Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy

Historian, documentary filmmaker, activist, and author Jeremy Brecher is launching his latest book, The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy.

The Green New Deal – a visionary program to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty – erupted into public attention as a proposal for national legislation. The core principle of the Green New Deal recognizes climate protection as the basis for realizing full employment and social justice. While the struggle to embody it in national legislation is ongoing, there is a wave of initiatives from community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other non-federal actors designed to contribute to the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who helped initiate the campaign for national Green New Deal legislation, has called the grassroots wave “a Green New Deal from Below.”

 Brecher’s latest book provides an overview of Green New Deal from Below initiatives in many different arenas and locations. It reveals the broad range of the programs already under way and in development. The projects of Green New Dealers provide inspiration for thousands more to create the foundation for local, national, and even global mobilization–and reconstruction.

Reviews include:

“The Green New Deal, like every necessary transformation, is too important a project to be left to politicians. If we want a future where working-class Americans thrive and our planet is saved, we the people are going to have to show our leaders how to get the job done. Jeremy Brecher, the great historian and builder of working-class movements, understands this better than anyone. And with The Green New Deal from Below he provides the blueprint for another world that is, indeed, possible.”
–John Nichols, national affairs correspondent,
The Nation

“Massive social transformation emerges through the ingenuity and vision of ordinary people. Jeremy Brecher captures the beginnings of a sea change within communities, unions, cities, and states that champion climate protection, justice, and job creation through their own Green New Deals. These highly readable, inspiring, and hopeful chapters trace how change truly happens–from the bottom up.”
–Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement

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Jeremy Brecher is a historian, documentary filmmaker, activist, and author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction. He is a winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work, and is the co-founder and senior advisor to the Labor Network for Sustainability.

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