Leftword

About the Book

With the earth and its inhabitants under more pressure than ever before, and with bona fide climate change deniers in the most powerful positions on the planet, reading this book is essential. It informs and inspires the actions that we all need to take to protect ourselves and our homes. Read it, and after you've wept, act. — Emma Thompson, Actor

Naomi Klein, delivering the Edward Said lecture, links the question of climate with the question of occupation (with Palestine as the focus). Klein points out that those who are 'othered' will be the first victims of the climate catastrophe. This volume collects Naomi Klein's superb essay, along with reactions from important writers who live across the globe. John Bellamy Foster and Ghassan Hage offer direct reflections on Klein's lecture, while other writers are spurred by Klein's insights. Rafia Zakaria takes us to the shoreline of Karachi, Masturah Alatas wonders about hijab and air-conditioning in Malaysia, Shalini Singh meanders through the climate wars in India, and Susan Abulhawa writes from the 'fossil fuel sacrifice zone' at Standing Rock (North Dakota, USA). The book closes with Amitav Ghosh's meditation on nutmeg and cloves, leading to important insights into globalization, interconnectedness and transformation.

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, editor at LeftWord Books, and chief correspondent for Globetrotter. He is the author of forty books, including Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community, Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. The Darker Nations won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize. He lives in Santiago, Chile.

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Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) was a Brazilian poet, whose poem, Canção Amiga, was on the 50 cruzado novo bill.

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Rafia Zakaria

Rafia Zakaria is a columnist for Dawn (Pakistan) and the Boston Review’s ‘Reading Other Women’ Series. She is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon Press) and Veil (Bloomsbury). She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Nation, Guernica and various other publications.

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Susan Abulhawa

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian novelist and poet. Her most recent novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015), is an international best seller, translated into 28 languages. She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a volunteer organization dedicated to upholding the Right to Play.

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Shalini Singh

Shalini Singh is a Delhi-based journalist, who has written for The Week and the Hindustan Times. In 2012 she won the Prem Bhatia Award for excellence in environmental reporting. Shalini is a founding trustee at the People’s Archive of Rural India. In 2013, she was described by Elle as ‘a headliner, one of journalism’s new guard that asks difficult questions, risks life and limb, and will stop at nothing for the truth.’

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Ghassan Hage

Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the university of Melbourne, Australia. He has held many visiting professorships around the world including at the American University of Beirut, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, University of Copenhagen, University of Amsterdam and Harvard. His work includes White Nation (2000), Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003) and Alter-Politics (2015).

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Masturah Alatas

Masturah Alatas is the author of a tale about climate change, The Girl Who Made It Snow in Singapore (Ethos Books, 2008) and The Life in the Writing (Marshall Cavendish, 2010), a memoir-biography of Malaysian sociologist, Syed Hussein Alatas, who was also her father. Born in Singapore, she worked as a journalist in Malaysia before moving to Italy in 1992 where she teaches English at the Univerity of Macerata. A regular contributor to Counterpunch, Masturah has completed a novel and is working on another.

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Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the first two volumes of The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, and River of Smoke.

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John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). His most recent books are The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett, Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).

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ECOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt

Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change

About the Book

Vijay Prashad

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) was a Brazilian poet, whose poem, Canção Amiga, was on the 50 cruzado novo bill.

Rafia Zakaria

Susan Abulhawa

Shalini Singh

Ghassan Hage

Masturah Alatas

Amitav Ghosh

John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). His most recent books are The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett, Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).

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