Abstract
Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman’s Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change is a must-read for anyone interested in critical perspectives, environmental sociology, and beyond. Their important contributions to the fields of sociology and epistemology are threefold. First, the authors offer a thorough and timely review of the successes and shortcomings of the field of sociology as a whole and, specifically, its need to challenge dominant and often exclusionary paradigms of knowledge. Second, the authors offer several keen descriptions and deconstructions of the destructiveness and reification of neoliberalism. Their attention to neoliberalism as both a vehicle of oppression and an erasure of difference is key to the multi-faceted and hopeful, but still realistic, solutions they provide in the second half of their book. Third, through a combination of traditional empirical data analysis and narrative explorations, the authors explore how people and communities, mostly based in the United States, are countering neoliberal prescriptions and building better futures. In this book review, I will describe these three main contributions and then conclude with readership considerations.
After successfully building the important context of their work in the Introduction, the authors carefully detail the history of sociology with an eye toward its shortcomings. In particular, Malin and Kallman use the tools of environmental sociology to illustrate how environmental issues are integrated with systems of white supremacy, sexism, colonialism, and others. They clearly show the importance of decolonizing sociology so it can actually tell the stories of the communities that are actively decolonizing our world. Importantly, they argue for the importance of perceiving nature, culture, and society as intrinsically interwoven rather than divided into separate concepts and realms where they can be more easily reframed to satisfy neoliberal ideology.
Next, Malin and Kallman expose how elite people and groups use neoliberal economics and its accompanying neoliberal ideology to cement and reify their dominance and control. The very methods of neoliberalism, including commodification, privatization, deregulation, reregulation, and the dismantling of social safety nets, further disenfranchise groups with less power. To illustrate these points, the authors describe various case studies, including climate justice in Uganda: The Rise up Climate Movement and Vash Green Schools Project, the U.S. Youth Divestment Movement, Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation and Lakota Nation Approaches to Connective Community Building, Urban Street Bands and the Built Environment, Urban Spaces of Hope: Indigenous-Led Action, Rural Spaces of Hope: Havasupai Tribal nation’s Water Protectors and the Threat of Uranium Mining near the Grand Canyon, Indigenized Energy, Standing Rock, and Community Solar Cooperatives, Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm: Community Enrichment and Building Regenerative Systems, and Soul Fire Farm: Regenerative Farming to Dismantle Layered Oppression.
Throughout these case studies, they describe how these practices of neoliberalism maintain and benefit from an insidious combination of the erasure of difference, subjugation of the planet, and oppression of historically marginalized groups, especially Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). The neoliberal system is also supported by adherence to empirical science while delegitimizing other forms of knowledge. The authors give several solutions for dismantling these systems from various positions. Their most notable contribution, however, is their decision to use both traditional empirical data and research as well as knowledge production commonly devalued by the dominant system, namely narrative analysis, to explore new systems and approaches to building better communities.
The second half of the book focuses on how communities are organizing around environmentalism and the importance of democratizing and decentering economic interests for ecological regeneration. Specifically, the authors provide several examples of how people are building more sustainable lives for themselves and their communities by addressing and resisting capitalism. In part, they attribute the success of these community endeavors to their open acknowledgment of neoliberal approaches as subordinating humans and nonhumans for profit through various intersections of class struggles, sexism, racism, and colonialism. Through centering intersectional perspectives and solutions, the authors show how solving our ecological emergency is inextricably intertwined with—and therefore cannot be divorced from—our economic, political, social, and epistemological problems.
Malin and Kallman’s book is especially incredible in its ability to appeal to a wide variety of thinkers and learners. This work is essential to any scholar and researcher interested in the geopolitics of knowledge, social movements, and anti-colonial, antiracist, and environmental sociological arguments. The book is clear and accessible to audiences including undergraduates and graduate students. In particular, it would make a fantastic addition to any sociology course concerned with global problems, knowledge production, economic sociology, qualitative methods, or, of course, environmental sociology. Moreover, anyone who would like a critical, concise, and inclusive overview of the history of sociology and neoliberalism, generally speaking, would enjoy this book and appreciate it as a reference.
The authors’ attention to hope throughout their book is unique among the available publications in environmental sociology. From explaining the real-world implications of neoliberalism to providing detailed solutions, like donut economics, Malin and Kallman go beyond common arguments of environmental destruction to a place of mutual collaboration and resistance against the people, groups, structures, and systems that endanger our planet. Malin and Kallman certainly build something better with their book.