Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet

By Ashley Dawson. Haymarket Books, 2024. 336 pages. $55/hardcover; $22.95/paperback; $9.99/eBook.

With the climate emergency drawing together all the threads of inequality and injustice from centuries of colonial and economic oppression, the author of this ambitious book contends that we need to look to Indigenous communities for wisdom on the path to a sustainable future. The climate solutions of advanced capitalism—shifting energy extraction from fossil fuels to cobalt, lithium, and nickel—do nothing to shift patterns of ownership or habits of consumerism. Wealthy countries, Dawson asserts, must acknowledge the havoc we have wreaked and engage in climate reparations as we join in the fight for a livable world.

In the book, climate justice activist Ashley Dawson chronicles four “diverse people’s struggles . . . against planetary ecocide,” dedicating one chapter to each: the decolonization of food; grassroots climate insurgency movements in urban areas; communities reclaiming the energy commons; and efforts to resist a trend of “fortress conservation” policies that are leaving millions of conservation refugees in their wake.

His discussion of food includes a scathing critique of industrial agriculture and its Green Revolution, as it has spewed emissions, slashed biodiversity, gutted rural livelihoods, and destroyed soils across the globe. Vandana Shiva’s comment on how gross domestic product measurements erase the value of women’s agricultural work was striking: if you consume what you produce, you don’t produce anything measurable. Dawson holds up La Via Campesina, a transnational peasants’ organization, and its commitment to sustainable agroecology and food sovereignty as a beacon for the future.

Turning to the cities, Dawson lays out big problems: lost rural livelihoods, heavy pollution, and the austerity that results from deep indebtedness to global finance. But he also sees the potential for “autonomous urbanism.” I was taken by a housing development project in the South African city of Cape Town, where approximately 20 percent of the city’s households live in informal dwellings in areas often called slums. Rather than displacing a township community, the project engaged residents in the rebuilding of their existing housing. The final result was a cluster of about 50 two-story concrete dwellings with courtyards, trees, rooftop solar, greywater recycling, and security of land tenure. In Latin America, where grassroots groups have worked with progressive governments, we see cable cars that tie the center of Medellín, Colombia, with the slums perched on the mountainsides, as well as the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual-Aid Housing Cooperatives that approaches housing as an urban commons.

To reclaim the energy commons requires challenging extractivism, which enriches elites and faraway investors at a terrible cost to the local population: first in the lives of those who are displaced, then in ravaged lands that are increasingly unable to sustain life. Yet Dawson notes—amazingly—that 11 percent of local environmental defense campaigns are successful. He supports calls for an anti-extraction program linked to a viable transition to publicly owned and democratically managed renewables.

I found the chapter on “fortress conservation” particularly thought-provoking. Setting aside “protected areas” is a popular strategy for addressing biodiversity loss, yet those who are being forced out of their lands in the name of such “protection” are among the Indigenous peoples and other local communities who currently steward 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity.

Dawson’s discussion of enclosure is instructive. John Locke’s suggestion in the 1600s that the “improvement” of common land justifies its becoming private property helped pave the way for enclosure of the commons in England, and then in the rest of the world. As the British Empire enclosed previously inhabited forests in India for big-game hunting and the cultivation of teak, so India continued that tradition, zealously eliminating “poachers” from ever-expanding tourist destination “wilderness” preserves. Only in the last few decades, and with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are traditional land stewards beginning to gain traction in the struggle for recognition of their customary rights to land.

Closing with a discussion of climate migration and borders, Dawson notes that wealthy countries spend significantly more on protecting their borders, often with great ruthlessness, than on addressing the global climate emergency. Yet the movement of people is a form of climate adaptation that calls for both recognition and protection.

Environmentalism from Below requires us to face the ongoing damage of a colonial, racist, and economically exploitative history, as well as the deadly assumption common among those in “wealth-afflicted” groups that we know better and have a right to bend other people and lands to our image of what is due to us. I’m left with images of brightly colored houses in Cape Town, cable cars connecting poor folks to the center, women risking their lives to protect the land that supports their communities, and the suggestion that the struggle for clean energy must also be a struggle for popular power. While this book may not be for everybody, I commend it to those who have an appetite for understanding hard truths.

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Pamela Haines is a member of Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting. Author of Money and Soul, her newest titles are Tending Sacred Ground: Respectful Parenting; The Promise of Right Relationship; and a third volume of poetry, Tending the Web: Poems of Connection. Her blog and podcast can be found at pamelahaines.substack.com.