Forget Fertility, Get Feral. Review of George Monbiot, \u3cem\u3eFeral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life\u3c/em\u3e

What\u27s more important to our planet\u27s future than little children? Global warning is about them, we\u27re told, and it\u27s on their behalf that we have to do better. Climate scientist James Hansen titled his memoir and climate science primer Storms of My Grandchildren. Naomi Klein\u27s fertility struggles frame the closing act of her epic This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In Ben Lerner\u27s climate dread novel 10:04 the protagonist navigates bureaucratic and emotional mazes to donate sperm to a friend. Fertility = future. Get it

The Urban Green Wars: Struggling for Working-Class Control of Cities is Crucial to Bringing Down Carbon Emissions

About half the planet\u27s carbon dioxide emissions originate in urban areas: the cities and suburbs where a growing majority of humanity lives. To survive this century, we\u27ll have to live together in new ways. Few issues are as fundamental to climate politics as this one. And few are as visceral: the urban is rapidly becoming one of the chief terrains of twenty-first century struggle

Petro Gotham, People\u27s Gotham

Climate change is an uneasy topic. Good news is welcome. For those lucky enough to live well in Manhattan, it\u27s comforting to imagine that at least as far as carbon is concerned, the borough\u27s density is right and good. Sure, the streets of midtown are clogged with cars. But walking, subways, and tall buildings with their cozy apartments and offices—all are exemplars of energy efficiency. Low-carbon virtuous, by default. This is the story told by the New Yorker writer David Owen in his classic essay Green Manhattan. It\u27s the story that\u27s been repeated a thousand more times by Michael Bloomberg. But the story is incomplete. And the implications are global. Manhattan isn\u27t a snow globe, and neither is New York City. It just pretends to be one in its annual carbon-accounting reports, the city\u27s official tallies of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming and of those gases\u27 attribution to local activities. The unfortunate norm, which New York follows, is to use a method that ignores the emissions caused by growing and raising the city\u27s food, ignores the carbon emitted to power the factories that assemble New Yorker\u27s smart phones and weave their clothes, and ignores the fumes spewed by planes that ferry New Yorkers around the world

It Gets Wetter

It\u27s a novel scene—New York City, 123 years from now: half-drowned but not out. Still a capital of real estate, still a political powerhouse, still an unequal battleground between finance and housing movements, still a crucible where capitalism and climate politics are smashed, melted, and twisted together. The (true) physical premise is that upper Manhattan is fifty feet higher than lower Manhattan

Seize the Hamptons: We Should All Get the Chance to Escape the City and Enjoy Leisure - Without the Hefty Ecological Footprint

Central park was once the greenest piece of Manhattan. Now environmentalists and politicians trumpet the city\u27s towers and subway tunnels, emblems of energy-efficient density, as the island\u27s greatest assets. With global warming threatening to kill millions a year, and inter-state negotiations stalled, pro-density planning is an increasingly vogue strategy for cutting carbon emissions. The basic idea is sound. Cluster home, work, and services and you reduce car traffic and improve daily life. Assemble people in large buildings and they\u27ll use energy more efficiently. Everyone is jumping on board — from big think tanks and international institutes to progressive planners and politicians. Make the suburbs more like Manhattan — or at least Brooklyn — they shout, and we\u27ll get more livable cities that also mitigate global warming

Time to Pull the Plug on Urban Fossil Consumption: Review of Andreas Malm, \u3cem\u3eFossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming\u3c/em\u3e

Andreas Malm\u27s wonderful book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, is about power. Since I\u27m a scholar who researches urban climate politics, I\u27m especially excited that Malm\u27s analysis of power is so centered on urban politics. I\u27ll explain what I mean by that, then suggest some interesting lessons from Malm\u27s account that his arguments around contemporary climate politics have underplayed

The Rationed City: The Politics of Water, Housing and Land Use in Drought-Parched São Paulo

Specters of rationing haunt metro São Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state’s center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state’s profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation, I propose, through an exploration of the crisis’s origins and recent developments that builds on over one year of ethnographic fieldwork, a new approach to ecological scarcity. It revitalizes, in a socioecological and crisis-sensitive form, Manuel Castells’s concept of collective consumption politics, with a focus on housing and land use. The question is how acute crises and longstanding socioecological struggles interact, from above and below. In São Paulo, this dilemma takes the form of housing movements’ and environmentalists’ longstanding estrangement, but prompted by crisis, some leaders are experimenting with cooperation. In an echo of the June 2013 bus fare protests, this fledgling coalition proposes a democratic version of rationing that goes beyond the distribution of water through pipes and that threatens broader power arrangements