Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in a time of crises.

As the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world—from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments—social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people? 
 
Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizbeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology can help us understand how and why they do this challenging work. Tackling neoliberalism head-on, these communities are making big changes by crafting distributive and regenerative systems that depart from capitalist approaches. The vivid case studies presented range from activist water protectors to hemp farmers to renewable energy cooperatives led by Indigenous peoples and nations. Alongside these studies, Malin and Kallman present incisive critiques of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and neoliberalism, while demonstrating how sociology’s own disciplinary traditions have been complicit with those ideologies—and must expand beyond them.

STEPHANIE A. MALIN is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. She is the author of The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice (Rutgers University Press) and a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Environmental Justice at CSU.
 
MEGHAN ELIZABETH KALLMAN is an assistant professor at the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development and is affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is the author of The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps and is a State Senator in Rhode Island.