In response to unprecedented environmental degradation, activists and popular movements have risen up to fight the crisis of climate change and the ongoing devastation of the earth. The environmental movement has undeniably influenced even its adversaries, as the language of sustainability can be found in corporate mission statements, government policy, and national security agendas. However, the price of success has been compromise, prompting soul-searching and questioning of the politics of environmentalism. Is it a revolutionary movement that opposes the current system? Or is it reformist, changing the system by working within it? In Birth of a New Earth, Adrian Parr argues that this is a false choice, calling for a shift from an opposition between revolution and incremental change to a renewed collective imagination. Parr insists that environmental destruction is at its core a problem of democratization and decolonization. It requires reckoning with militarism, market fundamentalism, and global inequality and mobilizing an alternative political vision capable of freeing the collective imagination in order to replace an apocalyptic mindset frozen by the spectacle of violence. Birth of a New Earth locates the emancipatory work of environmental politics in solidarities that can bring together different constituencies, fusing opposing political strategies and paradigms by working both inside and outside the prevailing system. She discusses experiments in food sovereignty, collaborative natural-resource management, and public-interest design initiatives that test new models of economic democratization. Ultimately, Parr proclaims, environmental politics is the refusal to surrender life to the violence of global capitalism, corporate governance, and militarism. This defiance can serve as the source for the birth of a new earth.

About the Author
Adrian Parr is chair and director of the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati and UNESCO Co-Chair of Water Access and Sustainability. Her books include Hijacking Sustainability (2009) and The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (Columbia, 2013). She is also the producer and codirector (with Sean Hughes) of the award-winning documentary The Intimate Realities of Water (2016).

Reviews
Birth of a New Earth is one of those rare and brilliant books that critiques the ongoing destruction of the environment in a writing style that is lyrical, compassionate, and as accessible as it is informative. Parr masterfully weaves together a language of critique and possibility and in doing so makes a convincing case for environmental and economic justice on a global scale and offers a powerful argument for rethinking the meaning and practice of politics. -- Henry Giroux, author of America at War with Itself This is a prescient book, one that not only provides a rigorous and critical analysis of emergent environmentalisms but also charts how imaginations of a "new earth" can be forged at the limits of liberal democracy. In this sense, the book is as much about the political as it is about the environmental. It is a must-read for our times. -- Ananya Roy, author of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development



Book Information
ISBN 9780231180092
Author Adrian Parr
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press