Reviews of political ecology books, films and events

July 14, 2022

Alcarrás and the normalization of farmers’ disappearance

By Lucia Arguelles Ramos.  The success of the film Alcarás has to do with a widespread imaginary that romanticizes family farming but at the same time normalizes its disappearance.
October 12, 2021

Dune and the Inhuman Agency of Commoning

By Riccardo Buonanno. The new sci-fi epic Dune is a planetary narrative. Human affairs only represent a part of a whole geopower, in which Planet’s forces organize, incite and deform social and political relations. Is it time to reconsider our certainties on the human agency facing environmental crisis?
April 7, 2021

Book review: “Enlightenment and Ecology: The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century” (Black Rose Books, 2021)

By Rafa Grinfeld. The recent collection edited by Yavor Tarinski explores the contemporary influences of Murray Bookchin and the recent resurgence of interest in the theory of social ecology.
May 20, 2020

Green Capital and Environmental “Leaders” Won’t Save Us

By Alexander Dunlap. Despite its flaws, Jeff Gibbs’s documentary Planet of the Humans powerfully exposes how optimism for "renewable energy" transitions is misplaced, and how mainstream environmentalism is becoming a force for green capitalism.
October 8, 2019

Defending limits is not Malthusian

By Giorgos Kallis. Self-limitation is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits.
June 20, 2019

Why ‘Game of Thrones’ was about ecomodernism

By Chris Giotitsas & Vasilis Kostakis. Game of Thrones was arguably about climate change, but the HBO series turned this narrative around by presenting a last-minute technological solution as magically saving the day, the planet, and existence. 
May 23, 2019

Environmentalism is not a metaphor

By Remy Bargout. Environmentalists live under a growing and yet age-old illusion that the mainstream movement has gained a critical mass, or unstoppable momentum that ‘now, consumer society, world leaders, and the capitalist system must reckon with’. In reality, the mainstream movement does not speak to power, but actually exerts it. Elite environmentalism is a problem for many reasons but, perhaps most of all, for exclusionary factors of age, sex, and race.
December 4, 2018

Book Review: "Total Transition – The human side of the Renewable Energy Revolution"

By Marula Tsagkari The book Total Transition: The Human Side of the Renewable Energy Revolution offers an in-depth look at the social and environmental impacts of the current fossil fuel energy system, and calls for a renewable energy transition, which takes into account the needs of those communities that have been most affected by this system.
November 15, 2018

'The Land Beneath Our Feet' – A Review

By Fidel C.T. Budy The critically-acclaimed documentary The Land Beneath Our Feet, produced by Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel (University of Wisconsin-Madison and Alchemy Films), is an in-depth ethnographic portrayal of processes of land grabbing and dispossession of rural communities in Liberia, which challenges the dominant narrative that depicts affected communities as passive victims.
October 9, 2018

Curiosity, relationalities and monkeywrenching: The futures of the Anthropocene

by Daniele Valisena Daniele Valisena reviews the book Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero and Robert Emmett (University of Chicago Press, 2018). If curiosity is insubordination, Future Remains elevates it to a key role in approaching – and hopefully changing – the “human epoch”.
September 6, 2018

Resisting Development: The politics of the zad and NoTav

Alexander Dunlap reviews the book The ZAD and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence, by the Mauvaise Troupe Collective.
May 9, 2018

The dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale 2/2

ENTITLE Blog presents two reflections on the dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale. In the second contribution, Joël Foramitti comments on the different ways that gender, exploitation and nature play out in the politics of the Handmaid’s tale. Here the first contribution by Júlia Hosta Cuy. The huge success of Hulu’s 2017 web television series, the ‘Handmaid’s tale’ (receiving widespread critical acclaim and eight Primetime Emmy Awards including Outstanding Drama Series) brought back to attention Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name. The book and the […]