Samuel Alexander

Rupert Read

Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. The reckless combustion of fossil fuels means that Earth's climate is changing disastrously, in ways that cannot be resolved by piecemeal reform or technological innovation. Sooner rather than later this global capitalist system will come to an end, destroyed by its own ecological contradictions. Unless humanity does something beautiful and unprecedented, the ending of industrial civilisation will take the form of collapse, which could mean a harrowing die-off of billions of people. This book is for those ready to accept the full gravity of the human predicament - and to consider what in the world is to be done. How can humanity mindfully navigate the inevitable descent ahead? Two critical thinkers here remove the rose-tinted glasses of much social and environmental commentary. With unremitting realism and yet defiant positivity, they engage each other in uncomfortable conversations about the end of Empire and what lies beyond.

Conversations on the End of Empire - and what Lies Beyond

This Civilisation is Finished

Parayi Tahrif Et

Brendan Gleeson

This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new urban imaginary, that of degrowth suburbia, which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.

A Radical Urban Imaginary

Degrowth in the Suburbs

When industrial civilisation collapsed in the third decade of the 21st century, a community living on a small island in the South Pacific Ocean found itself permanently isolated from the rest of the world. With no option but to build a self-sufficient economy with very limited energy supplies, this community set about creating a simpler way of life that could flourish into the deep future. Determined above all else to transcend the materialistic values of the Old World, they made a commitment to live materially simple lives, convinced that this was the surest path to genuine freedom, peace, and sustainable prosperity. Seven decades later, in the year 2099, this book describes the results of their remarkable living experiment.

Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation

Entropia

An Analysis of Ethical Conceptions

Moral Order and Progress

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Spinoza And Time

Sangeetha Chandrashekeran

As the crises of capitalism continue to intensify, radical thinkers must conjure realistic and inspirational alternative futures beyond this failing social order. This book presents a stimulating array of essays exploring such post-capitalist futures. With contributions and perspectives from the Global North and Global South, central topics include ecosocialism, ecofeminism, degrowth, community economies, and the Green New Deal. There are also chapters offering analyses of land, energy, technology, universal basic services, and (re)localisation of economies. The book is in three parts. The first presents various alternative paradigms for thinking about – and working toward – post-capitalist futures. The second section offers perspectives on alternative governance strategies and approaches for post-capitalist futures. The closing section gathers various analyses of post-capitalist geographies and resistance. Going beyond critique and instead envisioning alternative imaginaries, this collection should challenge and inspire readers to think and act upon the range of possibilities immanent in our crisis-ridden present.

Paradigms, Politics, and Prospects

Post-Capitalist Futures

The Inspiring True Stories Behind Groundbreaking LGBTQ+ Icons

Little Book of Queer Icons

In Salinor a prophecy is about to come true. Identities have been hidden and no one is who they appear to be. Leo and Danais are not who they thought they were; their friends and family are leading double lives; nothing is as it seems. The two of them are the key to bringing down a Tyrant who has ruled the realm with his hate for over a thousand years. Danais and Leo must figure things out before all is lost.

Salinor

Gavin is helping one of his best friends, Dario, navigate through depression with the help of another friend, Rayland. The three did everything together until high school ruined the bond. Something happened to Gavin that puts his friendship with Dario at risk. When it came down to the choice between their friendship and his own feelings, Gavin chose himself. Was it the best choice? Can the damage he did to Dario be undone? Will he ever get a chance to deal with the pain that led to the decision? Will he tell Dario what hurt him so bad he'd risk their friendship? Or will he bury it so deep he becomes numb to the pain? Gavin doesn't have the answers, he only knows that this one choice may be his biggest regret in life.This series was designed to be read in order due to different vantage points of events.

Gavin

This book presents a series of urban investigations undertaken in the metropolis of Melbourne. It is based on the idea that ‘enchantment’ as an affective state is important to ethical and political engagement. Alexander and Gleeson argue that a sense of enchantment can give people the impulse to care and engage in an increasingly troubled world, whereas disenchantment can lead to resignation. Applying and extending this theory to the urban landscape, the authors walk their home city with eyes open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing the industrial city in different ways. This unique methodology, described as ‘urban tramping’, positions the authors as freethinking freewalkers of the city, encumbered only with the duty to look through the delusions of industrial capitalism towards its troubled, contradictory soul. These urban investigations were disrupted midway by COVID-19, a plague that ended up confirming the book’s central thesis of a fractured modernity vulnerable to various internal contradictions.

Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City

Urban Awakenings

He found love too late and now... his mind can't let go of something that never was.

Broken: The Edge of Insanity

Jonathan Rutherford

Ted Trainer is an Australian scholar-activist who defends an 'eco-anarchist' perspective he describes as the Simpler Way. His vision is of a world where self-governing communities live materially simple but sufficient lives, in harmony with ecological limits. This anthology brings together some of Trainer's most insightful and provocative essays

Collected Writings of Ted Trainer

The Simpler Way

'Capitalist realism' implies that, ever since the fall of Soviet communism in 1989, capitalism has been the only realistic system of production and distribution. Everything else is generally dismissed as 'utopianism' or just naïve dreaming. This perspective points to a worrying failure of imagination, suggesting that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But here is the paradox of capitalist realism: just as the dominant cultural imagination has contracted into a single vision of what is possible, the existing system shows itself to be in the process of self-destructing, serving neither people nor planet. Whether by design or disaster, the future will be post-capitalist. In his fourth book of collected essays, degrowth scholar and activist Samuel Alexander seeks to transcend capitalist realism. He shows that viable and desirable alternatives are being lived into existence today by diverse but connected social movements. Calling for a 'degrowth' transition of planned economic contraction, Alexander examines and develops this emerging paradigm from various political, energetic, and aesthetic perspectives. Readers will come away seeing plausible pathways to prosperity, sustainability, and resilience that do not rely on the capitalist growth model of progress.

The Politics, Energetics, and Aesthetics of Degrowth

Beyond Capitalist Realism

What role might art need to play in the transition beyond consumer capitalism? Can 'culture jamming' contribute to the necessary revolution in consciousness? And can art provoke social change in a way that rational argument and scientific evidence cannot?In his new book, "Compost Capitalism: Art and Aesthetics at the End of Empire", Samuel Alexander explores these and other questions, both in theory and practice. The book begins with a novel theoretical defence of the necessity of art and aesthetic interventions in progressive cultural and political change, and concludes by presenting over one hundred 'culture jamming' artworks from a range of contributors that challenge the status quo and expand the horizons of what alternatives are possible.

Art and Aesthetics at the End of Empire

Compost Capitalism

What role might art need to play in the transition beyond consumer capitalism? Can 'culture jamming' contribute to the necessary revolution in consciousness? And might art be able to provoke social change in ways that rational argument and scientific evidence cannot? In this stimulating new book, "Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth," degrowth scholar Samuel Alexander explores these questions, both in theory and practice. He begins with a novel theoretical defence of art and aesthetic interventions as activity that is necessary to effective social and political activism, and concludes by presenting over one hundred 'culture jamming' artworks from a range of contributors that challenge the status quo and expand the horizons of what alternatives are possible.

Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth

Art Against Empire

What are the political, economic, and cultural implications of living on a full planet in an age of limits? How can seven-and-a-half billion people flourish on our one planet? What might 'one planet' living actually look like? And can we come together to build resilient, localised, sufficiency-based economies as carbon capitalism continues to deteriorate? In this third book of his collected essays, Samuel Alexander offers deeper insight into the themes of degrowth, permaculture, and voluntary simplicity, which he explored in earlier texts.

Degrowth, Permaculture, and the Simpler Way

Wild Democracy

A boy bullied-father lost to tragic events. A son with drunken parents-grown before his time. A child, the youngest boy of four. Fighting to be heard-lost in the noise of masculinity. A teen with an overprotective father struggling with sexual identity-his first love gone wrong. A youth with an ailing mother and useless father, confused-dealing with his hate for him. Four boys joined by internal issues and struggling to fit in; projecting their issues by bullying. Until one day the strangest thing happens. A usual victim stands up and demands they return an item. A sketchbook. Now the foursome turned five becomes an odd friendship where views collide, motives are questioned and tension threatens to destroy their close-knit unit. None can survive unharmed and none shall remain the same.

Brothers and Frenemies

Joshua Floyd

Carbon civilisation is powered predominately by finite fossil fuels and with each passing day it becomes harder to increase or even maintain current supply. Our one-off fossil energy inheritance is but a brief anomaly in the evolution of the human story, a momentary energy spike from the perspective of deep time. Today humanity faces the dual crises of fossil fuel depletion and climate change, both of which are consequences of the modern world's fundamental reliance on the energy abundance provided by fossil energy sources. Can renewable energy replace the fossil energy foundations of carbon civilisation? This book examines these issues and presents a narrative linking energy and society that maintains we should be preparing for renewable futures neither of energy abundance nor scarcity, but rather energy sufficiency. For industrial societies, this means navigating energy descent futures.

Samuel Alexander

Books

Your next favorite book is out there