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Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement
The evidence is global warming is real. While the debate continues about just how much damage spiking temperatures will wreak, we know the threat to our homes, health, and even way of life is dire. So why isn’t America doing anything? Where is the national campaign to stop this catastrophe?
It may lie between the covers of this book. Ignition brings together some of the world’s finest thinkers and advocates to jump start the ultimate green revolution. Including celebrated writers like Bill McKibben and renowned scholars like Gus Speth, as well as young activists, the authors draw on direct experience in grassroots organization, education, law, and social leadership. Their approaches are various, from building coalitions to win political battles to rallying shareholders to change corporate behavior. But they share a belief that private fears about deadly heat waves and disastrous hurricanes can translate into powerful public action.
For anyone who feels compelled to do more than change their light bulbs or occasionally carpool, Ignition is an essential guide. Combining incisive essays with success stories and web resources, the book helps readers answer the most important question we all “What can I do?”
It may lie between the covers of this book. Ignition brings together some of the world’s finest thinkers and advocates to jump start the ultimate green revolution. Including celebrated writers like Bill McKibben and renowned scholars like Gus Speth, as well as young activists, the authors draw on direct experience in grassroots organization, education, law, and social leadership. Their approaches are various, from building coalitions to win political battles to rallying shareholders to change corporate behavior. But they share a belief that private fears about deadly heat waves and disastrous hurricanes can translate into powerful public action.
For anyone who feels compelled to do more than change their light bulbs or occasionally carpool, Ignition is an essential guide. Combining incisive essays with success stories and web resources, the book helps readers answer the most important question we all “What can I do?”
- GenresClimate Change
285 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2007
47 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 18, 2008
This was a very well written piece of academic movement masturbation. There was useful discussion on how the climate justice movement needs to "frame" the issue to make it more accessible and compelling to different groups of people, but that's about as far as the analysis got.
In my opinion, the most important proposal for a new climate change framework was found in the essay on environmental justice. It explained how while the industrial Global North is responsible for the vast majority of climate change emissions, the vast majority of negative effects of climate change will impact the Global South, including Pacific Islanders, native people in the Arctic, and people of tropical and Sahelian Asia and Africa. It also went into how even within rich countries, episodes like Hurricane Katrina and the recent European Heatwave disproportionately impacted, and will continue to target, marginalized communities. Significantly, it criticized the United States' rich, white-dominated environenmental movement for excluding these most threatened people. That's the direction I think it is essential we take the discussion about this movement.
Ironically, though the strongest essays were the ones on environmental justice and health as an environmental issue, the editors of the book still didn't seem to get it. Nearly every essay cited the lessons of the Civil Rights movement as the successful US movement to emulate, but only those two essays mentioned above focused on incorporating the goals (as opposed to just the tactics) of anti-racism in the climate justice movement. Without a serious commitment to anti-oppression activism and global justice, this book ends up being more of the same old same old, Old World Order with a greener face-- sure the planet might make it but the humans still won't.
In my opinion, the most important proposal for a new climate change framework was found in the essay on environmental justice. It explained how while the industrial Global North is responsible for the vast majority of climate change emissions, the vast majority of negative effects of climate change will impact the Global South, including Pacific Islanders, native people in the Arctic, and people of tropical and Sahelian Asia and Africa. It also went into how even within rich countries, episodes like Hurricane Katrina and the recent European Heatwave disproportionately impacted, and will continue to target, marginalized communities. Significantly, it criticized the United States' rich, white-dominated environenmental movement for excluding these most threatened people. That's the direction I think it is essential we take the discussion about this movement.
Ironically, though the strongest essays were the ones on environmental justice and health as an environmental issue, the editors of the book still didn't seem to get it. Nearly every essay cited the lessons of the Civil Rights movement as the successful US movement to emulate, but only those two essays mentioned above focused on incorporating the goals (as opposed to just the tactics) of anti-racism in the climate justice movement. Without a serious commitment to anti-oppression activism and global justice, this book ends up being more of the same old same old, Old World Order with a greener face-- sure the planet might make it but the humans still won't.
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April 22, 2009how to spark a social movement
October 29, 2007
A field manual for any would-be or currrently active climate activist.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews