Soil degradation is real and global, even if the evidence is not so easy to glean. Degradation poses comparable risks to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and nonhuman animal extinctions. Few have noticed soil degradation as the problem it has become, except most indigenous peoples in their struggles for survival.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment provides an in-depth and accessible analysis and theorization of environmental issues in the region. It will help readers make connections between Latin American and other regions' perspectives, experiences, and environmental concerns. Latin America has seen an acceleration of environmental degradation due to the expansion of resource extraction and urban areas. This Handbook addresses Latin America not only as object of study, but also as a region with a long and profound history of critical thinking on these themes. Furthermore, the Handbook departs from the environment as a social issue inextricably linked to politics, economy and culture. It will be an invaluable resource for those wanting not only to understand the issues, but also to engage with ideas about environmental politics and social-ecological transformation. The handbook covers a broad range organized in three areas: physical geography, ecology and crucial environmental problems of the region, key theoretical and methodological issues used to understand Latin America's ecosocial contexts, and institutional and grassroots practices related to more just and sustainable worlds. The Handbook will set a research agenda for the near future and provide comprehensive research on most subregions relative to environmental transformations, challenges, struggles and political processes. It stands as a fresh and much needed state of the art introduction for researchers, scholars, post-graduates and academic audiences on Latin American contributions to theorization, empirical research and environmental practices.

no adequate handbook on ecosocialism of this kind exists reflects the diversity of ideas that can be combined under ecosocialism a resource that is as comprehensive as possible with respect not only to theorisation or ideological framework, but also to existing projects, practices, and movements

This book explores the critical role of urban food production in strengthening communities and in building ecosocialism. It integrates theory and practice, drawing on several local case studies from seven countries across four continents: China, Cuba, Ghana, Italy, Tanzania, the UK, and the US. Research shows that the term "urban agriculture" overstates the limited food-growing potential in cities due to a shortage of land required for growing grains, the basic human food staple. For this reason, the book suggests "urban cultivation" as an appropriate term which indicates social and political progress achieved through combined labours of urbanites to produce food. It examines how these collaborative food-growing efforts help raise local social capital, foster community organisation, and create ecological awareness in order to promote urban food production while also ensuring environmental sustainability. This book illustrates how urban cultivation constitutes a potentially important aspect of urban ecosystems, as well as offers solutions to current environmental problems. It recentres attention to the global South and debunks Eurocentric narratives, challenging capitalist commercial food-growing regimes and encouraging ecosocialist food-growing practices. Written in an accessible style, this book is recommended reading about an emergent issue which will interest students and scholars of environmental studies, geography, sociology, urban studies, politics, and economics.

More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences. As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism's heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends. By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn't, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.

"What the future fortunes of Gramsci's] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this." --Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface

Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci's masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary.

Gramscian terms such as "civil society" and "hegemony" are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci's purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci's writings, is absorb Gramsci's methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of "grand explanatory schemes," the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his "Nota" "Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society."

The rigor of Santucci's examination of Gramsci's life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.

This book explores the critical role of urban food production in strengthening communities and in building ecosocialism. It integrates theory and practice, drawing on several local case studies from seven countries across four continents: China, Cuba, Ghana, Italy, Tanzania, the UK, and the US. Research shows that the term "urban agriculture" overstates the limited food-growing potential in cities due to a shortage of land required for growing grains, the basic human food staple. For this reason, the book suggests "urban cultivation" as an appropriate term which indicates social and political progress achieved through combined labours of urbanites to produce food. It examines how these collaborative food-growing efforts help raise local social capital, foster community organisation, and create ecological awareness in order to promote urban food production while also ensuring environmental sustainability. This book illustrates how urban cultivation constitutes a potentially important aspect of urban ecosystems, as well as offers solutions to current environmental problems. It recentres attention to the global South and debunks Eurocentric narratives, challenging capitalist commercial food-growing regimes and encouraging ecosocialist food-growing practices. Written in an accessible style, this book is recommended reading about an emergent issue which will interest students and scholars of environmental studies, geography, sociology, urban studies, politics, and economics.

"What the future fortunes of Gramsci's] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this." --Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface

Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci's masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary.

Gramscian terms such as "civil society" and "hegemony" are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci's purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci's writings, is absorb Gramsci's methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of "grand explanatory schemes," the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his "Nota" "Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society."

The rigor of Santucci's examination of Gramsci's life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.

Soil degradation is real and global, even if the evidence is not so easy to glean. Degradation poses comparable risks to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and nonhuman animal extinctions. Few have noticed soil degradation as the problem it has become, except most indigenous peoples in their struggles for survival.

More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences. As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism's heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends. By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn't, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.