Why am I passionate about this?
I became a climate activist and later a researcher after my sister and her family lost their home in the Black Saturday fires of 2009 in Victoria. Their bravery and survival is a daily reminder for me, that climate change is upon us, and we are fighting for our lives as well as our children and future generations. Because my research has been focused on colonialism and race their story has opened many questions for me around the history of colonialism and whether it was coal-fired. I’m thinking about what it means for settlers to lose their homes on stolen land, and whether this recognition could prompt us to rethink land ownership, custodianship, and coexistence.
Liz's book list on climate change and race
Why did Liz love this book?
White Skin, Black Fuel is the most clarifying book I’ve read explaining the rise of the far right and how it made climate change an issue of politics rather than physics, of ideology rather than environment.
It has many light touches and is accessible in style, so the reader is guided through the postwar progression of the far-right as principally an anti-immigration platform that then gained, once they had acquired some electoral credibility, the support and funding of fossil fuel corporations to advance their extractivist business models and scuttle any transition to renewables.
It made connections I’d been grasping at for years.
1 author picked White Skin, Black Fuel as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilian president has opened the Amazon and watched it burn. In Europe, parties denying the crisis and insisting on maximum combustion have stormed into office, from Sweden to Spain. On the brink of breakdown, the forces most aggressively promoting business-as-usual have surged - always in defense of white privilege, against supposed threats from non-white others. Where have they come from?
The first study of the far right…