Fighting in a World on Fire: The Next Generation's Guide to Protecting the Climate and Saving Our Future

An argument for bold action to halt climate destruction, adapted for young people from Andreas Malm’s best-selling book

Young people are inheriting a world of climate catastrophe. Young people are also one of the strongest forces leading movements for climate justice, and to halt the fossil fuel emissions that are making our Earth unlivable.
 
As Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for the Future movement have made clear, solutions offered by adults are far too little, far too late: the measures in unenforceable international agreements won’t halt our reliance on fossil fuels, or take the drastic steps humans need to take in order to keep our planet livable.

What kinds of drastic steps are needed? What kind of bold actions can the climate justice movement begin using to bring a stop to climate destruction, and that can be employed alongside existing strategies of mass protest, awareness, and legal appeals? Why does our society consider profit for oil companies more important than the future of young people and the health of our shared environment?

In this adaptation of Andreas Malm’s best-selling book on the need for a bolder, more confrontational climate justice movement, these urgent questions are brought to the most important audience of all: those who are growing up in a world on fire.

Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology, and the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, The Progress of this Storm, and Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Jimmy Whipps is a lifetime resident of Portland, Oregon. He enjoyed a twenty-year career in education, primarily as a middle school social sciences teacher. He has been involved in a variety of actions, marches, and protests.

Llewyn Whipps is a habitat restoration practitioner working primarily on Kalapuyan land. They attended their first protest as an elementary schooler, with their father Jimmy. They have been a participant in the climate movement since their early twenties, joining fights for fossil fuel divestment, against industrial logging, and to stop oil trains and drill rigs.