I want to add some books that we’ll be covering in our upcoming Workers’ Liberty reading groups to Stuart Jordan’s “Reading on environment emergencies”, Solidarity 617.
In Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, the evolutionary epidemiologist Robert G. Wallace gives vital accounts of how capital is driving our age of pandemics. Large-scale and international agriculture, organised in pursuit of profit and coupled with ecosystem destruction, leads to spill over of ever-scarier pathogens from animals to human: and with increasing regularity. This is also an important rebuttal to nationalist, conspiratorial, or fatalist accounts of the emergence of pandemics.
Historic examples of working-class activism on environmental issues, to learn from and be inspired by include the Green Bans in Australia by the Builders Labourers Federation, the Lucas Aerospace workers’ fight for an Alternative Plan for production, and the occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight. Our study group will read and discuss, in turn, The Vestas Jobs Battle: How Wind Turbine Workers Became a Power,Green Bans, Red Union: The Saving of a City and The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making?
Our fourth reprint of For Workers’ Climate Action, out in November, contains a handful of reviews of other books, plus additional suggestions throughout.
Zack Muddle, Bristol
