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Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash
Since the early 1990s, activists, corporations, and government officials have battled for the heart and soul of the environmental movement. In Earth for Sale , Brian Tokar examines the economic issues, political divisions, and worldviews that have shaped this conflict, and their implications for a renewed ecological movement for the 21st century.
296 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1997
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About the author
Brian Tokar
13 books6 followersBrian Tokar is an activist and author, Lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, and a board member of 350Vermont and the Institute for Social Ecology. He is the author of The Green Alternative, Earth for Sale, and Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change (Revised edition, 2014). He is an editor of the 2010 book, Agriculture and Food in Crisis (with Fred Magdoff), and also edited two collections on biotechnology and GMOs: Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders. Tokar is a contributor to the Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement, A Line in the Tar Sands, and other recent books. His articles on environmental issues and popular movements appear in Z Magazine and in web-based publications and sites such as CommonDreams, Counterpunch, ZNet, Popular Resistance, New Compass, Toward Freedom, and Green Social Thought. He has lectured across the US and internationally on social ecology and the links between environmental and social movements.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 30, 2020
3 3/4 stars
July 27, 2019
This was a bit academic, but overall fairly accessible survey of ‘ecological’ movements in motion in 1996 and the larger forces within mainstream environmentalism and broader society that were being fought against. A bit inside baseball, probably not a 101 book if you aren’t familiar with the existing histories of third-wave environmentalism + environmental justice work - but if you are, a welcome addition to that history!
November 9, 2025
A book I wish I had read when it first came out.
The environmental movement went through a cataclysmic change during the Reagan administration, when government institutions designed to protect the environment became forces for the continued destruction and exploitation of natural resources, along with the human health and social impacts that attend such activities. *Earth for Sale* helped me relive those good-old, bad-old days, where the environmental movement splintered along with the opposition to an overwhelmingly popular POTUS who carelessly disregarded ecology and held the environmentalist movement in contempt. Sound familiar?
At the time, the environmental movement split into professional lobbyists that played Federal politics from the inside, making concessions on environmental policy without any regard to what the impact was on the ground for grassroots organizations that were underfunded and overwhelmed. The remainder split between various grassroots factions loosely described as "Ecofeminism", "Social Ecology", and "Deep Ecology". I was part of the Deep Ecology movement and was engaged in the author--who identified as being a part of the Social Ecology movement when I met him in the late 1980s--in a series of polemics regarding economics. I was more of a Neo-Malthusian / Limits to Growth economist at that time, and not a Deep Ecology true believer as he describes in the book. If anything, I think he gives short-shrift to those of us who were seeking to use property rights reforms and market signals outside the legislative process to correct the ills of capitalism.
Obviously we all failed at those various efforts. Ted Kaczynski literally and figuratively blew up Deep Ecology a few years after the book was published. Social Ecology remains an interesting intellectual exercise, but I concur with Tokar's analysis that the movement was born and died with Murray Bookchin. The fate of Ecofeminism in an increasingly ambiguous world of identity politics becomes a footnote. All three ecological movements are now marginalized, if not extinct compared with their strength and relevance at the time the book was published.
The most important message, crafted during the first Clinton administration and more true today than ever, is that liberals in the Democratic party cannot be trusted to carry out their promises to protect the environment. Tokar documents the many ways that Clinton and Gore betrayed the environmental movement, and that was only the first term. The broken promises were even worse in the second Clinton administration, which led to the strength of Ralph Nader's 2000 candidacy, and the splintering of the environmental vote to elect George W. Bush. Ever since the Reagan administration, the Republicans can be trusted to do what they can to dismantle environmental protection and persecute those who seek to protect Mother Earth.
These lessons are important today, as Mother Earth is besieged to an unprecedented degree through accelerated natural resource exploitation.
The environmental movement went through a cataclysmic change during the Reagan administration, when government institutions designed to protect the environment became forces for the continued destruction and exploitation of natural resources, along with the human health and social impacts that attend such activities. *Earth for Sale* helped me relive those good-old, bad-old days, where the environmental movement splintered along with the opposition to an overwhelmingly popular POTUS who carelessly disregarded ecology and held the environmentalist movement in contempt. Sound familiar?
At the time, the environmental movement split into professional lobbyists that played Federal politics from the inside, making concessions on environmental policy without any regard to what the impact was on the ground for grassroots organizations that were underfunded and overwhelmed. The remainder split between various grassroots factions loosely described as "Ecofeminism", "Social Ecology", and "Deep Ecology". I was part of the Deep Ecology movement and was engaged in the author--who identified as being a part of the Social Ecology movement when I met him in the late 1980s--in a series of polemics regarding economics. I was more of a Neo-Malthusian / Limits to Growth economist at that time, and not a Deep Ecology true believer as he describes in the book. If anything, I think he gives short-shrift to those of us who were seeking to use property rights reforms and market signals outside the legislative process to correct the ills of capitalism.
Obviously we all failed at those various efforts. Ted Kaczynski literally and figuratively blew up Deep Ecology a few years after the book was published. Social Ecology remains an interesting intellectual exercise, but I concur with Tokar's analysis that the movement was born and died with Murray Bookchin. The fate of Ecofeminism in an increasingly ambiguous world of identity politics becomes a footnote. All three ecological movements are now marginalized, if not extinct compared with their strength and relevance at the time the book was published.
The most important message, crafted during the first Clinton administration and more true today than ever, is that liberals in the Democratic party cannot be trusted to carry out their promises to protect the environment. Tokar documents the many ways that Clinton and Gore betrayed the environmental movement, and that was only the first term. The broken promises were even worse in the second Clinton administration, which led to the strength of Ralph Nader's 2000 candidacy, and the splintering of the environmental vote to elect George W. Bush. Ever since the Reagan administration, the Republicans can be trusted to do what they can to dismantle environmental protection and persecute those who seek to protect Mother Earth.
These lessons are important today, as Mother Earth is besieged to an unprecedented degree through accelerated natural resource exploitation.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews