the problem, it takes place on a staggering scale. Vanda Felbab-Brown gives us a sense of the scale in the introduction to this book: 

Between 2010 and 2012, almost 100,000 elephants were killed for their tusks in Africa... African elephants have thus experienced a drastic net population declaine of some 111,000 since 2006, leaving a likely current poplation of 415,000... Between 2009 and 2015, Tanzania lost between 50 and 60 percent of its elephant population... in South Africa alone, 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns in 2014.

The list goes on and on. A 171 of a global population of under 4,000 tigers were poached in India between 2010 and 2015. More than a million pangolins were poached in the decade prior to the book's publication. Millions of reptiles are poached every year. It is a grim story, and a difficult question to approach. As Felbab-Brown argues the drivers of poaching are complex - and are often rooted in economic instability and poverty. The solutions are not straightforward either, and in this nuanced book Felbab-Brown uses her knowledge of the global drugs trade to discuss various strategies to challenge poaching. 

While the story is grim, the discussion is nuanced. Felbab-Brown points out, for instance, that total bans don't always work, and can often have adverse effects. Indeed, the centrality of hunting to some communities means that bans should be carefully considered. This is not, of course, to follow the lead of the US National Rifle Association who oppose bans on ivory trading in order that their members can go on hunting safaris. But, she points out:

Under some circumstances, legal sales from hunting or farming crucially underpin and enable wildlife conservation in a way that bans, prohibition, and law enforcement will not [be] able to accomplish because they fail to give key actiors and economic stake in conservation. 

Having said this, Felbab-Brown does acknowledge that this is neither easy not automatic. While "the legal trade of farmed crocodilians also resulted in the recocver in the wild of several crocdilian species", there can also be a consequent increase in demand, or allow illegal hunting to insert animals into the legal supply chains. In addition to these nuances, Felbab-Brown is also aware of the way in which questions of poaching and conservation interact with wider political and historical issues. For instance she notes that the setting up of US National Parks such as Yellowstone saw the forced displacement of Native Americans. She also notes that because of how hunting was linked to colonial rule in parts of Africa:

Environmental policies thus came to be strongly associated and directly overlapped with colonial oppression in the minds of many African and Asian population. Not surprisingly they felt morally justified and economically empowered by illeagally hunting and exploiting protected areas. Poaching became not only a means of susbistance but also a form of rebellion against colonial rule.

Indeed the best examples that Felbab-Brown can offer in terms of "parks" and protection of animals from hunters are ones were the local populations are empowered to see the protection of the habitats and the animals as being in their interests. This might mean ensuring that wildlife guards are properly paid to ensure they don't become poachers at night to raise extra cash. But it might also mean ensuring that local communities have land to farm and adequate access to the natural resources they need.

What are the solutions? These must start from a clear understanding of the problem. Felbab-Brown summarises:

Althought global poaching and trafficking have become more organised, many poor individuals and communities willingly participate in them and do not embrace conservation. For them, hunting, sale and consumption of animals and the conversion of natural habitats to agriculture or resource exploitation are means of economic survival and social advancement. Ignoring this uncomfortable truth, as has become a fad in some parts of the consevation communityu, including many environmental NGOs, will produce unsustainable and ineffective policies.

Going further she points out that the "dominant narrative" over emphasises organised crime as a driver of poaching and downplays "corruption of government institutions and the wildlife industry" in affected countries.

The question really becomes one of economic wealth. What are the best ways to ensure that people and communities don't need to hunt animals to extinction? Some of this should be straightforward - making people feel a stake in the protection of plants and animals. Some requires removing demand. This is harder - some markets for animals parts are closely linked to countries' traditional beliefs, foods or practices. Though it is interesting to note that Felbab-Brown points out how much of these are recent inventions, and how "Chinese Traditional Medicine" is constantly reinventing itself as sources change. 

The strength of the book is its nuanced approach. That there is no "one size fits all" for every country, market or animal is a repeated mantra of Felbab-Brown's book. But despite this I was a little unconvinced by the general thrust of the author's argument. Part of the problem is that the generalised approach by capitalism towards nature is the commodification of nature. The "natural capital" approach which seeks to place a value on nature and embedded it in economic flows is one adopted by most governments, lots of NGOs and almost all global agreements on biodiversity. But once you do this you guarantee that there's a profit to be made. This is why Felbab-Brown argues that "Although it is vital to clean up the corruption that has permeated trohpy hunting in much of Africa, to suspend it indefinitely will hurt, not advance conservation". 

This surely is short-sighted - it assumes firstly that people will always want to hunt for trophies and secondly that conservation can only be helped by a uncorrupted hunting industry. I think it's entirely possible to imagine a world where animal hunting for trophies is inconceivable - but that requires a massive challenge to existing ideologies and power structures. A properly funded environmental approach that doesn't rest on "natural capital" would also release the cash needed for the sort of bottom up conservation that Felbab-Brown shows clearly works. But that again requires a challenge to existing global economic priorities.

So while Felbab-Brown has many helpful insights into how not to try and restrict poaching, because her outlook remains essentially bourgeois, I'm not convinced it offers a long term solution. It is why conservation cannot be separated from wider political and economic questions, particularly ones that are about lack of resources and wealth inequality. That's a big criticism, but in making it I want to emphasise that Vanda Felbab-Brown's book has a great deal to stimulate discussion about conservation and the protection of biodiversity loss. It also makes it clear that those who hold the key to protecting biodiversity are often those who are usually dismissed. The book challenges many assumptions and has a multitude of facts and figures that deserve to be widely known. 

Related Reviews

Bourgon - Tree Thieves: Crime & Survival in the Woods
Archer - 'By a Flash and a Scare': Arson, Animal Maiming & Poaching in East Anglia: 1815-1870

Susan Crawford - Charleston: Race, water & the coming storm

One of the immediate, and most expected, impacts of climate change is a rising sea level. Nasa says that "since the satellite record of ocean height began in 1993, the rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled. In total, global sea level has gone up by 4 inches (10 centimeters) since 1993." But this is nothing to what is coming unless there is a rapid, and drastic, cut in carbon emissions. According to Susan Crawford, "some scientists say we should be planning on three feet of rise by 2050, six feet by 2070 and ten feet by 2100". For the majority of the world that uses metric units this is 0.91m, 1.82m and 3.05m. Billions of people who live in low lying and coastal areas will find themselves, their communities and their economies under threat from this future.

How will this threat impact? Susan Crawford's book is a study of one example - the lowlying, heavily populated southern US city of Charleston in South Carolina. Charleston is a fascinating place. It's a city that has been at the epicentre of US history, mostly because its geographical position meant the slave trade was centred there: about 40 percent of enslaved humans brought to the US from Africa came through Charleston's port. After the international trade in slavery was abolished, it became the centre of interal trade in enslaved people. The legacy of slavery, the centrality of the city to the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the legacy of racism and colonialism have meant that Charleston is a stunningly unequal city. 

Climate change, and particularly flooding, will explode through and along the lines created by capitalism in this city - ones of race and class. As Crawford explains, Charleston's strategy for dealing with flooding exposes this directly:

The reason some breachfront homeowners, but not all, get that sand dumped on their beaches, and the reason that some portions of cities, but not all, get federal funds for building walls, is that the one rule of thumb for all these expenditurers is that they be made subject to a cost-benefit analysis. But that means the only thing that is valued is the price of the property being protected. Lower-income people, or renters, do not get protected or rescued. 

"Surely," asks Crawford rhetorically, " we are interested in everyone thriving, not just those who have the highest land values." The answer is of course that no, US society does not care for all equally, nor does it have a plan for the majority of people who do not have valuable enough assets to warrant projection. In the case of Charleston almost all (but not everyone) of these people are black.

One way that we know the future will be like this is because the past and the present are already like this. The accident of history that placed the initially European settlers at this location, has also meant that the city that developed and grew up, was built on marshy, lowlying, wetlands. As the city expanded much of this was done on the waste and rubbish of the existing town. The poorest areas, again with almost an entirely black population, are built on the worst and most dangerous terrain. Unbelievably this means that some of the material supporting the roads, housing, hosptials and infrastructure is human waste, offal and rubbish. When the tides and storms come, the inevitable floods bring cholera and e-coli into the streets. Crawford uses Noaa data to explain how bad it will get:

Current (2020) numbers of flood days will double or triple by 2030 - double the eight-nine floods in 2019, the sixty-eight floods in 2020, the forty-six floods in 2021, each one of which made some roads in Charleston impassable and undermined strtures. By 2050 [Noaa] says, the number of days of more serious flooding could be five to fifteen times as great as it was in 2020.

Through a combination of reportage, statistics and interviews with citizens, Crawford shows how the black community is hit worst and first by these regular floods. The second thing she demonstrates is that the authorities have done nothing to aid the people at risk, instead channelling funds and investment into reinventing Charleston as a tourist hotspot for wealthy (white) tourists who come to experience Southern "charm". This mostly seems to involve a disney style experience of seeing homes built on the profits of slavery and eating expensive seafood on areas completely isolated from the real Charleston. Black, and poor, Charlestonians are excluded from the rich areas, as racism and poverty keeps them out of the bars, clubs, restaurants and other destinations. Over the years more and more areas have been converted by buying up land from black people (or forciably relocating them) in order to further expand this tourist paradise. Little of the new builds are flood proof, protected or insurable long term. "More than 100,000 structures in Charleston are sited in FEMA's notoriously inaccurate floodplains" says Crawford. FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency whose funding and activities are already seriously under attack from Trump.

This is, of course, the great tragedy. Charleston is doomed. The first people to go will be those forced out of the unprotected areas. But unless there is radical action, great parts of Charleston will simply become unsalvabable. That's why Crawford discusses the reality of "retreat" in the face of sea level rise - something that's already being discussed in low lying areas like the Netherlands, but rarely is talked about in the US.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about Crawford's book is her focus on individuals from the affected communities - people who have lived, worked and frequently campaigned for change in Charleston's black areas. They are people whose families and communities are most at risk, and ultimately they are the people who are the only force that will bring change - both in terms of a socially just solution for everyone in the city and in terms of winning a wider, more equal United States. Stacked against them however are some greedy, corrupt and powerful forces. Time and again Crawford shows how politicians and business leaders, their eyes firmly focused on wealth and tax income, take decisions that mean ignoring the threat from sea-level rise. Its hard to even speak about climate change in the US political arena today. In Charleston's its near impossible to discuss the links between race, poverty and flooding. Local politicians seem to think that a magical solution is there in the future. Actually they really think that what will happen is a major disaster that will lead to significant funding from the Federal government.

The problem is that this seems less and less likely, and Charleston has its specifics, but it is not unique. Millions of Americans live in areas threatened by floods, and in this unequal, racist and violent society many of them (most?) will be left to fund for themselves. This is why I think Crawford's book would have benefited from a closer study of other countries impacted by floods - who returned home? Who got compensation? What sort of activism was needed to win compensation? In addition I think the book could have done with a long look at the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. There are plenty of lessons to be learnt for Charleston's future there in terms of race and class.

I explicitly mention class in ths context because the fractures in Charleston's society don't just run through racial lines, but also class lines. It is the poorest who will be affected first by climate change - wherever they are. These same inequalities also exist through the US, even if there are differing ethnic makeups. But class also helps us understand why there's no money for certain communities. Its not just racism (though that's very important) but also a disdain for those at the bottom - the very people who have a vested interest in building a different sort of America, and have the power to change it. And, let's be honest, no one else is coming to save them. Crawford writes:

Few are talking about how America is going to get through the rapid rise in sea level that is coming. Like most other countries, we have no national plan.

Susan Crawford's detailed study of the specifics of Charleston are important for understanding what will happen to the majority of citizens in that city, and other areas globally. For many readers, particularly those outside the US, the reality of racism in the southern states even today will be extremely shocking. At certain points I was dumbfounded by the realities of what the author described. I was also inspired that despite the difficulties and the violence of the police, people protested, campaigned, formed organisations, marched and stood up. That must be the hope for the future. Otherwise, as Susan Crawford says, things are bleak:

Charleston's story reveals a general blind spot that will become more visible as at least thirteen million people are expected to have to retreat from swamped [North] American coastlines. Americans will learn, if they did not know already, that some lives count and some do not.

It's a book for everyone thinking about the climate future in an unequal and unjust society that puts profits before people.

Related Reviews

Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
Dawson - Extreme Cities
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Glynn & Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue
Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Sparrow - Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating

Brett Christophers - The Price is Wrong: Why capitalism won't save the planet

This deep dive into the problems with and limitations of the capitalist energy system is a powerful argument against the free market's role in making renewable energy and sustainable energy systems a reality. My review of The Price is Wrong for the Climate and Capitalism journal is here.

You can also read my 2019 review of Brett Christophers The New Enclosure on the privatisation of land.

Michael Patrick F. Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown

One of the mistakes that environmentalists have been guilty of in the past is forgetting that behind every oil, coal, gas and fracking site are dozens of workers. The fossil fuel industry is both a uniquely devastating part of capitalism, and also a massive employer. This is why the British Campaign Against Climate Change produced a number of pamphlets aimed at the trade union movement to argue that a "Just Transition" to a sustainable economy could both create jobs, and transition workers from the fossil fuel industry to alternative employment while protecting terms and conditions. That remains, I would argue, a central task of both the environmental and trade union movement.

The Good Hand is an insight into the lives of the men and women who are behind the fossil fuel industry. Michael Patrick F. Smith lived and worked in New York as a playwright, singer and jobbing actor. In 2013, as the fracking (shale gas) boom exploded in North Dakota he headed up to the oil fields to try and make his fortune. Arriving in Willston, North Dakota, the centre of the boom he finds himself, alongside hundreds of others, trying to get work in a boomtown where rents are rocketing and McDonalds cannot (or won't) pay enough to hire enough staff. Living in a flophouse, where three or four men share a living room sleeping on bunks or airbeds, Smith trudges the streets trying to get a job.

This is oil boom capitalism. But its also capitalism that has shed any dignity. There's plenty of money sloshing around to ensure that the bars, sex clubs, and drug dealers are able to make a killing from the young, lost, alienated and immigrant labour.  The work, when Smith eventually makes it into an oil job, is uniquely dangerous. There are safety briefings, but the chances of injury and death are ever present. The long hours, long distances, drink, drugs and pressure to work faster contribute to a workplace safety record near the bottom of the graph.

Smith is an incredible story teller. His experiences however are shaped in this remarkable book by his upbringing in a abusive and dangerous family. His father was violent and sexually abused his sister. Smith notes that there are two topics of conversation for oil workers meeting for the first time - the job, and paternal violence. It is, Smith thinks, because of this background that he is determined to make it in the industry - to be come a "good hand", a reliable worker in the eyes of his compatriots.

Because the other aspect to this alienated world of work is that workers make themselves a community. The shared danger, drinking and drugs, and the hell of life without proper public services and housing, means that men learn to love and defend each other. Even if they are often at each others throats. There are stories here that allude to the love that they develop for each other. Sometimes this is actual sexual relationships, and it's interesting that Smith notes that homosexuality isn't that frowned on, except for a few jokes. In this intensely macho world that seems surprising. That said, this is barely a bastion of liberalism. In his time on the North Dakota prairie Smith meets just one trade unionist. 

Nor are there many progressives. The chapter where Smith confesses to the men that he voted Obama had me holding my breath. Here it seemed the jokes about "someone having an accident" might be very real. Smith, in fact, is shocked to find Willston almost entirely white. There are a few black workers, who are to the men from the region mostly figures of curiosity and fun. In turn the immigrant workers are shocked, upset and angered by the racism. It is when Smith realises that he has just accepted the "innocent explanation" for the name of a bar called the K K Korner that he begins to realise how much he has been changed.

Smith's time on the oilfields is a life changing experience - not because of the work. But because of the people. As an explanation of working class life, in the rarefied, high-stakes and sometimes high-paid world of booming fossil fuels, it is often difficult to read. This is a place of drugs, drink, casual violence and deep misogyny. But there are also moments of real beauty and solidarity. People standing up for each other, defending each other or simply putting a hand on someone else's shoulder at a time of need. It's a tough read, but it tells you more about the reality of the "American Dream" than any rhetoric from Trump or Biden will. Smith writes movingly, but never patronisingly about his life, work and the people of America. It's highly recommended.

Related Reviews 

Malm - Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
Heinberg - Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils our Future
Marriott and Minio-Paluello - The Oil Road
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

Shourideh C. Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza

This short book tackles an aspect to the Israeli war on Gaza that is often neglected. Shourideh C. Molavi is a researcher with Forensic Architecture and in this book she studies the way that the Israeli state has used environmental changes to consolidate and facilitate its war against Palestine. The book was written and published in the midst of the latest genocidal war, which has now raged for over a year, and it should be said it is not a study of the environmental impacts of that (or earlier) wars. It does not cover, for instance, the pollution, emissions, or destruction to infrastructure and environment that arises out of the bombing or the use of military vehicles. It is rather, a more detailed study of the environmental aspects to Israel's method of warfare.

The book begins with Palestine's oranges. Illustrated by many colour maps, it explores how citrus cultivation, once a staple of Palestinian agriculture, has almost completely disappeared in Gaza. Instead a variety of non-traditional crops, such as strawberries or even pineapples and broccoli have been used. Molavi explains that this is because the methods of warfare that Israel uses have systematically destroyed Palestinian agriculture, both as a result of their dislocation of the Palestinian people and their land, and as a result of the destructive nature of war. In the introduction she writes:

This layered colonialty and the ways in which apartheid and occupation policies are activiated in Gaza become visible when weobserve the historical transformation of its agricultural lands, the forced transtions in cultivation practices adopted by Gazan farmers, and their relation to the stifled urban development of Palestinian cities within the strip... Far from an understanding of the environment as a passive landscape - or a mere setting for conflict - we consider how Israeli settler-colonial practices make use of environemal elements as an active tool of military warfare.

In 1951, the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion made a speech which famously said that the new state would "make the wilderness bloom". It was an explicit statement of a core idea of settler colonialism, that the land was empty or, indeed, it had been used wastefully and destructively. The new "Israeli landscape" Molavi says "was largely cultivated through the multifaceted and by now well-documented eco-colonial practices of the quasi-governmental Israeli organisation, Keren Kayemet L'Yisrael, the Jewish National Fund". While the JNF claimed to be acting in a positive way, its policies actively displaced, destroyed and deforested enormous areas. The destruction of the Gazan citrus industry was a major consequence of policy in this era. Indeed the JNF actually chose trees that emphasise a particular image of the landscape:

The JNF's preference for European-looking pine is not surprising given the historical matrix of European colonialism within which the Zionist movement emerged. Cultivating trees that conform to the Picturesque Western ecological sensibilities further demonstrates Israel's European-style environemntal values, while also pushing forward a new historical narrative on the landscape that naturalises a more 'civilised' colonial presence. 

Forests she says are "weaponised" to "erase Palestinian presence in strategically important spaces, providing camouflage for military objectives".

Moving to more recent times, Palestinian farmers have experienced repeated destruction of their lands and crops. At the core of Molavi's book is a study of how the Israeli state uses herbicides to clear areas. This is done to ensure that "line of sight" exists for military incursions. Farmers frequently must deal with the loss of their crops as the herbicide blows onto their fields, in addition to the risks of sniper bullets and explosions. Molavi shows how the timing of the flights that drop the herbicides is done when winds blow towards the land and people of Gaza. No warnings are issued, despite the State's obligation to protect civilians under occupation.

At times the book feels more like an academic study. This is, of course, important. It matters that researchers like Molavi document the methods by which Palestine has been erased and attacked. The scientific rigour at the centre of the book is bleak testimony to a forgotten aspect of oppression. This changes in the afterword where Molavi documents the very personal loss of a Palestinian journalist Roshdi Yahya al-Sarraj, killed during an Israeli airstrike, in October 2023. This tragic episode reflects the disregard for life that is emblematic of the Israeli occupation and its "environmental warfare". But Roshdi's life, work and indeed that of all those who contributed to the research, and all those who continue to resist and farm in Palestine, are testiment to the resiliance of the Palestinian people. As Molavi concludes, "as long as this desire... to create a settler ecology out of the ecology of Palestine continues, novel and subversive frontiers of resistance to confront it will also continue to blossom."

Related Reviews

Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People
Alexander - 'Revolution is the Choice of the People': Crisis & Revolt in the Middle East & North Africa

Sarah Glynn & John Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage. In addition there will be billions of people injured, made sick, and displaced by floods, heatwaves and weather crises of all types. The vast majority of these people will be poor - both in the Global South and the developed world. A significant number of them will be working people.

The centrality of workers, and the working class, to the question of climate change and its impacts is frequently ignored or downplayed. It is important then, that some writers and activists take the question of class seriously in their analyses of the environment threat. Here in the UK I, for instance, with many other trade union and climate activists have participated in the Million Climate Job reports which discuss the role of trade unions in creating sustainable jobs and the fight for a climate service to manage a Just Transition.

Activists Sarah Glynn and John Clarke's important new book places the question of class, specifically the working class, central to its manifesto for an alternative strategy to the climate crisis. In its introduction they emphasise how workers, and their class, are not privileged in their discussion because of their increased likelihood of being victims, nor the disproportionate impact of their lives on the environment compared to the wealthy, but "because the system that exploits the planet to destruction is the same that depends on class exploitation: the system that sees everything in
terms of profit – which is what capitalism is."

As an exploited class, whose labour is central to the production process that powers capitalism, workers have the most powerful position in society when it comes to winning and enacting change. 

This change, the authors argue, must be revolutionary. Capitalism has proven itself unable to enact real change. It is not able to confront the centrality of fossil fuels and the short-termism inherent to production driven by competitive accumulation. The authors write:

Survival demands revolutionary change to the economy, and the backbone of the economy is its  workers. When workers take action together, including planned and strategic withdrawal of their labour, they have the power to make continuation with existing practices impossible: the power to force change. They also have knowledge and skills that can be turned towards creating a different way of doing things.

This is a crucial understanding. Workers' power is not just in their ability to stop the economy. But also in their ability to conceive and construct alternatives to the status quo. Indeed I would go further. The struggles of workers, even the shortest strike, prefigure a new way of organising society as they demonstrate the ability of workers' to control and organise their own way. The heights of revolution, as I have written elsewhere, show this a million times more as workers create new institutions of workers' power to lead their struggles and organise their world.

Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster, the authors suggest a strategy to go forward:

Foster’s book puts forward the notion of an initial ‘ecodemocratic phase’ in the struggle that would  ‘demand a world of sustainable human development.’ This would then go over to a ‘more decisive,  ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle’. Taking this perspective as a starting point, we can consider how we might organise and what our goals might be as the scale and intensity of the climate disaster intensifies.

They continue:

We must develop and apply the forms of mass action that can lead to the curtailing of emissions and the transition to renewable energy sources. In this regard, we are hardly starting from nowhere because a  vital struggle for climate justice is already well and truly underway.

This is, obviously true. Socialists have frequently been caricatured, and often for good reason, as suggesting that humanity must "wait for the revolution" before solving environmental crisis. As Glynn and Clarke point out, there are crucial immediate struggles to be fought over mitigation and to reduce emissions. These must be fought for. But the danger I think is that we see to great a delineation between the two "phases" as suggested by Foster. The first will likely flow over into the second, and indeed contain elements of the second as the struggle ebbs and flows. Building workers' power organizationally and economically is a process, not a defined series of steps.

In addition the struggles that workers will need to engage in, may not be just over climate issues. Workers' fighting to defend climate refugees from state racism, striking to defend jobs (even in fossil fuel industries) or protesting against austerity are engaging in a struggle that will increase their confidence to resist and fight over wider and bigger issues - including climate justice.

The importance of Glynn and Clarke's analysis is, however, to argue that workers are the agency of change: "Workers are not victims needing protection, as portrayed in some writing about the ‘green transition’. They are subjects who can and must play a proactive role in building a genuinely sustainable future." This is an analysis lost on too many in the environmental movement who when faced with the power of the capitalist state lack an understanding of the force to challenge that.

This brings me to a couple of minor criticisms of Climate Change is a Class Issue. While the authors' depict a democratic and sustainable post-capitalist future I felt the book lacked any link between the struggles of today, and the revolutionary overturn of society. A couple of paragraphs that linked struggle today, with the process of workers' struggle creating revolutionary institutions that form the basis of a socialist society that can enact the fundamental changes needed would have been helpful. A couple of lines on the state as a barrier to this transition and workers' power as the strength to challenge it would have been helpful.

I also thought the authors' formulation of nature as being "exploited" by capitalism unhelpful. For Marxists "exploitation" has as specific meaning, that refers to the way that workers under capitalism sell their labour power to enable the bosses to extract surplus value. This is not the way capitalist production relates to nature. The authors argue, "Capitalism exploits nature in the same way that  capitalism exploits the working class. How both are treated depends only on their potential to make money."

It is true that natural resources are embedded within the capitalist production process, but this is only in as much as they are tied to the capital-worker relationship. This is not Marxist nit-picking, but important if we are to understand precisely why workers do have the power to overthrow capitalism.

These minor criticisms aside, I cannot help but agree with the authors' conclusion:

The class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival and the goal of a  rational and just society. In the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.

Activists in the socialist, trade union and environmental movement would do well to get hold of a copy of this short book and read and discuss it. It's freely available for download at the authors' website here.

Related Reviews

Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Slow Down: How degrowth Communism can save the Earth
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century
Malm - How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Chantal Lyons - Groundbreakers: The return of Britain's wild boar

Until I picked up Chantal Lyons' Groundbreakers I had no idea that there were parts of the British Isles that had hundreds of wild boar. Native to Asia, Europe and North Africa wild boar are a significant part of European cultural identity. Think of the boar hunts in medieval romances and the boar on various regal coats of arms. But boar disappeared from many parts of their "natural" habitat, and entirely vanished from Britain as the woodland that they live in was cut back and they were hunted down. Now, the boar are back. In the Forest of Dean where Lyons studies boar there have been perhaps 800 individual boar, though numbers have decreased due to hunting and control by poachers and authorities in recent years.

Groundbreakers is Lyons' celebration of the boar. It is simultaneously a study of the boar, their nature, and their place in the environment. But the book is also a look at how humans relate to wildlife in general, and boar in particular. How these animals are perceived, and how that perception changes. But the boar's return is not, in itself natural. As Lyon writes:

Their rise has been abetted by our own environmental damage, because an organism is more likely to become destructive – and therefore invasive – in a foreign ecosystem if we have erased the native species that might otherwise have stopped it gaining a foothold.

In other words, the boar have been returned to a place that is not the one they used to occupy. It is one transformed in time and space. Indeed the boar themselves are different, some of them carrying the genes that result from their breeding with domestic pigs.

The comeback of wild boar in mainland Europe has been blamed largely on the decline in human hunters and bountiful food in the form of maize and other crops. With their undiscerning diet, their large litters and their sheer adaptability, wild boar are evolved to catapult themselves towards the slightest opportunity.

The return of the boar, some released deliberately by animal liberation campaigners, others released by hunters and still more escaping from domestic confines, has led to an interest in their role within the wider ecology, and a discussion about their potential as part of wider rewilding efforts. Rewilding is often simply understood as the release of animals and plants into areas that have been denuded by human induced change. A return to a past nature. It is, in my opinion, a environmental that is much more complex - not least because it rewilding enthusiasts often hope for a return to an imaginary past, neglecting to understand the role of human influence on nature. As I noted in my recent review of Sophie Yeo's recent book Nature's Ghosts, there is no natural world. Rewilding must take account of the complex interactions between animals, environment and humans. 

Lyons' book supports this. She explores the way that boar change the environment, shaping aspects of the Forest of Dean, digging, turning and breaking ground in ways that have important impacts on flora and fauna. These are fascinating chapters, exploring as they do the way that boar fit into an ecosystem, changing it and being changed by it in turn. The experience of boar in the Forest of Dean is, Lyons says, the "biggest unintentional field experiment in Britain’s nascent rewilding history."

Wherever boar root through the earth, we’re told, we’ll see volcanic eruptions of green growth, and all manner of other life will swarm and flock. Which does happen. Sometimes... But while the time that the boar has been gone is, in ecological terms, just an eye-blink, we have still forced much change on our landscapes in the interim. We can’t be certain of what would happen if boar were allowed to return to the entire country and in significant numbers.

But Lyons' book is perhaps most remarkable in her study of the effect of boar on humans. Some people living in areas where the boar have returned are excited; celebrating them, enjoying them, photographing and sharing their pictures. Others are scared and threatened. Lyons is certainly in the first category. Her excitement for these giant creatures shines through the pages, and we're drawn into her adventures. But Lyons is not the sort of author who only looks for positive reinforcement for her own opinions. She travels with people who hunt the boar, trying to understand their perspective, and finding some real insights. She also talks to those terrified of the animals.

Some of them are fearful for their personal safety, though there are scarce any examples of injury from boar in Britain. Some fearful for their animals, or personal property, though again few examples. Some are caught up in tabloid fearmongering, or simply don't like the animals.

Boar might number a few thousand in Britain. But there are an estimated ten million across mainland Europe and this makes for an interesting comparison. Why are the experiences and attitude to boar to wildly (!) different in Britain and Europe?

Here Lyons examines the different approaches to nature. One expert in the Spanish state, hired to monitor the boar living in the rural-urban interfaces in Barcelona argues that ‘The wild boar is not a problem... The problem is caused by people’s lack of experience with wildlife.’ It is certainly a good point. The fear of the unknown, hyped up by click-bait newspaper headline writers, is certainly a factor. But perhaps more deeply Lyons argues that the way that nature is approach in Britain arises out of a particular separation between nature and human. As Lyons says:

I fear that the sole use of farmed animals is helping to reinforce the mindset that ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are, and should always be, separate realms. We have erected fences and other hard barriers to keep nature (including people) in or out. Yet so many wild lives depend on the ability to move through landscapes, to take part in ecological cycles of disturbance, rest and renewal. We’ve forgotten this. And just as we deny the movement of individual animals and of species by creating artificial boundaries, so we deny ourselves permission to belong to the rest of the world. We absorb our fences into our minds.
Maybe that’s a core part of why rewilding raises hackles. If your thoughts are constructed using the nature versus human binary, then rewilding can only mean wildlife, and never wildlife and people.

This I think is a particular problem in Britain. While it isn't restricted to Britain, there has been a particularly intense experiment with neoliberal nature by successive governments in the UK that has placed prices on nature and commodified the landscape. Lyons quotes Virginia Thomas of the University of Exeter who says "rewilding in England has itself been domesticated; it sacrifices some of its ambitions for ecological restoration in order to retain more human control." 

Rewilding has become trapped by an approach to nature marked by the idea that prioritising capital accumulation is the only way for society to function. Nature is simply another aspect to this. This is not to say that neoliberalism hasn't also affected France, Spain or Italy. But to argue that so called Natural Capital approaches haven't gone as far. That won't last.

Thus the rewilding conundrum cannot be answered simply. It is not enough, as Lyons book explains, to simply restore an individual animal or plant to an area. Boar on their own won't halt Britain's biodiversity crisis. On the other-hand, rewilding as an approach that ignores humanity and our own position within ecological systems, is also doomed. The people who quietly shoot boar, or try to restrict them to certain fields and woodlands, are making the same mistake from the other direction.

The only solution can be a transformative approach to humanity's relationship to nature, one that recognises the complexity of nature's interactions and the place of boar (or beaver or any other animal) within that. And whose introduction involves a transformation of our own understanding of nature as well as our understanding of particular species. Such a revolutionary rewilding would be something else indeed.

Groundbreakers reminds us of what we stand to lose. Its not simply that we might not see boar, and their litters, living in the Forest of Dean, but that we might lose it all. Chantal Lyons' celebration of boar, and her thoughts on the meaning of rewilding make for a lovely and stimulating read. As such Groundbreakers is a book for our times.

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Rawlence - The Treeline: The last forest and the future of life on earth
Shrubsole - Who Owns England?
Yeo - Nature's Ghosts: The world we lost and how to bring it back
Pearce - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

John Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

I write this review in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Milton's devastation of parts of Florida. Milton followed Helene, just a week or so earlier. Both hurricanes cut a swathe through parts of North America, leaving death and destruction in their paths. John Vaillant's recent book Fire Weather is subtitled a "true story from a hotter world" and the story of hurricanes Milton and Helene could have shared that subtitle. They were both made worse by the hotter world we now live on. Scientists and environmentalists have longed warned about the feedback mechanisms of a warmer planet. As the world gets warmer, climate change further encourages the warming of the world. This cycle accelerates the speed of warming. The catastrophes that accompany a hotter planet come thicker and faster.

Fire Weather deals with just one such catastrophe, but it is an emblematic and enlightening one, the destruction of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016. There's a grim feedback mechanism in play here, for McMurray is at the heart of fossil fuel capitalism. It was for many years a boomtown driven by the wealth of the region's tar sands. The bitumen deposits here are difficult to turn into profitable commodities. But when the price of oil is high enough there are bonanzas to be made. McMurray was a town built on bonanza. 

Vaillant traces the history of McMurray, and indeed, the history of industrial capitalism's obsession with oil. Its a fascinating story that shows the way that capitalism embedded nature, and its resources, into a global commodity system. McMurray started off as an isolated place where animal skins and fur were trapped and sold, before morphing into an (isolated) 21st century oil city. Weaved in with this history is a longer story of humanity's relationship with fire. Combustion, burning, fire are essential for humans. We need fire for travel, heating and food. But fire is also intrinsic to nature. The boreal forests that surround McMurray for tens of thousands of square miles need fire to renew and propagate. Humans think of such fires as a threat that needs to be fought - an invading army that has to be countered with traps, weapons and occasional retreat (the retreats are more common now). But the fires that engulf Alberta are part of that ecological system, its just that (unfortunately for humanity) they are more frequent, more intense and more common in a warming world.

Vaillant explains fire to us. But his use of metaphor is interesting. Describing how wildfires crossover ("when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsisus exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage") and become an exponentially faster, more agile, more dangerous fire, Vaillant says that "if unregulated free market cpaitalism were a chemical reaction, it would be a wildfire in crossover conditions". He continues "Alberta's bitumen industry follows a similar growth pattern, with market forces standing in for weather."

Capitalism is the problem here. It drives an endless accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation, based on an insastiable burning of natural resources. It is a wildfire of production, and as it grows it sucks in more nature, more humanity and expels material that pollutes and destroys. The irony of McMurray is that it was destroyed by its own forces of production, or rather the consequences of the usage of the use-values it produced. In fact Vaillant's book is really about the intersection of urban fossil fuel capitalism and wildfire. As he writes:

Combustive energy had drawn people to For McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon... the exodus of May 3 [2016] was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes.

With Hurricane Milton in mind, as well as Vaillants accounts of the escape from McMurray, it might be that the defining images of 21st century global warming in the Global North will be endless streams of SUVs and trucks driving away from environmental disasters. Climate refugees from the Global South are met with barbed wires and closed borders. In the Global North the Ford F-150s were given a much friendlier welcome. In one way the Fort McMurray fire was a very unusual climate disaster. Unusual circumstances combined with a rare urban environment: 

Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousands petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of dessicated trees.

But as Vaillant points out, "this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI [Wildland Urban Interface] fire." Once in a lifetime events are becoming once in a decade events. Soon they'll be more common. 

If Vaillant had only written the story of McMurray and the urban-wildfire environment it would have been a fine book. But at the heart of the story is that of McMurray's population. His account of the desperate evacuation, the struggle of the authorities to adjust to rapidly changing and unprecedented fire condition and the battle of the firefighters itself is a remarkable account of the reality of disaster in modern neoliberal society.

It is the story of a city that is really unable to deal with the disaster, not because of incompetence, or lack of training, or even lack of resources (something that most people in the world facing disaster will not have), but because there was no real understanding that a disaster on this scale could even happen. In many ways McMurray was better prepared than most cities for fire, because it could draw on the resources and fire-fighting experience provided by the oil industry itself. But the failure to control the fire happened because it was on a scale far beyond imagination. In fact clear is that traditional fire fighting doesn't work in the in the 21st century WUI, and new methods of fire control need to be learnt. Interestingly it seems that allowing firefighters and workers to make decisions based on events and knowledge, rather than centralied leadership, is one lesson to be learnt from these massive fires.

Reading Vaillant's account of the breakdown of control I was reminded of those highly popular 1970s brick sized novels epitomised by Arthur Hailey. In those wonderful disaster stories, tiny mistakes and failures would accumulate into a giant failure. In McMurray there were plenty of such failures that combined to help the fire reach epidemic proprtions, but there was no lack of bravery. In fact the stories of the firefighters and indeed ordinary workers who fought day after day to save their city are inspiring. One wonders what is left for them. Vaillant quotes one Radio director who said afterward, "imagine a city - thousands of people - all living in everyday harmony, each and every one with some aspect of PTSD."

There's going to be more. Vaillant writes that "hotter and drier now, the atmosphere has been tilted in fire's favour". As the hammer of global warming drives more and more hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and floods against the anvil of capitalism's fractured and divided society, there will be endless death and destruction. There will also be plenty of PTSD for the survivors. But the bravery, industry and inventiveness of the workers who fought the fire in McMurray, and who rebuilt the town, are the potential force for change. John Vaillant concludes his superb book, by arguing for a different vision to that offered by fossil fuel capitalism - "devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal, rather than combustion and consumption". Let's hope that these are the lessons of Fort McMurray, and hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Related Reviews

Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Dawson - Extreme Cities

Sparrow - Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating
Angus - Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the crisis of the Earth System
Malm - Fossil Capital