Please join Ashley Dawson and Ajay Singh Chaudhary for a discussion and celebration of their new books Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements are Leading the Fight for Our Planet (Haymarket) and The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater) which investigate the movements that have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, these grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.

As Chaudhary explains, Climate change is not only about the exhaustion of the planet, it’s about the exhaustion of so many of us, our lives, our worlds, even our minds. He shows how a new politics particular to the climate catastrophe demands a bitter struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of “business-as-usual” and all of us, those exhausted, in every sense of the word, by the status quo.

And scholar and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity organizations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria, and beyond. Taking up the four critical challenges we face in a warming world—food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and conservation—Dawson shows how the unruly power of environmentalism from below is charting an alternative path forward, from challenging industrial agriculture through fights for food sovereignty and agroecology to resisting extractivism using mass nonviolent protest and sabotage.