[PREVIEW] Patron Exclusive: Múscailt Series 2 – Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner on ‘All We Want is the Earth’

In this wide-ranging conversation, Rosie talks with Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner about their wonderful co-authored book ‘All We Want is the Earth - Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism’. Published by Bristol University Press in July 2023, the book critiques what its authors describe as ‘modern environmentalism’ and conventional understandings of who does and what counts as environmental politics. In this interview, Naomi and Paddy highlight and re-centre the radical ecological legacies of a diverse array of movements, activists and thinkers from the Global South, and other contexts, over the past 80 years or so. These include Dolores Huerta, César Chávez and United Farm Workers’ who organised on behalf of migrant farmworkers in California during the 1960s; Mexican agronomists such as Edmundo Taboada; and movements associated with Autonomous Marxism, Wages for Housework and Zero Work.Paddy and Naomi recognise the prescience of Amílcar Cabral, Sylvia Wynter and others who forged essential connections between anti/decolonial and ecological struggles. They consider more recent movements too, such as La Vía Campesina, The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, the Zapatistas and how they challenged capitalist globalisation and resource extraction in the name of food-sovereignty, indigenous rights and the commons. And they point us towards vibrant forms of Earth Politics, that centre Indigenous knowledges and the imagery of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth), while also re-imagining human and non-human relationships.