Insurgent Ecologies

Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations

edited by Undisciplined Environments Collective  

A unique collection of stories about how movements against environmental and climate injustice globally converge into broader struggles for overcoming the racist, patriarchal and colonial structures of global capitalism while creating worlds of life, dignity and justice.

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  • October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781773636917
  • 312 pages
  • $35.00
  • For sale worldwide
  • EPUB October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781773637082
  • $34.99
  • For sale worldwide
  • PDF October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781773637075
  • $34.99
  • For sale worldwide

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About the book

We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and ecological catastrophe and that everything needs to change, and fast. Thankfully, radical environmental movements have forced the question of “system change” to the centre of the political agenda to make way for a just and livable world.

Insurgent Ecologies takes readers on an inspiring journey across key sites of ecological crisis and contestation, showing how revolutionary politics can emerge from the convergences between place-based, often disconnected struggles. These engaging essays speak to longstanding debates in political ecology around how to advance transformations in, against and beyond capitalism. The collection starts from the belief that the environmental struggles taking place across the Global South and North are a necessary component of such transformations. The book presents unique stories of the visions and strategies of struggles organized around sovereignty, land, climate, feminisms and labour, written by scholar-activists rooted in territories around the globe, offering locally grounded yet global perspectives. Each story reflects on how to build solidarity and comradeship across diverse struggles and how new political subjects and transformative collective projects for social-ecological justice are created.

Activism & Social Movements Climate & Ecology Political Economy

What people are saying

Maywa Montenegro, assistant professor, University of California and author of Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention

“This powerful collection begins from the premise that insurgency is always a provocation, a forceful intervention that doesn’t constitute a singular new order from whole cloth, but rather moves to radically destabilize authorized forms of knowledge, power, and organizations based on a plurality of environmental struggles. In cases that take us from eucalyptus plantations in Spain to energy infrastructures in Palestine, from the organizing of La Via Campesina’s transnational feminist politics to just transitions movements in South Africa, readers get more than disconnected storylines of resistance — they get a lucid study of how place-based, seemingly disconnected environmental struggles can cohere into a radical, unified, revolutionary politics. It’s an indispensable handbook for scholars and movements seeking to go beyond a narrow antineoliberal critique toward one that embraces radical anticolonial thought, that avoids the exclusivity of excess jargon, and that locates liberation in the struggle that Samir Amin called “convergence in diversity.”

Bengi Akbulut, professor, department of geography, co-director of the Social Justice Centre, Concordia University

“This book points to broader questions of strategy and transformation through which it engages critically with the field of political ecology from a novel lens, i.e., that of political strategy and the possibility of engendering revolutionary transformations.”

Julian Agyeman, professor of urban and environmental policy and planning, Tufts University

“Linking planetary ecological devastation and the climate crisis to inequality and precariousness, this excellent collection could not be more timely. In the radical political ecology tradition, it argues for systemic change in order to advance environmental and climate justice — in, against and beyond capitalism.”

Ariel Salleh, author of EcoSufficiency and Global Justice and Ecofeminism as Politics

“It’s not only climate that’s warming up, so is ecopolitics! The interplay of movements for liberating land, livelihood, labour, and sexuality creates a new kind of materialist lens for our 21st century politics. This book is a joy to encounter - pluriversal in both content and process.”

Amy Trauger, professor of Geography, University of Georgia

“With a trenchant critique of the dominant systems that enslave, immiserate, and destroy people and nature, this volume’s contributors map out a way forward with nothing short of radical change in every realm of social and political life. As a wide-ranging and globe-spanning yet highly synthetic set of chapters, this volume is a must-read for political ecologists everywhere.”

Maria Kaika, director of the Centre for Urban studies at the University of Amsterdam, and editor of Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency

“The Undisciplined Environments Collective offers a timely addition to the classics of radical political ecology. Going beyond stale critique or mere documentation of resistance practices, the book dares to put ‘the radical’ back to the core of political ecology, by centering on questions of strategic, systemic and revolutionary change, and asking what forms of universality and camaraderie can come out of the now fragmented and localized struggles against capitalist accumulation. A must read!”

Elise Klein (OAM), associate professor, Australian National University

Insurgent Ecologies is a critical collection paying urgent homage the brave frontline of the many whilst reminding the struggle everywhere that confrontation, resistance and contestation is the work in times of continued elite capture, coloniality and dispossession.”

Diana Ojeda, professor of Geography and director of the Commons Program at the Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University

“In times of renewed and massive enclosures, including that of political imagination, Insurgent Ecologies irrupts as a necessary read. A powerful collection on subaltern ecological politics across different geographies, this book will surely remain an important reference for intellectual and political work against and beyond capitalism.”

Stefania Barca, University of Santiago de Compostela, author of Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change

“This book is an invaluable tool for looking beyond capitalism and its ‘fixes’, and forging the unity of struggles that is needed to move past it”

David Naguib Pellow, University of California Santa Barbara, author of What is Critical Environmental Justice?

“There has never been a more critical moment for imagining and bringing into existence a broad spectrum of post-capitalist realities. Insurgent Ecologies offers rigorous analysis and inspiring guidance on counterhegemonic thought and direct action for the realization of that radical vision of system change.”

Author

Undisciplined Environments Collective

The Undisciplined Environments is a collective of political ecology researchers founded in 2014 and organized around a blog platform by the same name. It seeks to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research, methodologies, activist experiences, events, publications, art and other issues related to political ecology. The collective’s main purpose is to contribute to socio-ecological struggles, primarily by rendering rigorous and critically engaged research available to non-academic audiences, including socio-environmental movements. This work seeks to inspire and contribute to radical thought and practice, toward more egalitarian and ecologically sound futures, and to encourage the growth of political ecology networks at a transnational level. Click here to see the complete list of contributors. 

Visit www.undisciplinedenvironments.org for more details. 

Contents

  • Foreword (Ulrich Brand)
  • Introduction (Diego Andreucci, Gustavo García-López and Rita Calvário)
  • Part One: Sovereignty (Diego Andreucci, Rita Calvário and Gustavo García-López)
  • Chapter 1: “Because of the Land”: Insurgent Infrastructures of Social Reproduction in Palestine (Omar Jabary Salamanca)
  • Chapter 2: Ecological Thought and Practice in the Kurdish Freedom Movement: The Case of Bakûr (Ercan Ayboga and Anselm Schindler)
  • Chapter 3: Articulating Sovereignties: Convergences and Tensions between National-Popular and Community-Territorial Struggles in Ecuador and Bolivia (Diana Vela Almeida, Geovanna Lasso, Marxa Chávez León and Diego Andreucci)
  • Chapter 4: Decolonial Encounters and Autogestion: Struggles for Life and Sovereignty in Puerto Rico and Beyond (Gustavo García-López)
  • Part Two: Land (Rita Calvário, Marien González-Hidalgo and Irmak Ertor)
  • Chapter 5: Uprooting Monocultures, Re-Rooting the Commons: Everyday Struggles against Eucalyptus Tree Plantations in Rural Galicia (Marien González-Hidalgo, Diego Cidrás and Joám Evans Pim)
  • Chapter 6: Migrant Agricultural Workers, Radical Food Activism and the Struggle for Emancipatory Rural Change in Southern Europe (Antonella Angelini, Giulio Iocco and Martina Lo Cascio)
  • Chapter 7: Food Sovereignty as Translation: Strengthening Fisherfolk’s Struggles and Cultivating Peasant-Fisher Alliances in Brazil (Rita Calvário, Irmak Ertör and Zoe W. Brent, in conversation with Josana Pinto)
  • Part Three: Climate (Salvatore Paolo De Rosa, Gustavo García-López and Amelie Huber)
  • Chapter 8: See You on the Front Lines: Direct Action Tactics of Convergence for Climate Justice (Salvatore Paolo De Rosa)
  • Chapter 9: Imagining Just Transitions (Julie Sze, in conversation with Gopal Dayaneni)
  • Chapter 10: Counterhegemonic Flows: Expanding Renewable Energy Struggles in Turkey (Ethemcan Turhan and Cem İskender Aydın)
  • Part Four: Feminisms (Panagiota Kotsila, Ilenia Iengo and Irene Leonardelli)
  • Chapter 11: Queer Cruisers and Sex Workers Resisting and Redefining Urban Socionatures in Tbilisi, Georgia (Tornike Kusiani and Panagiota Kotsila)
  • Chapter 12: Radicalizing Food Sovereignty: The Power of La Via Campesina’s Feminist Politics (Annette Aurélie Desmarais and Rita Calvário)
  • Chapter 13: Communitarian Territorial Feminisms of Abya Yala: Women Organized against Violence and Dispossession and the Experience of Community Networks in Chiapas, Mexico (Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández)
  • Part Five: Labour (Giorgos Velegrakis, Diego Andreucci and Gustavo García-López)
  • Chapter 14: A Transformative Just Transition as the Driver to an Ecosocialist Future in South Africa (Jacklyn Cock)
  • Chapter 15: Workers’ Struggles in Colombia: From the Defence of National Sovereignty to the Defence of Territory (Tatiana Roa Avendaño)
  • Chapter 16: Belonging by Confrontation: Living, Working and Struggling Next to a Mine in Halkidiki, Greece (Giorgos Velegrakis and Danai Liodaki)
  • Conclusions (Undisciplined Environments Collective)

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