Interesting new book out by Alex Loftus – Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology with University of Minnesota Press. UMP kindly sent me a publicity copy, and the timing was good – I read it immediately after Matthew Gandy’s Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, which I was looking at for the work I am doing on ‘volume’. While Gandy is largely historical and empirical, Loftus’s book is more theoretically orientated than the title might suggest. The chapters look at a succession of Marxist thinkers – Neil Smith, Karl Marx, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and Henri Lefebvre – but weaves in analysis of some environmental movements in South Africa and London. I was, unsurprisingly, most interested in the chapter on Lefebvre, which provides a sympathetic reading of Lefebvre’s work on everyday life, but is (rightly) critical of his reading of nature. For Loftus, Smith provides a much more useful analysis. Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in any of these theorists, or the interrelation of nature, politics and the urban.