We have reached the point of no return. The existential threat of climate change is now a reality. The world has never been more vulnerable. Yet corporations are already planning a life beyond this point. The business models of fossil fuel giants factor in continued profitability in a scenario of a five-degree increase in global temperature. An increase that will kill millions, if not billions. This is the shocking reality laid bare in a new, hard-hitting book by David Whyte. Ecocide makes clear the problem won't be solved by tinkering around the edges, instead it maps out a plan to end the corporation's death-watch over us. Ecocide will reveal how the corporation has risen to this position of near impunity, but also what we need to do to fix it.
Introduction: Corporate ecocide
1 What is the corporation?
2 From colonialism to ecocide: capital's insatiable need to destroy
3 Regulation at the end-point of the world
Conclusion: Kill the corporation before it kills us
David Whyte is Professor of Socio-legal Studies at the University of Liverpool
"Ecocide is a refreshing analysis of the huge damage wrought on people and planet by the multinational corporations that play such a significant role in all of our lives. Rather than trying – and failing – to regulate these corporate behemoths, Whyte makes a compelling case that we must rid ourselves of private corporations altogether. Fast-paced, original, and highly compelling, Ecocide should be required reading for activists and academics alike."
– Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation
"This brilliant book not only offers solace to those struggling against invisible and, seemingly, invincible corporate power, it also throws us a lifeline through which we may be able to salvage everything we hold dear. Where the wall of callous indifference stands, Whyte paints a window to an alternative world away from this slow-motion apocalypse. The survival of organised human life and avoidance of mass societal breakdown rests upon our ability to mobilise in demand of this alternative world. It is said "the corporation has no body to punish and no soul to condemn" and this book illustrates clearly that this kind of unaccountability is in no way exceptional to the neoliberal era, it is an inherent feature of the corporation as a shapeshifting structure of irresponsibility. Kill it so we may live."
– Lowkey, Rapper and Activist