Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

There is broad agreement on the left that capitalism cannot solve the crisis it created, and sharp disagreement about what should replace it. Should the economy grow its way out through massive green investment, or stop growing altogether? Should transformation come through a strong planning state, through decentralized self-management, or through returning land to Indigenous stewardship? This lens gathers those answers and sets them against each other on purpose.

Anchor questions

• What would an ecological society actually look like, day to day?
• Growth, degrowth, or a different kind of development: which points toward a livable future?
• What does “Land Back” mean, and what would it change?
• Can the state deliver an ecological transition, or must it come from below?
• What do Indigenous, ecosocialist, degrowth, and solarpunk visions share, and where do they clash?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.

Indigenous ecology and Land Back

• Nick Estes (b. 1983), Our History Is the Future (2019). Standing Rock read as one episode in two centuries of Oceti Sakowin resistance rather than as a new environmental cause: the pipeline fight is a long war over land and water that never stopped. The anchor text for Land Back, and it was missing from this school entirely. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: versobooks.com. Free and assignable: his interview with a full transcript at thedigradio.com, or a short video opener at youtube.com (about 24,000 views, niche, and the best that could be verified).

• Robin Wall Kimmerer (b. 1953), Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). Weaves Potawatomi teachings and botany into an ethic of reciprocity with the living world, offering a vision of abundance and gift rather than extraction. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: milkweed.org. Her On Being interview is free and published with a full transcript, so it can be assigned as a reading: onbeing.org

• The Red Nation (collective), The Red Deal (2021). An Indigenous, anticapitalist program insisting that any Green New Deal must also be “Red,” centering decolonization and Land Back over growth. Read against the Green New Deal debate below. The Red Nation released the original pamphlets free but not this book. Paywalled: commonnotions.org, and see the note on access for how to get it. The free pamphlets the book grew out of are partly broken since the movement migrated hosts: Parts I and III now 404. Part II, Heal Our Bodies, survives, 46 pages: therednationdotorg.files.wordpress.com. An authorized excerpt from the book is at mondoweiss.net

Ecological thought from the Global South

The lens above argues about growth in the language of the countries that did the growing. These are the traditions that were being dug up to pay for it, and their questions are not the same. Buen vivir does not ask how fast an economy should expand; it asks whether “development” was ever the right noun.

• Eduardo Gudynas, Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow (2011). Buen vivir as a plural alternative to development itself rather than a gentler version of it, rooted in Andean Indigenous thought and argued in the language of political ecology. Gudynas is sympathetic and unsentimental at once, sharp about governments that use the phrase while expanding the mines. Free: gudynas.com
• Republic of Ecuador, Rights for Nature Articles in the Constitution (2008), and Bolivia, Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (2010). The first places on earth to give nature enforceable legal rights: Pachamama has the right to exist and regenerate, and any person may sue on her behalf. Read the texts, then read Svampa on what those same governments did next. Free: Ecuador, Bolivia
• Maristella Svampa, Commodities Consensus (2015) and Neo-extractivism in Latin America (2019). The bargain left and right governments in Latin America both accepted: pay for social programs by digging and drilling harder. This is the necessary complication to any story in which the pink tide was simply green, and it is written from the left rather than against it. The essay is free on her own site: maristellasvampa.net. The book is a Cambridge Element and is paywalled: cambridge.org, and see the note on access for how to get it. The PDF of it circulating on her own site is Cambridge’s typeset file rather than an authorized release, which is a good reminder that an author’s website is not by itself permission. Her Spanish sibling book makes the same argument and is genuinely open access under Creative Commons: CLACSO
• Wangari Maathai (1940 to 2011), Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (2004). She organized Kenyan women to plant forty million trees and was beaten and jailed for it, and here explains in her own voice why trees, democracy, and peace are one question rather than three. Short enough to read aloud. Free: nobelprize.org
• Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, Ogoni Bill of Rights (1990). What the Ogoni asked of Nigeria over Shell’s oil and their land, five years before the state hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others for asking. Environmental justice as a primary source, written by the movement that paid for it. Free: mosop.org

Ecosocialism

• Joel Kovel (1936 to 2018) and Michael Löwy (b. 1938), An Ecosocialist Manifesto (2001). A brief foundational program for a red-green future built on democratic control of production and the free development of ecological needs. Free: systemicalternatives.org
• Naomi Klein (b. 1970), This Changes Everything (2014). A widely read argument that the market cannot solve the crisis it created, and that climate action means confronting capitalism and rebuilding local economies and democracy. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: simonandschuster.com. Her full-hour Democracy Now! interview on the book is free with a transcript: democracynow.org

The growth debate

The sharpest strategic argument in climate politics runs between degrowth and a green growth Green New Deal, with planned “half-earth” visions as a third pole. Read these three together and let the room take sides.

• Jason Hickel (b. 1982), We Need a Green New Deal Without Growth (2020). The degrowth position: a just transition must abandon the growth imperative and scale down the throughput of the rich economies. Free: jasonhickel.org
• Robert Pollin (b. 1950), Degrowth Policies Cannot Avert Climate Crisis (2021). The opposing position, holding that only large-scale green investment and continued growth decoupled from fossil fuels can cut emissions in time. Included precisely because it disagrees with Hickel. Free: truthout.org
• Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Half-Earth Socialism (2022). A third position: a planned economy built on rewilding half the earth, energy quotas, and global veganism, which rejects endless growth but leans hard on central planning. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: versobooks.com. Better than an excerpt, the authors give away a browser game of their own plan: play it as a group and watch the tradeoffs bite, at play.half.earth
• For a long-form audio case, hear Timothée Parrique on Upstream, Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth (2025). The French degrowth economist distinguishes degrowth from a recession and sketches a dynamic steady-state economy, the fullest spoken introduction to the degrowth position gathered here. Free: upstreampodcast.org

Prefigurative and hopeful visions

• Murray Bookchin (1921 to 2006), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971). Argues that ecological abundance makes possible a decentralized, self-managed society, the basis for his social ecology and municipalism. Shared with Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• The Solarpunk Community, A Solarpunk Manifesto (2019). A short, hopeful statement of a decentralized, post-scarcity future powered by clean energy and rooted in community. Useful for imagining an ecological society in a register that is not only catastrophe. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Debates and disagreements

The school holds the disagreements open. The degrowth communists (Hickel, Saito in the theoretical lens), the green growth Green New Deal (Pollin), the half-earth planners (Vettese and Pendergrass), the ecosocialists (Kovel and Löwy), and the Indigenous Land Back tradition (the Red Nation, Kimmerer) do not agree about growth, the state, or technology. Degrowth says the rich economies must shrink; Pollin says shrinking is politically and physically too slow; Half-Earth Socialism wants to plan the shrinking centrally; Land Back says the question is not growth but whose land and whose sovereignty. Put them side by side rather than choosing for the room.

Video

• “Why We Need Degrowth” (Our Changing Climate, 2023). Roughly 26 minutes, about 213,000 views. A longer case for degrowth over green growth, a good anchor for the growth debate. youtube.com/watch?v=48G3ox90wss
• “How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now” (Our Changing Climate with Andrewism, 2022). Roughly 13 minutes, about 348,000 views. An accessible introduction to solarpunk as a concrete near-term project rather than a distant utopia. youtube.com/watch?v=twGcjDnOb_U

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially Pacific and Caribbean climate thought, which this lens still does not reach: the Global South material added here is Latin American and African. Energy democracy and food sovereignty now sit in the practical lens. Note that Estes, Malm, and Vettese and Pendergrass have no borrowable copy anywhere; the free full texts circulating online are unauthorized, and each entry here points to the publisher with a free companion instead.