A review by Anjali Vaidya of The Green New Deal from Below by LNS newsletter editor Jeremy Brecher was just published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Vaidaya writes in part,
The book’s aim is to shift “the sense of what is possible.” To that end, from a large constellation of local Green New Deal efforts, Brecher—co-founder and senior advisor to the Labor Network for Sustainability—has selected a few dozen bright stars to illuminate and connect.
Brecher’s examples of how California and Boston are, independently, providing universal free meals for kids in school might not have immediately signaled climate action to me before I read this book. Nor would I have automatically put school lunches in the same category as a fight for affordable housing in Chicago. Or the program in Philadelphia, PowerCorpsPHL, which has been providing green job training to the recently incarcerated.
“What connects these projects,” they write, is “an intersection of goals: to fight, simultaneously, for the environment and for social justice. Put together, “they seem like the snowflakes that start an avalanche.
It’s an odd moment to be reviewing a book with the sheer energy and optimism that suffuses this one. The Green New Deal from Below is not an unrealistic book, but its political realism is still a far cry from the pessimistic dirge into which Western environmentalism so often slips. Cynicism can be oddly comforting. Hope is painful because it makes you open your eyes. It is striking, and invigorating, to see how many people in these pages don’t just hope but also act, taking the contagious idea that none of us is saved unless all of us are, and putting that idea to work.
For the full review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/snowflakes-that-start-an-avalanche/
To purchase the book: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088278