All we want is the earth: land, labour and movements beyond environmentalism

A series of social and ecological crises confront communities across the globe. Rooted in ongoing processes of capitalism and colonialism, these issues call forth transformative modes of resistance to establish viable planetary alternatives for living.

Written against this backdrop, All We Want is the Earth successfully delivers three interventions. The first offers a concise deconstruction of mainstream environmentalism’s origin story and provokes the reader to break free of narrow conventional imaginaries of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ that focus on ecological and nonhuman systems, landscapes, and nonhuman species primarily as a backdrop of human affairs. The second interposition integrates ostensibly unrelated social movements into the history of environmentalism, which helps it convincingly argue that ‘environmentalism loses its political purchase when it focuses on nonhuman land and ecologies at the exclusion of concerns with livelihoods, forms of labour and violent histories of colonialism’ (p. 100). These two interventions help set the stage for Bresnihan and Millner’s third intervention where they introduce the notion of resonance as a framework to understand how diverse, translocal struggles can support and build on one another to respond to today’s ecological and social maladies.

The authors do much to both problematize and provincialize the typical picture of environmentalism, offering an invitation for the reader to engage in a kind of contrapuntal relearning consistent with decolonial scholarship. To achieve this, they juxtapose prevailing histories of environmentalism stretching back to the mid-20^th century alongside adjacent movements less-commonly recognized as ‘environmental’. Chapter 2, for example, situates Rachel Carson’s crusade against DDT alongside the organization of migrant farm workers by Dolores Huerta, César Chávez, and the United Farm Workers (UFW). While environmentalists focused on the risks of pesticide exposure in predominately white and suburban communities, the authors tell how UFW members parlayed this growing awareness and concern about pesticide exposure into their consumer boycott of Californian grapes – a tactical move that helped pressure agriculture industry owners to engage in contract negotiations with the UFW (p. 35).

A series of four interludes punctuate the book’s six chapters and core narrative structure. These function as brief asides and an opportunity for the authors to deconstruct, highlight, or otherwise expound on varying aesthetic regimes associated with the ‘environment’. For instance, the second interlude, Planetary Icons, showcases how the photographs ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Blue Marble’ from the Apollo missions convey a seemingly universal and therefore objective depiction of Earth. However, these images are emblematic of ‘one-worldism’ and reinforce a Western, scientific vision of reality that can downplay Indigenous and non-Western visions of the world.

By contrast, the authors advocate for a pluriversal conception of reality. It is from this ontological position that they articulate their primary conceptual innovation; something they refer to as resonance.

They contend that resonance, combined with acts of witnessing – that is, the demand for action through the communication of truth of a lived or shared reality – creates space for agential possibility within and beyond mainstream environmentalism. Rather than a single vision for emancipation, resonance recognizes how diverse social movements in opposition to ongoing processes of capitalism and colonialism can support one another across time and space. Critically, resonance leaves open the possibility for both disagreement and alignment between social movements, which shows how idiosyncratic but nonetheless hopeful exchange among movements can help advance a plurality of alternative modes of living.

Chapter 4: The Right to Subsist supplies an apt illustration of what the authors have in mind. Focused principally on the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in the Niger Delta and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, the text details how social movements may translate their protestations to places far afield. Though MOSOP’s struggle was imperceptible to existing aesthetics of environmental politics at the time, authors describe how the movement used new communication technologies and forums of exchange – like joining together with the emerging alter-globalization movement in Rossport, Ireland – to elevate their cause. Despite their distance, MOSOP president Ken Saro-Wiwa and Sister Majella McCarron along with their respective communities became interlinked through their common struggle against the state-sanctioned expropriation and enclosure of land for oil (p. 94). Around the same time, the Zapatistas similarly took advantage of new communication avenues to invite members of the international community to bear witness to their struggle. The authors argue it is this creative recombining of ideas that bounce off one another in different places and across time that gives an animating spirit for alternative social modes of being.

While I admire the authors’ ideas and the candor of their prose, the book is not above reproach. Although the text covers the UFW, an exploration into the on-again, off-again relationship different industrial unions have had with environmental issues in both the past and present would have helped further solidify the book’s argument. For instance, the book could have brought in Erik Loomis’ 2015 book, Empire of Timber, and its analysis of worker relations with old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest – a history the authors gloss over, relegating it to a single line of how environmentalists helped inform Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP strategy (p. 91). Greater discussion of organized labour could have similarly helped situate the book’s narrative within the contemporary discourses around climate mitigation strategies and energy transition efforts. These often emphasize technocratic, market-based solutions to environmental problems, which would have lent further fuel to the author’s argument for how mainstream environmentalism continues to uplift some narratives above others.

In any case, this book provides a valuable contribution in the form of an incisive alternate history of environmentalism. The introduction of resonance as conceptual praxis remains true to the emancipatory roots of critical and decolonial scholarship, while also offering a middle path between the espoused universality of conventional environmentalism on one hand and irreconcilable relativism on the other. In this, the book offers a hopeful vision for how past and present social movements can interact in a kind of ‘globalisation from below’ (p. 143). Thus, this book should be considered an essential read for readers engaged in the pursuit of more just futures.