{"title":"Books by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781802067316","title":"More and More and More","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA radical new history of energy and humanity's insatiable need for resources that will change the way we talk about climate change\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e*Winner of a \u003ci\u003eNouvel Observateur\u003c\/i\u003e Award, a Fondation pour l'écologie politique Award, the Prix du jury Turgot and the Prix du Sénat  du livre d’histoire 2025*\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e*Selected as an \u003ci\u003eEconomist\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e Book of the Year*\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on \u003ci\u003eall \u003c\/i\u003eforms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means \u003ci\u003eto put off \u003c\/i\u003eany meaningful change. \u003ci\u003eMore and More and More \u003c\/i\u003eforces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55896465899893,"sku":"9781802067316","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781802067316_d466f351-0f56-483c-b62b-0906e0ce9424.jpg?v=1786026908"},{"product_id":"9781839767227","title":"Chaos in the Heavens","description":"Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in \u003ci\u003eChaos in the Heavens\u003c\/i\u003e, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClimate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism. From these intellectual and political battles emerged key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of global warming, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307902284149,"sku":"9781839767227","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781839767227_689c6084-b55d-4660-82e1-047b876dc415.jpg?v=1786027877"},{"product_id":"9781839765506","title":"Happy Apocalypse","description":"Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and \u003ci\u003emea culpas\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn response, \u003ci\u003eHappy Apocalypse\u003c\/i\u003e plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSocieties of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308186775925,"sku":"9781839765506","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781839765506_bfd3d41e-e11f-4432-a196-1e863531b753.jpg?v=1786027849"},{"product_id":"the-shock-of-the-anthropocene","title":"The Shock of the Anthropocene","description":"The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did we get to this point? Refuting the convenient view of a \"human species\" that upset the Earth system, unaware of what it was doing, this book proposes the first critical history of the Anthropocene, shaking up many accepted ideas: about our supposedly recent \"environmental awareness,\" about previous challenges to industrialism, about the manufacture of ignorance and consumerism, about so-called energy transitions, as well as about the role of the military in environmental destruction. In a dialogue between science and history, \u003ci\u003eThe Shock of the Anthropocene\u003c\/i\u003e dissects a new theoretical buzzword and explores paths for living and acting politically in this rapidly developing geological epoch","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57502243389813,"sku":"9781784785031","price":20.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781784785031.jpg?v=1786781064"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-jean-baptiste-fressoz.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}