By Merlin Sheldrake
Random House, 2020
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. These metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes are changing our understanding of how life works.
By Diana Stuart, Ryan Gunderson, & Brian Petersen
University of Michigan Press, 2020
The authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction and the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. In their view, alternatives like degrowth can offer new systemic arrangements that confront and move beyond the capital-climate contradiction
By Jennifer Clapp
Polity, 2020
The fully revised and expanded third edition of this popular book explores how the rise of industrial agriculture, corporate control, inequitable agricultural trade rules, and the financialisation of food have each enabled powerful actors to gain fundamental influence over the practices that dominate the world food economy and result in uneven consequences for both people and planet.
By Jennifer E. Telesca
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why are the big bluefin tuna on the verge of extinction? Telesca shows that the regulators manage the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires.
To save marine life we need to transform the dominant culture that consents to this slaughter.
By Louis A. Pérez Jr.
University of North Carolina Press, 2020
How did Cuba’s long-established sugar trade result in the development of an agriculture that benefited consumers abroad at the expense of Cubans at home? Perez examines the 150-year relationship between the rice and sugar, as Cuban efforts to expand rice production were met with keen resistance by United States rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as sugar growers were on the US market.
[Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]