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Edited by Lorena Julio, Serial Editorial, Argentina, 2026.
Reviewed by Girish G. Patil.
The title of this book is an argument, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Inclusion, it suggests, only widens the door of a house that is already built wrong. Equity rebuilds the house. To include more people in an economy that concentrates wealth and burns the planet is not justice; it is the spread of the same injury to a larger number of bodies. As editor Lorena Julio puts it in her prologue, inclusion that does not challenge structures can become yet another mechanism for reproducing injustice. The task is not to fit more people into the model, but to transform the model itself. The fourth volume of Julio’s Inclusion vs. Equity series takes that distinction and tests it against the one crisis that respects no door at all, which is climate change. Eleven essays, most of them from Latin America, are gathered under a single coined word that recurs across the chapters like a refrain: common-unity, the unity in the common that makes us a community. Julio means community not as a place where people happen to live near one another, but as a political practice, a way of organising life that resists fragmentation and builds something in its place. She is explicit that the book does not seek to adapt to the current system but to question it, and that neutrality, in her words, is no longer an option. What is striking is how wide a net the volume casts to make that single point. The essays move from philosophy to permaculture, from the cosmos to the kitchen garden. Juan Acevedo Peinado opens with a meditation on symbiogenesis, the biological insight that life advances less through competition than through organisms learning to live inside one another, and turns it into a thesis about human survival: live together or die alone. Eduardo Torres Astigueta reaches into Buddhism and the wisdom of nature; Javier Di Benedetto revisits the ecological appeal to care for a common home. Juliana de Moraes Pinheiro shifts the scale entirely, reading the climate crisis through resource sovereignty and the pressures Latin America faces from US authoritarianism. The book is unembarrassed about this range. Its wager is that philosophy, faith, geopolitics, and a vegetable plot in southern Argentina are all describing the same wound from different angles, and that fragmenting them is part of how the wound was made. The strongest chapters, though, are the ones that stop discussing community in the abstract and show it doing something. Andrés Sánchez Peña, a water specialist with the Organization of American States, notes first that Latin America and the Caribbean contribute under ten percent of global emissions yet suffer disproportionately, that climate disasters in the region rose fivefold between 1970 and 2019, and that women, who make up seventy percent of the world’s poor, are far likelier to die in a climate disaster, not from any physical weakness but from social barriers to information and decision-making. Then he does the wiser thing and tells a story. On the slopes of the Irazú volcano in Costa Rica, a farmer named María del Carmen Rodríguez Quesada proposes a climate-monitoring system run by the women of her village. Thirty of them learn to read basic instruments and log data on their phones, and they fold that data together with what the eldest residents know about how birds behave and how clouds gather before a frost. The result is a community early-warning system that no ministry designed and no consultant sold; it spreads to fifteen neighbouring communities. Sánchez Peña uses the story to argue what the whole book argues: that top-down climate policy fails not only because it is unjust but because it is inefficient, since the people who live the impacts hold knowledge the experts lack.
over sixty percent feel deep dread about climate change, eco-anxiety, if not paired with something to do, curdles into either denial or paralysis.
Leidy Jhoanna Cifuentes-Gómez, a Colombian educator who cofounded her country’s youth climate industrial movement, makes a parallel case through communication, leaning on Arturo Escobar’s idea of relational ontologies, worlds in which the basic unit of existence is not the individual but the collective, and in which water, forest, soil, and climate are themselves members of the community. Her organisation, Climalab, produces a documentary series, Portraits of the Countryside, filming rural communities across Colombia’s biodiverse regions so that they narrate their own adaptation rather than appear as victims. Her chapter is also the one that names the danger most honestly. Drawing on a survey of more than ten thousand young people across ten countries, she writes that over sixty percent feel deep dread about climate change, and she warns that this eco-anxiety, if not paired with something to do, curdles into either denial or paralysis. Hope, she insists, must be built from showing that millions of people are already acting. It is offered without the false cheer that weaker writing on this subject falls into.
Several essays close by asking us to believe in the common, to move from eco-anxiety to eco-hope.
For a reader working on water and the commons in rural India, the chapter that lands hardest is Jill Carr-Harris’s account of land reform and what she calls a nonviolent economy. Carr-Harris has spent more than three decades with Ekta Parishad, one of the largest nonviolent movements of landless people in India. Her essay opens with the 2025 Oxfam finding that India’s top one percent now controls forty percent of national wealth while the bottom half holds around three, then reaches back to the Gandhian economist J. C. Kumarappa, who imagined an economy of permanence modelled on the self-renewing processes of nature, half a century before anyone used the phrase climate change. She walks through the Forest Rights Act, under which 2.39 million households have received individual forest titles, the long struggle for those titles through the Gram Panchayat, and Ekta Parishad’s framing of land reform as four Rs: restoration of lost lands, regularisation, resolution of disputes, and only then redistribution. She tells of the 2007 march in which 25,000 people walked 350 kilometres along a national highway to force the state’s hand, and of Mira from Umaria, an Adivasi woman who farmed land she did not yet legally own, won title to two and a half acres of it, and then turned to helping other women do the same. The throughline of her argument is that prosperity built through exploitation will not lead to peace, while prosperity built through mutuality and fairness will; peace, made through peaceful means.
It is worth pausing on that phrase, the nonviolent economy, because it is the quiet hinge on which the whole book turns, and it carries more weight than a casual reader might notice. When Kumarappa published Economy of Permanence in 1945, he did something most economists still refuse to do: he treated violence as an economic category rather than only a political one. He sorted human economies into a sequence that runs from the most violent to the least. At the bottom is the parasitic economy, which lives by theft and, like a parasite, eventually kills the host it feeds on; he placed colonial extraction here. Above it sits the predatory economy, the economy of conquest and war, which seizes by force what it has not made. Then comes the enterprise economy, ordinary self-interested capitalism, productive but blind to what it costs. Only at the top did he place an economy modelled on the way nature itself works, where nothing is wasted and every output feeds another cycle, an economy of service rather than extraction. His radical claim, decades before the word sustainability entered common speech, was that any economy which destroys nature is by definition a violent economy, and a violent economy can only ever be temporary, because it consumes the conditions of its own survival. Permanence and peace, in this reading, are the same thing seen from two angles.
Hope, she insists, must be built from showing that millions of people are already acting.
This is what gives the book’s title its teeth, and it is the idea I most wish the volume had pressed harder. Inclusion, in Kumarappa’s terms, can leave an economy parasitic or predatory while simply adding more participants to it; you can include the poor in an extractive system and have changed nothing about the extraction. Equity asks the harder question of what kind of economy people are being included into. A peace economy, by this logic, is not an economy with less fighting in it. It is an economy whose basic transactions, the way it holds land, draws water, grows food, and shares the surplus, do not require someone or something to be quietly destroyed for the exchange to balance. For a climate-stressed world, that reframing matters: it means the climate crisis and the crisis of violence are not two problems that happen to overlap but one problem wearing two faces, and that you cannot build a lasting peace on an economic base that is at war with the soil. Several of the remaining essays extend the same conviction into other registers. Diego Slagter recounts the creation of a Higher Technical Degree in Agroecology in a small town in southern Buenos Aires province, arguing that the industrial agriculture model survives partly because the entire science, technology, and teacher-training apparatus has been built to reproduce it. Vanesa Ganduglia and Leandro Poblete describe Casa Runa, a self-built octagonal home of adobe and quincha in the Colorado River valley, with dry toilets, a greywater system, a fruit forest, and a cultural space, offered as proof that inhabiting with conscience can be lived at an everyday scale. And in the volume’s most bracing chapter, Lorena Julio interviews the Argentine collapse theorist Flavia Broffoni, who refuses every comfort: the window for solutions has narrowed brutally, 2024 already breached the 1.5-degree threshold that the Paris Agreement was built to defend, and the gravest threat to peace is the coming wave of climate migration. She notes, in a line that should arrest any South Asian reader, that India is building a wall to keep climate refugees out of Bangladesh.
What I keep returning to, as someone who works on rivers and the commons in the Khandesh region of Maharashtra, is how closely Carr-Harris’s India maps onto the ground I stand on, and where even her careful account leaves the harder question unasked. The detail she gets right, and that outside writing usually misses, is that a land title is the beginning of the struggle and not its end. I have watched the Mira-from-Umaria pattern play out in my own valley: the title arrives after years, and then the real work begins, holding the land against monied interests, finding a livelihood above bare subsistence, keeping the children in school. But this is also where the book’s central idea reaches its limit. Common-unity is shown almost always at its best moment, the moment of solidarity,
Hope is a posture, not an analysis, and this volume is strongest when it forgets to be hopeful and simply shows the work.
the village discovering its collective strength. What appears far less often is the commons colliding with the institution: the panchayat ledger that does not reconcile, the forest officer who jails a cultivator as an encroacher, the welfare scheme that, as Carr-Harris herself notes in a sharp aside, may only circulate money back into government banks. In these pages, the community is usually a hero and rarely a bureaucracy. Yet most people meet the commons precisely at that friction, in the queue, in the file, in the title that takes from 2010 to 2018 to arrive. A book this committed to the practical could afford to live longer in that uncomfortable middle ground, because that is where equity is either delivered or quietly lost.
My second reservation is about hope, and I offer it as a fellow traveller rather than a sceptic. Several essays close by asking us to believe in the common, to move from eco-anxiety to eco-hope, and the instinct is humane and necessary, especially for the young people the book rightly worries about. But hope is a posture, not an analysis, and this volume is strongest when it forgets to be hopeful and simply shows the work: the women reading clouds on Irazú, the 350-kilometre march, the seeds saved on camera. Broffoni’s refusal of comfort is what keeps the book honest, and her wall between India and Bangladesh does more for its seriousness than any invocation of belief, because it locates the crisis where it actually lives, at the border, in the politics of who is permitted to survive. For a publication concerned with peace, that is finally the lesson I take from these pages: that peace built on extraction and exclusion is not peace but a deferral of conflict, and that the alternative is not charity but a different way of holding land, water, and one another. The book does not always reach the institutions where that alternative would have to be defended. But it asks the right question, the one its title poses and its best chapters live out: not how to fit more people into a world that is breaking, but how to build a world worth fitting into.
Girish Patel is an environmentalist based in Jalgaon in India. He is also the Coordinator of the Peacebuilders Forum in India.