All We Want is the Earth

Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism

Patrick Bresnihan, Naomi Millner

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781529218343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sixty years ago, an upsurge of social movements protested the ecological harms of industrial capitalism. In subsequent decades, environmentalism consolidated into forms of management and business strategy that aimed to tackle ecological degradation while enabling new forms of green economic growth. However, the focus on spaces and species to be protected saw questions of human work and histories of colonialism pushed out of view. This book traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers' and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves 'environmental, ' and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Boxes
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Beyond Modern Environmentalism
• 2 Suburb, Field, Laboratory: Recomposing Geographies of Early Environmentalism
• First Interlude: Green and White Dreams
• 3 Revolt Against One-Worldism: Radical Claims on Land and Work Post-1968
• Second Interlude: Planetary Icons
• 4 The Right to Subsist: Transnational Commons Against the Enclosure of Environments and Environmentalism
• Third Interlude: Witnessing in the Global Resonance Machine
• 5 Earth Politics: Disagreement and Emergent Indigeneity in the So-Called Anthropocene
• Fourth Interlude: Making Things Resonate
• 6 Conclusion: Resonance Beyond Environmentalism
• Coda: Afterlives
• Notes
• References
• Index