Overshoot | Andreas Malm

 

Malm’s central thesis is unflinching: that we have already overshot our planetary limits, not just in carbon emissions or biodiversity collapse, but in the moral architecture that once allowed for hope without accountability. What he offers is a sharp-edged genealogy of our predicament—how colonial extraction, capitalist acceleration, and fossil-fuelled fantasy have conspired to give us not just a crisis, but a civilisational breaking point. He names the villains, and he names them plainly. There is no room for the euphemisms of corporate greenwashing here, no refuge in techno-utopian dreams.

But Overshoot is not just a ledger of sins. It is also, in the most lacerating sense, a book about grief: grief for the lost seasons, the vanished species, the polluted air, and for politics corrupted by denialism. Yet woven within this grief is a call to arms grounded in what Malm calls “a theory of catastrophe with claws.” Conjuring the ghosts of revolutionaries past he offers a persuasive reminder that despair is not the only honest reaction to disaster. There is also rage. There is also refusal. And there is also the wild, improbable hope that comes from acting anyway. – Liz Jensen