On the emergency agenda: books to reflect on climate change

Recently, a report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the HIM HIM it has raised the alarm on a trend which daily brings alarming news to dots all over the planet.

“It is not too late to stop the trend, provided we act with determination now and all together,” he said. Frans Timmermans, in charge of European Green Agreement. The young activist Greta Thunberg He said the report has no surprises, but rather “confirms what we already know”. The problem has been thoroughly analyzed for writers, essayists, columnists and researchers who approach the phenomenon from different angles.

The following selection offers some avenues for analyzing the roots of the problem, while conveying the discomfort and helping to diffuse this disturbing trend. All books are available at Leamos.

It happened at some point in those years: suddenly the world woke up to a new apocalypse: the planet would undergo climate change so profound that nothing would ever be the same again. And then, governments, celebrities, international organizations, big companies, small NGOs launched themselves to fight against the change. Against Change is a tour in ten countries – Brazil, Nigeria, Niger, Morocco, Mongolia, Australia, Philippines, Marshall Islands, United States – which suffer from the climate threat. But it is above all a sharp and provocative reflection on this disorder which seems to be the most important problem in a world plagued by hunger and misery. The author also discusses the meanings of environmentalism, the place of Nature in our society, the green interests of large capitals, the ideology of conservationism, the climate of an era that thinks of its future like a sword of Damocles. .

Man needed to interpret time in his early days as a hunter-gatherer and later as a trainer of plants and animals. How have cultures understood the water cycle throughout history? To better understand it, we break down here the rain into its components to compare the mythologies studied. Observation of the sky and biota were the tools that man used to predict the weather. Along with animistic practices, he tried to control it by magic. These old religions were supplanted or syncretized by the new hegemonic religions, which transmuted many of these beliefs into stories, legends and fables. Finally, the way modern man seeks to dominate the climate through neoliberal economic measures, strangely effective instruments like ancient magic.

Over the past decades, much has been written and discussed about climate change, its causes and how to deal with its consequences. However, there is one question that does not always occupy the place it deserves in debates: what is the relationship between economic growth and climate change? Horacio Fazio dismantles the widespread arguments that attribute the climate problem to an alleged overpopulation of the planet through an unpublished thesis. The author argues that the real conflict is social inequality: a select minority with irresponsible consumption patterns is the social sector that causes the most damage to the environment. Therefore, he argues that, as a society, faced with the conditioning of climate change, we will have to differentiate between quantitative and qualitative growth, both in its scope and in its distributional aspects.

Clive L. Spash, one of the most irreverent environmental economists over the past decades to build and found a radical vision of ecological and social economy, devotes this book to exploring and projecting, in a somewhat provocative way, its evolution, consciously drawing on the failures of environmental economics, the tensions with conventional economics and the need to bring a new approach to the eco-social crisis. Problems like multidisciplinarity, pluralism and integration of sciences, the relationships between orthodox and heterodox economic thought or how an ecologically and socially transformative agenda for the economy could be designed are analyzed in detail in this work.

An enlightening chronicle which is in turn a call to take up the climatic challenges of the present and the future. Towards the end of the 16th century, temperatures began to drop, to such an extent that the waters of certain Mediterranean ports froze and the birds froze in flight … Lively fairs were organized on the ice of the Thames. In the middle of the following century, Europe was transformed: ruined crops, famines, migrations … Western thought itself began a process of change culminating with the emergence of the Enlightenment, which fought against the conception of these natural phenomena as divine signs or punishments.. The riot of nature presents the consequences of a sudden alteration of the climate based on testimonies of various kinds: there are more or less anonymous characters who have documented the damage caused by these long and harsh winters and these sunless summers. ; but great thinkers and scientists also appear, such as Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Montaigne O Kepler, who saw their work and their research transformed by the Little Ice Age.