Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis

by Eve Darian-Smith Narrated by Brigid Lohrey

Overview

Recent years have seen out of control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.



As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmentalism has become an essential political tool enabling the rise of extreme right governments and energizing their populist supporters. These are the governments that deny climate science, reject environmental protection laws, and foster exclusionary worldviews that exacerbate climate injustice.



The widespread fires demand acknowledgment of the global systems of inequality that undergird them, connecting the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment. In thinking through wildfires as environmental and political phenomenon, Global Burning challenges listeners to confront the interlocking powers that are ensuring our future ecological collapse.

Editorial Reviews

author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor - Rob Nixon

"Global Burning is as powerful as it is succinct. Eve Darian-Smith writes with urgent clarity and conceptual richness as she grapples with some of the most pressing issues of our times. Global Burning is a very teachable book—truly interdisciplinary and international in reach."

Columbia University - Saskia Sassen

"In a daring move that combines the familiar and the unexpected, Eve Darian-Smith adds anti-environmentalism as a distinctive dimension to our understanding of the global rise of extreme far-right governments. Anti-environmentalism assumes a whole range of new meanings in this book –including willful denials of what we know will be disastrous effects."

author of Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis - Henry Giroux

"Global Burning is a brilliant analysis of how a range of anti-democratic trends can be viewed through the lens of catastrophic wildfires across the globe. If you want to understand how to analyze and become involved in a politics of collective resistance aimed at saving both the planet and democracy itself, this is the book to read."

From the Publisher

"As this clearly-argued book makes evident: too much of our politics has aided the forces heating our atmosphere and drying out our forests. It's time to stop."—Bill McKibben, author Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

"This is a book I want my students to read, this is a book my friends and family will read. Simultaneously devastating and hopeful, it repositions the significance of Indigenous ecological knowledge as a key source for worldwide wellbeing."—Jane McMillan, former Canadian Research Chair of Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Communities

"The threat of extinction is real and immediate, but Eve Darian-Smith rightfully warns that it cannot be effectively thwarted unless we link the fight for environmental survival with the struggles against global, class, racial, and gender inequalities. A persuasive, solidly documented work."—Walden Bello, co-founder of Focus on the Global South and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175762076
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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