The Sustainability Class vs Working-Class Environmentalism

We are currently witnessing the dismantling of environmental policies and a reversal of climate commitments on a large scale. But what kind of environmentalism do we really want, and for whom? Environmentalism is not about switching out plastic for paper straws, electric vehicles, carbon-neutral yachts, or eco-friendly waterfront real-estate.

It’s not about meeting the desires of a smoothie-slurping “green” class whose lives depend on increasingly precarious working class livelihoods. Environmentalism is about building class power to resist the decimation of life on our planet by a privileged minority.

Join Ashley Dawson, Emma River-Roberts, Aaron Vansintjan, and Vijay Kolinjivadi for a discussion on how to reject the “sustainability class” and instead build a working class environmentalism.

Order The Sustainability Class here: http://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781620977439

Speakers:

Emma River-Roberts is the Founder and Co-Director of the international non-profit the Working Class Climate Alliance, as well as a PhD Researcher at Goldsmiths University, specialising in working class environmentalism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has published numerous books on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the toxic impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.

Aaron Vansintjan was born in Ghent, Belgium and lives in Montreal, Canada. After studying philosophy and natural resource sciences, he became involved in Montreal’s artist and activist community, running an underground venue and organizing around food and housing justice. Eventually, a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London took him to Barcelona and Hanoi, leading him to write essays on how people build and transform their world, through food, social movements, and political imagination. He has since co-authored two books: The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (Verso) and, with Vijay Kolinjivadi, The Sustainability Class: How to take back our future from lifestyle environmentalists (The New Press). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, Al Jazeera, and The Conversation.

Vijay Kolinjivadi is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio and born from two immigrant parents from Tamil Nadu, India. For over a decade, Vijay has worked as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, covering UN multilateral environmental processes around the world. He now teaches community economic development and ecological economics at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. His research explores the social impacts of putting a monetary price on the conservation of nature. He has published on environmental politics for Aljazeera, The New Internationalist, Green European Journal, Newsweek, and Science for the People, among others. He is the co-author of The Sustainability Class: How to take back our future from lifestyle environmentalists, for The New Press.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuCa9KwQbBg

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