The Progress of This Storm
On Society and Nature in a Warming World
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-78663-489-4 (ISBN)
Description
In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency that sets them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a contrary argument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable. Deflating several prominent currents in contemporary theory - constructionism, hybridism, new materialism, posthumanism - and submitting the influential work of Bruno Latour to particularly biting critique, Malm shows that action against fossil fuels is best served by a theory that takes nature, society and the dialectics between them very seriously indeed.
Reviews / Votes
Andrea Gibbons is a reseacher at the Sustainable Housing and Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU) at the University of Salford. She completed her doctorate in geography at the London School of Economics and holds a Masters from UCLA in Urban Planning. She is a writer, editor and educator with ten years of organizing experience in Central and South Central L.A. working on issues of community planning and civic participation, immigration rights, development and regeneration, slum housing and public health. She sits on the editorial board of the academic journal City.More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78663-489-4 (9781786634894)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental History, Historical Materialism, Antipode and Organization & Environment. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, and of half a dozen books in Swedish on political economy, the Middle East and climate change.