Environmentalism from Below

How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet

by Ashley Dawson

A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.

Paperback | 336 pages | Haymarket Books | 2024

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. His field of specialization is postcolonial studies. Areas of interest of his include the experience and literature of migration, including movement from colonial and postcolonial nations to the former imperial center (Britain in particular) and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South such as Lagos and Mumbai. He has also worked on contemporary discourses of U.S. imperialism, on the rhizomatic organizing forms of the global justice movement, and on emerging global discourses of environmental governance.