Crimes Against Nature by Jeff Sparrow illustrates both the ineffectiveness of small tweaks that leave the larger systemic problems in place as well as the placement of capitalism as the systemic ill that fuels climate change.

This is not primarily a prescriptive book, though it suggests the changes that need to be made. These changes are societal, cultural, and political, but specific actions are largely not mentioned. My impression is that this is due to the fact that societies differ around the world so the detailed changes that could work in Australia might not work in the US. The basic approach will always be acting on the same "guilty party," namely capitalism, but because of different relationships the specific actions will be different. So this is more a call to action that includes a call to form an action plan for your location.

While the book works well as a whole, it is really a collection of essays, so there is less of a building of an argument and more of a series of illustrations of what has happened and what might be a way forward. Because of this, there is less feeling of a single argument (although it is there) but it also lends itself to being read in bits, since each chapter can pretty much be read independently of the others.

I would recommend this to those readers who are concerned about our environment and who also believe that most of the piecemeal changes proposed and, sometimes, acted upon just aren't enough. The world can be helped and we can live better lives, but we need to quit worshipping the almighty profit motive.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing. ( )

I received Jeff Sparrow's book through the Early Reviewer's program. His discussion of how capitalism came about was very enlightening. It made me realize the impact that advertising has on us. I have found myself reverting back to the days of my needing less "stuff" and donating or recycling as much as I can. I was delighted to see that my nephew (yes, my nephew!) has started to can some foods like his grandmother did. Perhaps there's hope that the next generation will have an impact on mitigating what has become an environmental disaster. ( )

Sparrow starts off great. He talks about some things I didn't know about and does a good job with citations. But the last quarter of the book or so, where he offers the obligatory "but there's hope" speech just didn't hold the same level of scholarly backing. He relied more on ideas from creative writers of the past rather than facts. I get that it's important for people to have hope, but the story here is that corporations have been killing the world and the world's inhabitants for a long, long time. Maybe we need hope, but rage might be the only emotion that can push back fast enough to elicit change in time. ( )

Jeff Sparrow’s very well written set of essays cogently makes the case that the underlying bedrock of climate change today is the capitalistic system, particularly its reliance on fossil fuels as its major energy source.
He argues that global warming is a modern phenomenon that has occurred not because of innate human greed but because of “a particular set of social and political structures that didn’t exist in the past and needn’t exist in the future.”
He makes a strong historical case of how and why the current version of capitalism came about, although the initial perpetrators had little realization that carbon based industrial development and growth were building into a devastating attack on the environmental system as the residue of fossil fuel consumption incrementally began to raise the temperature of the planet. But even after that phenomenon was substantially understood, beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, there were now powerful economic and political forces opposing any substantial changes to either the fossil fuel based activities or the economic and social beliefs in the specific capitalistic practices accounting for modern global warming.
Sparrow concludes that the only solution is a systemic change in that capitalistic system and that such a change is not only necessary but quite possible. He lays out the problem quite well but unless there is strong leadership and positive action from the major greenhouse gas emitters-particularly the United States, China, Russia and the European Union- I am much more skeptical than Sparrow that sufficient changes will be made by those nations to begin to lessen further environmental damage before we have substantial and devastating effects around the world. What is done in the next couple of decades will determine how much damage our planet and the world’s population will have to endure. ( )