Discover our non-fiction and fiction books about climate change, the environment, ecology and more…
With her inimitable mix of scholarship and activism, Vandana Shiva lays out the emergency we all face: extinction, climate havoc and the global food crisis. She lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1%: corporations, polluters and turncoat governments. She challenges the idea that all humans are responsible for this emergency and therefore challenges the term ‘anthropocene’.
Environmental treaties intended to protect the earth have been appropriated and are now being used to create new markets in pollution and massive environmental damage. The Biodiversity Convention (1992) has been undermined and subverted by the same 1%. This is a travesty for the planet and its inhabitants. In a similar fashion, the UN Climate Convention has been turned into a marketplace for trading pollution.
The shift in power from governments to corporations is epitomized by the 2023 COP 28 meeting being presided over by Sultan Asmed Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and their investors BlackRock EniSpA and KKR & Co. Inc.
Our future, Shiva argues, is not about fake foods made in labs but by following the ecological laws of the earth by decolonising, decreasing food miles, deindustrialising and deglobalizing food systems. A future sustained by biodiversity, local foods, and end to deforestation and an ethical and organic farming system in which degenerative cycles are transformed into regenerative cycles.
13 AUGUST 2024 | ISBN 9781922964182 | Paperback | 168 pages | 140 X 216 mm
What do you do when you fall in love with your next-door neighbour? You peer at each other through a hole in the fence and eventually climb over.
Sybil is a member of The Good-Hearted Gardeners, a Society for Well-Meaning Efforts for the Betterment of Language and the Salvation of the Planet, which her lover, Demo, is allowed to join. It’s funded by MI5, who ask them to monetise and weaponise the English language. Soon afterwards they discover that English is even more widespread than anyone had thought. Even the birds and the fish, the cows and the kangaroos can speak it – when they choose. The Good-Hearted Gardeners set about trying to talk to anyone – crows, magpies, robins, goldfish, cows, horses, rats, mice – who will talk to them.
With climate change and technology gone mad, what’s in store is a frightening scenario that threatens everyone – humans, animals, plants. Can the headlong rush to extinction be halted?
When the birds, and the cows and the horses and the mice and all the rest come together, much is made possible. But at what cost? Will the planet and its inhabitants be saved?
A comedic allegory for our future.
NOVEMBER 2023 | ISBN 9781922964007 | Paperback | 112 pages | 148 x 210 mm
From racialised police brutality to climate change, #MeToo, ‘trans rights’, COVID-19, the prospect of nuclear war and the prevalence of trauma – we are constantly bombarded with high stakes problems that we are expected to speak out about and act on. On closer inspection, the popular solutions to each of these problems aren’t easy to reconcile. Black Lives Matter activists demand prison abolition, while #MeToo feminists want rapists in jail – and while our objections to war and police brutality make us suspicious of state institutions in general, our responses to climate change and COVID-19 reinforce our dependency on them.
Out of the Fog cuts through the confusion. Renée Gerlich suggests that readers move beyond feeling overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated. She draws on a radical feminist tradition that demonstrates how our despair is connected to our most pressing social problems, and offers a framework for assessing and interpreting the current political landscape.
Out of the Fog delivers clarity and guidance in this bewildering time. Renée Gerlich’s insights will help you develop the capacity to speak with an authentic voice and to act purposefully and with impact in the world.
...understanding how our private heartbreak relates to our large-scale problems is the only way we can unravel the helplessness we feel, claim our voices, and take action in the way we deeply crave. We cannot do any of these things while living with the cognitive dissonance of competing ideas, priorities, solutions, and top-down paternalism.
NOVEMBER 2022 | ISBN 9781925950540 | Paperback | 252 pages | 228 x 152mm
RE-RELEASED WITH A NEW PREFACE
Offering an exciting ride into how the world could be, this book is the one we have been waiting for. Feminists have long been saying we could do life differently, here is the local and global exploration of what needs to change, what must go and how together we can make a new reality. A visionary book with a focus on local and global politics and social movements, Wild Politics presents a powerful critique of global western culture. Susan Hawthorne unpicks the structures of power and knowledge, law and international trade rules, as well as probing issues that intimately affect our daily lives. Wild Politics concludes with a compelling vision for a world inspired by biodiversity.
JUNE 2022 | 9781925950687 | Paperback | 140 x 216 mm | 484 pp
Trained as a physicist, Vandana Shiva says, “It was Chipko that made me realise, in intimate detail, how biodiversity is at the heart of sustainable economies.” Working with peasant women in her home state of Uttarakhand, she learnt her first lessons in ecology: transferring fertility from the forest to the field. Chipko was her ‘university’ and, turning away from quantum physics, she made the preservation of biodiversity, and of sustainable societies, her life’s work.
For over four decades Vandana Shiva has worked with farmers’ and people’s movements across the world, against what she calls ‘seed imperialism’, economic polarisation, and the digital colonisation of our ecological and social diversity. Her Gandhian philosophy of resistance is rooted in people’s power, true science, and real facts, through which she challenges the Billionaires’ Club of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, as well as the transnational corporations that manipulate and control what we cultivate and consume and how we communicate, via Big Ag, Big Pharma and Big Data.
This powerful and eloquent memoir looks back at the most memorable campaigns and movements that she has been part of, while looking ahead to the challenges posed by the COVID crisis, the privatisation of biotechnology, and the commodification of our biological and natural resources.
JUNE/JULY 2022 | 9781925950526 | Paperback | 140 x 216 mm | 264 pp Co-edition with Women Unlimited, India
Do we want to live in a world without birdsong? The pesticides, the coal mines, the clear-felling forestry industry, the industrial farmers are destroying the earth with their insistence on profit. But what point is profit on a dead and silent planet?
In this enlightening yet devastating book, Susan Hawthorne writes with clarity and incisiveness on how patriarchy is wreaking destruction on the planet and on communities. The twin mantras of globalisation and growth expounded by the neoliberalism that has hijacked the planet are revealed in all their shabby deception.
Backed by meticulous research, the author shows how so-called advances in technology are, like a Trojan horse, used to mask sinister political agendas that sacrifice the common good for the shallow profiteering of corporations and mega-rich individuals.
The biotechnologists see the lure of cure, rising share prices and profits.
She details how women, lesbians, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees and the very earth itself are being damaged by the crisis of patriarchy that is sucking everyone into its vortex. Importantly, this precise and insightful volume also shows what is needed to get ourselves out of this spiral of destruction: a radical feminist approach with compassion and empathy at its core.
Shame is an emotion of the powerless because they cannot change the rules.
The book shows a way out of the vortex: it is now up to the collective imagination and action of people everywhere to take up the challenges Susan Hawthorne shows are needed.
This is a vital book for a world in crisis and should be read by everyone who cares about our future.
NOVEMBER 2020 | ISBN 9781925950168 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 196 pages
Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva
Widespread poverty and malnutrition, an alarming refugee crisis, social unrest, economic polarisation... have become our lived reality as the top 1% of the world’s seven-billion-plus population pushes the planet – and all its people – to the social and ecological brink. In Oneness vs The 1%, Vandana Shiva takes on the Billionaires Club of Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg and other modern Mughals, whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world. Their single-minded pursuit of profit has undemocratically enforced uniformity and monocultures, division and separation, monopolies and external control – over finance, food, energy, information, healthcare, and even relationships.
Basing her analysis on explosive little-known facts, Shiva exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas, based on One Science, One Agriculture and One History. She calls for the “resurgence of real knowledge, real intelligence, real wealth, real work, real well-being”, so that people can reclaim their right to: Live Free. Think Free. Breathe Free. Eat Free.
2018 | ISBN 9781925581799 | Paperback | 215 x 140 mm | 192 pp
EBOOK AVAILABLE
From fishing villages on the Gujarat coastline to Adani’s power plant in Mundra and the company’s headquarters in Ahmedabad, Lindsay Simpson’s personal story tracks how the Adani Group managed to woo Australian governments into approving Australia’s largest coal mine in the Galilee Basin and port expansion in a zone of great ecological sensitivity.
Why would an Australian Prime Minister, a State Premier and a handful of regional mayors back such a project, risking the future of the Great Barrier Reef and threatening Australia’s vast precious source of underground water – the Great Artesian Basin? And what of the consequences for greenhouse gas emissions if other proposed mines in the Galilee Basin go ahead?
Why is there a single-minded pursuit of the mining of coal when we are running out of time to do something useful about climate change? As a tourism operator in the Whitsundays Lindsay Simpson, investigative journalist, former academic and author, is determined to expose the contribution of coal mines to global warming, which is threatening the world’s largest living organism – the Great Barrier Reef – with extinction.
With other activists, she travels from Adani’s Indian headquarters in Gujarat to Parliament House in Canberra to lobby politicians, demand answers and question motivations. She also documents the power of the social movement, Stop Adani, which has captured the public imagination.
In an astute analysis of this ongoing environmental battle, the biggest since the Franklin Dam in the 1980s, Lindsay Simpson argues that while Adani might have gained the backing of politicians, it has not won over the Australian people.
This is an important book for every citizen concerned about dirty coal and climate change, the globalisation of corruption and the destruction of our democracies, from India to Australia. It tells the global story of how a handful of billionaires are using politicians to make limitless money while they destroy the planet, people's lives, and our common future.
—Dr Vandana Shiva, author of Making Peace with the Earth, Recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award
2018 | ISBN 9781925581478 | Paperback | 180 x 135 mm | 266 pp
between wind and water, is to be in a vulnerable place, the place where people and planet are. When industrial wind arrives in the neighbourhood, some locals find that living with their new neighbour has brought a whirlwind of troubles. Their health and that of the community take a nosedive. Their complaints are filed into obscurity, their stories dismissed and they belittled. What sort of world do we want? We ask how can we have a better world if people and planet are not equally respected?
These poems speak the stories of people who have been denied a voice. A local story told with a global perspective … these are small fragments of a very complex story, an attempt to distil the experiences of some people in small rural locations across the world.
At the heart of between wind and water is an intimate portrayal of the vulnerable place people and planet find themselves. When home no longer feels safe as houses, when health has so deteriorated, and the local community divided and toxic, people leave their homes and the lives they have known.
between wind and water, a series of poems, tells the stories of people who, after a windfarm is built in their neighbourhood, find that they begin to experience problems: among others sleep disruption, headaches, nausea, anxiety. They complain to the Company, local council, and government. Lost in the labyrinth of doublespeak and duplicity, anxiety, disillusionment and a sense of abandonment grow. These poems tell of their experience and try to make sense of what is happening.
The broader ideological framework that these stories are set in: the earth is being plundered; consumerism is rife; bias and zealotry on all sides are rampant. Who do you believe? Where do we go from here, when respect for people and the planet is at such a low ebb?
2018 | ISBN 9781925581591 | Paperback | 230 x 190 mm | 96 pp
The Great Climate Robbery provides valuable information about how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it, and what can be done to turn things around. The various chapters in this collection document the ill effects of this industrial food system such as the growing hunger, the destruction of rural peoples’ livelihoods, the loss of biodiversity and cultures, the exploitation of labour and a range of health calamities.
This timely anthology by the international NGO Grain shows how food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution to climate change. With governments, particularly those from the main polluting countries, abdicating their responsibility to deal with the problem, it has become ever more critical for people to take action into their own hands. Changing the food system is perhaps the most important and effective place to start.
2016 | ISBN 9781742199917 | Paperback | 246 pp
Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, except across the border. One night, a village is bombed after its men attempt to cross the border. Nine-year old Amedea is buried underground and sleeps to survive. Ten years later, she wakes with a locust embedded in her brow. This political fable is a girl’s magical journey through the border. The border has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locust Girl’s dream, her lovesong—
For those walking to the border for dear life
And those guarding the border for dear life
Awards
Winner, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 2016
Winner, Philippine National Book Award for Best Novel in English
Shortlisted, ACT Book of the Year Award, 2016
2015 | ISBN 9781742199627 | Paperback | 192 pages
This unique, international offering on an issue of critical importance today, demonstrates how women as activists, scientists and scholars are at the forefront of shaping new scientific and economic paradigms to reclaim seed sovereignty and food security across the world. Women in the North and South are leading movements to change both practice and paradigm: how we grow and transform our food. As seed keepers and food producers, as mothers and consumers, they are engaged in renewing a food system that is better aligned with the ecological processes of the earth’s renewal, the laws of human rights and social justice and the means through which our bodies stay well and healthy.
2015 | 9781742199566 | Paperback | 376 pages
The book documents the fight that was put up by a group of poets, artists and ecologists to save the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling. It's a remarkable story being re-published in the midst of another attack on the Reef as oil tankers and an increasing number of coal freighters are plying its waters in the newly-built super ports.
The Great Barrier Reef lies off the coast of Queensland: 2000 kilometres of spectacular coral reefs, sand cays and islands, Australia’s most precious marine possession. Teeming with life, it covers 350,000 square kilometres.
In the late 1960s the Reef was threatened with limestone mining and oil drilling. A small group of dedicated conservationists in Queensland – John Büsst, Judith Wright, Len Webb and others – battled to save the Ellison Reef from coral-limestone mining and the Swain Reefs from oil exploration. The group later swelled to encompass scientists, trade unionists and politicians throughout Australia, and led in 1976 to the establishment of a guardian body: the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
That it still survives is a legacy of activists, artists, poets, ecologists and students. In 1967 they were branded as ‘cranks’; now they should be recognised as ‘visionaries’.
2014 | 9781742199061 | Paperback | 205 pp
Jeanné Browne (Art)
this tiny crack
in our lives
wind and rain strewn
stranded on the limen
that space between
water and sky
rain and sun
cold and heat
When two women and a dog set off on a holiday they have no inkling of what’s to come.
They wake to find the river has crept up silently during the night. Trapped by floodwater, they devise escape routes only to be faced with more obstacles at every turn.
Only the dog remains calm.
This novella grips you with its language, its pace, its anxieties.
2013 | ISBN 9781742198606 | Paperback | 220 x 150 mm | 166 pp
In her new book, Making Peace with the Earth, Sydney Peace Prize recipient Vandana Shiva explores the basis of human life on our planet. She finds that a series of wars have been declared against the Earth: wars about land, water, climate, forests and biodiversity.
In a searing critique of corporate globalisation, she examines the root causes of these wars against the backdrop of the current crisis in food supply. She imagines a world that could be sustainable; a world in which food security, justice and peace are all aligned.
By drawing out the connections between ‘growth’ and free markets, she argues for a future in which human rights and earth rights become central to the creation of a different kind of wealth, one imbued with democracy and justice.
A radical scientist and ecofeminist, and the author of several books published to international acclaim, in Making Peace with the Earth Vandana Shiva offers solutions that hold the promise of freedom and peace.
2012 | ISBN 9781742198385 | Paperback | 215 x 140 mm | 400 pp
Winner of the Rachel Carson Prize, this explosive expose details the disturbing practices of one of the world's most influential multinational agricultural corporations.
The result of a remarkable three-year-long investigation that took award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across four continents, The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant—the world’s leading producer of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)— its new and dubious “green” face and its problematic PCB– and Agent Orange–soaked past.
Robin reports that, following its long history of manufacturing hazardous chemicals and lethal herbicides, Monsanto is now marketing itself as a “life sciences” company, seemingly convinced about the virtues of sustainable development. However, Monsanto now controls the majority of the yield of the world’s genetically modified corn and soy—ingredients found in a high percentage of households—and its legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly are the subject of worldwide concern.
Released to great acclaim and controversy in France, throughout Europe, and in Latin America, alongside the documentary film of the same name, The World According to Monsanto is sure to change the way we think about food safety and our food supply.
2010 | ISBN 9781876756833 | Paperback | 229 x 155 mm | 384 pp
A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSIC
A new release of Vandana Shiva’s classic with a new introduction. Shiva links the violation of nature with the violation and marginalisation of women in the Third World by examining the position of women in relation to nature – the forests, the food chain and water supplies. She shows how science, technology and politics, along with the workings of the economy itself, are inherently exploitative. Every area of human activity marginalises and burdens both women and nature.
Shiva suggests that there is only one path to survival and liberation for nature, women and men: the ecological path of harmony, sustainability and diversity. She explores the unique place of women in the environment of India in particular, both as its saviours and as victims of maldevelopment.
Her analysis is an innovative statement of the challenge that women in ecology movements are creating and she shows how their efforts constitute a non-violent and humanly inclusive alternative to the dominant paradigm of contemporary scientific and development thought.
2010 | ISBN 9781876756161 | Paperback | 215 x 140 mm | 234 pp
Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earth's Breath. It's an eye that radiates out from the personal to the communal, tracking its subject matter through the lenses of history and myth. Susan Hawthorne's poetry shifts with seismic intensity, from tranquility to roar, bureaucratic inertia to survival, and the slow recovery from destruction to regeneration.
2009 | ISBN 9781876756734 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 84 pp
Climate change will dramatically alter how we live and is already affecting the lives of the world's most vulnerable people. In Soil Not Oil, bestselling author Vandana Shiva connects the food crisis, peak oil, and climate change to show that a world beyond a dependence on fossil fuel and globalization is both possible and necessary. Bold and visionary, Shiva reveals how three crises are inherently linked and that any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere.
2009 | ISBN 9781876756727 | Paperback | 215 x 140 mm | 156 pp
As the twenty-first century faces a crisis of democracy and sustainability, this book attempts to bring academics and alternative globalisation activists into conversation. Through studies of global neoliberalism, ecological debt, climate change, and the ongoing devaluation of reproductive and subsistence labour, these uncompromising essays by internationally distinguished women thinkers expose the limits of current scholarship in political economy, ecological economics, and sustainability science. The book introduces groundbreaking theoretical concepts for talking about humanity-nature links and will be a challenging read for activists and for students of political economy, environmental ethics, global studies, sociology, women's studies, and critical geography.
2009 | ISBN 9781876756710 | Paperback | 215 x 135 mm | 324 pp
A modern fictional equivalent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. What happens when a group of scientists take creation into their own hands? Ao Toa is that rare novel ⎯ an eco-thriller combining action and suspense with deep emotions and the sensual power of the natural world. It is peopled with believable women and men, teenagers and elders, suits and activists, farmers and gardeners. As they grapple with concerns ranging from sick children and indigenous medicines to toxic sprays and genetic engineering; they encounter the realities of corruption, politics and power. The richly realised texture of daily life expresses fundamental conflicts over food security, the care of the environment and the morality of science. The writing is irreverent, funny and fresh, catching the authentic tone and flavour of today's global debates as they play out at a local level.
2004 | ISBN 9781876756437 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 336 pp
eBook Available
For more paperback copies, please visit Gazelle Book Services in the UK
This thought-provoking collection of essays from radical speakers from around the world moves beyond criticism of the current trends of globalization and deregulation to challenge Thatcher-inspired economic rationalists with both theoretical and practical alternatives for our world. If there is no alternative to corporate globalization, doesn’t that mean this society, and our current military struggles are as good as life is going to get?
Inspired by the ground-breaking work of Maria Mies and her colleagues in developing the elaboration of the ‘subsistence perspective’, There is an Alternative defies popular Western thought with concrete cases of resistance to globalization in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia and the Pacific. Anyone who refuses to believe that corporate globalization is our inevitable destiny will find this book a solid basis for formulating ideas and implementing strategies for the creation of a future in the image and interest of the world’s people.
Featuring pieces by Vandana Shiva, Christa Muller, Gustavo Esteva, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Fradia Akhter, Theresa Wolfwood, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein.
2001 | ISBN 9781876756178 | Paperback | 210 x 137 mm | 240 pp
A product of twenty years of analysis and activism, this unique book poses a radical alternative to the current free-market industrial system. A book of history, theory and polemic, the authors show how, if we are to survive, economies must become needs-based, environmentally sustainable, co-operative and local. They explain how the current capitalist system is none of these things, is inherently unstable and is dependent on the exploitation of various marginalised groups, particularly women, and of the environment.
2000 | ISBN 9781875559930 | Paperback | 215 x 135 mm | 246 pp
aurora linnea
Beneath the world-destroying violence of male dominion, a morbid terror churns. Man’s is a Kingdom of Fear, and madness reigns, for what has men so spooked is something they cannot run from: their own bodies.
The ruling fathers have historically reacted to this predicament by scorning biological material reality and chasing after the consolations of domination, delusional transcendence, and, when desperation sets in, revenge against the rejected real world.
Man Against Being traces body horror as the through line that unifies manmade society’s hallmark oppressions and atrocities. Moving from the mind/body separation that is patriarchal doctrine’s starting point to the brutal subjugation of all creatures scapegoated as bad bodies so men can play at being pure minds, from ‘born in the wrong body’ to the transhumanists' dreamt-of ascent into bodiless virtuality.
Drawing on a holistic ecofeminist analysis of male dominion’s cascading devastations, aurora linnea argues with poetic insight that, if men are determined to do away with bodies and biological life, the antidote to patriarchy’s apocalyptic charter must necessarily involve a return to the flesh and blood of matter, a reintegration of body and mind and living earth.
5 NOVEMBER 2024 | ISBN 9781922964120 | Paperback | 320 pages | 152mm x 228mm