BiblioVault - Books about Environmental Destruction

Bleakonomics

A Heartwarming Introduction to Financial Catastrophe, the Jobs Crisis and Environmental Destruction

Rob Larson

Pluto Press, 2012

Bleakonomics is a short and darkly humorous guide to the three great crises plaguing today's world: environmental degradation, social conflict in the age of austerity and financial instability.

Written for anyone who is wondering how we’ve come to this point, Rob Larson holds mainstream economic theory up against the grim reality of a planet in meltdown. He looks at scientists’ conclusions about climate change, the business world’s opinions about its own power, and reveals the fingerprints of finance on American elections.

With a unique and engaging approach to each crucial subject, students, academics and activists will find a lot to appreciate in this quiet call-to-arms for a saner and more stable world.

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Foreclosing the Future

The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction

Bruce Rich

Island Press, 2013

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has vowed that his institution will fight poverty and climate change, a claim that World Bank presidents have made for two decades. But if worldwide protests and reams of damning internal reports are any indication, too often it does just the opposite. By funding development projects and programs that warm the planet and destroy critical natural resources on which the poor depend, the Bank has been hurting the very people it claims to serve. What explains this blatant contradiction?

If anyone has the answer, it is arguably Bruce Rich—a lawyer and expert in public international finance who has for the last three decades studied the Bank’s institutional contortions, the real-world consequences of its lending, and the politics of the global environmental crisis. What emerges from the bureaucratic dust is a disturbing and gripping story of corruption, larger-than-life personalities, perverse incentives, and institutional amnesia. The World Bank is the Vatican of development finance, and its dysfunction plays out as a reflection of the political hypocrisies and failures of governance of its 188 member countries.

Foreclosing the Future shows how the Bank’s failure to address the challenges of the 21st Century has implications for everyone in an increasingly interdependent world. Rich depicts how the World Bank is a microcosm of global political and economic trends—powerful forces that threaten both environmental and social ruin. Rich shows how the Bank has reinforced these forces, undercutting the most idealistic attempts at alleviating poverty and sustaining the environment, and damaging the lives of millions. Readers will see global politics on an increasingly crowded planet as they never have before—and come to understand the changes necessary if the World Bank is ever to achieve its mission.

To review the references and notes with links to articles, please click on the "Resources" tab at https://islandpress.org/foreclosing-the-future.

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Unserious Ecocriticism

Humor, Play & Environmental Destruction in Art & Visual Culture

Edited by Jessica Landau and Maria Lux

Amherst College Press, 2026

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice are complex, messy, and gravely important issues. In addressing these concerns, traditional ecocriticism understandably has taken itself very seriously. Unserious Ecocriticism, by contrast, highlights alternative responses to the challenges of environmental collapse and catastrophe. By theorizing an unserious ecocriticism, the essays, artworks, and other contributions in this volume validate and empower alternatives to mainstream environmentalism, scholarship, and artmaking. The essays, artworks, and non-traditional scholarly formats of this edited collection demonstrate that the creative tools available to artists and those who study them are particularly well positioned to inventively disrupt normative modes of ecocritical presentation and environmentalist thought.

Rather than approach environmental crises through tragic and dire warnings, contributors take seriously the unexpected or easily dismissed, play with format and form, embrace the bodily and abject, take pleasure in their subjects of study, have fun, and crack jokes. In Unserious Ecocriticism, humor, playfulness, parody, and irreverence become tools to challenge expectations, cope with complicated problems, and imagine new futures.

Edited by Jessica Landau and Maria Lux, with a foreword by Aaron Sachs and contributions from Allie ES Wist, Deke Weaver, Kathleen McDermott, Annie Ronan, Kimiko Matsumura, Ina Linge, Paula Kupfer, Craig Carey, Anna Ialeggio, Topher Lineberry, Stentor Danielson, Patrick Gonder, Mathew Teti, Nicole Seymour, with Emily Eliza Scott, Rob Gioielli, and Jenny Price, Phaan Howng, and Jennifer Schell.

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