Podd: New Books in Environmental Studies

Ethan Tapper, "How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World" (Broadleaf Books, 2024)

22 februari 2025 | 48 min

For more than a decade, Ethan Tapper has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the worlds of forestry, conservation, and ecosystem stewardship.

He has many years of experience managing private and public forestlands. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Forester-of-the-Year, by the Northeast-Midwest Foresters Alliance. Ethan lives in Northern Vermont, where he manages a 175-acre forest and homestead called ‘Bear Island’…and rumor has it he is a musician in a punk-rock band.

In his tender and fearless literary debut, Tapper proffers a more complex vision. He writes that we must act now in order to protect ecosystems, and that the actions we must take will often be counterintuitive, uncomfortable, even heartbreaking. In striking prose, he shows how bittersweet acts—like loving deer and hunting deer, loving trees and felling trees—can be radical expressions of compassion. In this poetic and visionary book, Tapper weaves a new land ethic for the modern world, reminding us that what is simple is rarely true, and what is necessary is rarely easy.

Countless decisions await. There are no perfect solutions; only endless bittersweet compromises. How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World (Broadleaf Books, 2024) offers a clear-eyed, hopeful vision of a world in which so much is wrong and so much is worth saving.

Michael Simpson has been actively working, researching and teaching in the watershed management and wetlands fields for 40 years. He is a licensed wetlands scientist where he has conducted numerous delineations, wetland assessments and restorations employing a variety of assessment approaches and data collection procedures, as well as designing wetlands for treatment of NPS run-off and wastewater.

He has also held a position as graduate school Professor at Antioch University New England, where he has taught courses in wetlands ecology, watershed science and management, climate science & climate vulnerability and adaptation

His primary research has been funded by both US EPA and NOAA, which has focused upon impact to natural systems and built infrastructure in riparian corridors and estuaries, from changes in land-use combined with increases in storm intensity and frequency due to projected climate change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)

20 februari 2025 | 50 min

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic?

To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninusula Press, UK; Catapult, US), as well as, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as, many psychoanalytic publications.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor in the Somatic Psychology program at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 februari 2025 | 42 min

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge UP, 2024), Xiangli Ding provides a historical understanding of China's ever-growing energy demands and how they have affected its rivers, wild species, and millions of residents. River management has been an essential state responsibility throughout Chinese history. In the industrial age, with the global proliferation of concrete dam technology, people started to demand more from rivers, particularly when required for electricity production. Yet hydropower projects are always more than a technological engineering enterprise, layered with political, social, and environmental meaning. Through an examination of specific hydroelectric power projects, the activities of engineers, and the experience of local communities and species, Ding offers a fresh perspective on twentieth-century China from environmental and technological perspectives.

Xiangli Ding is an associate professor of history at the Rhode Island School of Design. He considers himself a historian of modern China and environmental history. At RISD, he teaches courses on East Asian and Chinese histories. His research interests lie at the intersection of the environment, technology, politics, and human life in modern China. He is the author of Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and multiple research and review articles in both English and Chinese.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Debra J. Davidson, "Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency" (Routledge, 2024)

11 februari 2025 | 32 min

Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)

10 februari 2025 | 64 min

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.

Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

"Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations" (Fernwood Publishing, 2024)

9 februari 2025 | 53 min

William A. Selby, "The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next" (Heyday Books, 2024)

3 februari 2025 | 51 min

Helen Louise Cowie, "Animals in World History" (Routledge, 2024)

1 februari 2025 | 54 min

Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" (Yale UP, 2024)

1 februari 2025 | 65 min

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world.

By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (Yale UP, 2024), Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and well before climate change, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context.

In strikingly contemporary language, Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J. C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mira, Verrier Elwin, K. M. Munshi, and M. Krishnan wrote about the forest and the wild, soil and water, urbanization and industrialization. Positing the idea of what Guha calls “livelihood environmentalism” in contrast to the “full-stomach environmentalism” of the affluent world, these writers, activists, and scientists played a pioneering role in shaping global conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature. Spanning more than a century of Indian history, and decidedly transnational in reference, this book offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.

About the Author:

Ramachandra Guha is the author of many books, including India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He lives in Bangalore.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Peter Hill, "River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways" (Columbia UP, 2024)

29 januari 2025 | 34 min

Peter Hill has been working as a resource manager with a specialty in stream restoration for over two decades, first for Washington DC and then as a consultant for Great Lakes Watershed Opportunities. Currently, he is Senior Policy Advisor for Green Infrastructure at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in Milwaukee, WI.

His many years of experience in managing major, multi-agency stream and river restoration projects which necessarily needed to include building partnerships to support such multi-faceted ecological restoration efforts. Many of these resource management projects have been located in underserved areas.

With River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways (Columbia UP, 2024), Pete reaches out to both the layperson, as well as the practicing professional. His goal is to build a more comprehensive understanding regarding restoration best practices that can be tapped to meet a community’s desire for a healthy and sustainable riparian environment.

But Pete’s perspective and professional practice goes beyond just understanding different restoration approaches. He is also quite cognizant about the need to build community understanding and support for their local rivers and streams, both in rural and urban settings. To this latter point, he does feel strongly that stream and river restoration can be tied directly to a community’s environmental justice efforts.

Michael Simpson has been actively working, researching and teaching in the watershed management and wetlands fields for 40 years. He is a licensed wetlands scientist where he has conducted numerous delineations, wetland assessments, employing a variety of assessment approaches and data collection procedures, as well as designing wetlands for treatment of non-point source run-off, agricultural liquid wastes and municipal generated waste water.

Currently, his primary research for both US EPA and NOAA has focused upon impact to natural systems and built infrastructure in riparian corridors and estuaries, from changes in land-use on the watershed combined with increases in storm intensity and frequency due to projected climate change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Dario Fazzi, "Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement" (Columbia UP, 2023)

26 januari 2025 | 50 min

Melanie Dennis Unrau, "The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

19 januari 2025 | 52 min

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.

The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) by Dr. Melanie Dennis Unrau presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.

How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 januari 2025 | 59 min

James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)

18 januari 2025 | 46 min

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian Dr. James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Dr. Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

17 januari 2025 | 51 min

The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century

15 januari 2025 | 54 min

David Strayer, "Beyond the Sea: The Hidden Life in Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

12 januari 2025 | 36 min

Willingness for climate action in South Korea and Finland: A cross-cultural comparison

12 januari 2025 | 44 min

Negative Life

8 januari 2025 | 22 min

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay talk about negative life, which names the misalignment of individual and species survival, as a condition of thought and film. In developing this concept, they shed light on the gaps within the rhetoric of entanglement, and push against ethics and politics that insist on the values of human and nonhuman relations. Negative life already inheres in existing social relationships because the world is already broken. Steven and Jean-Thomas critique much of ecocriticism’s romantic attachment to contingencies and solutions that would have us ignore this truth.

Steven Swarbrick is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of two books: The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and The Earth Is Evil (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, “Provocations” series, 2025). He is a coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). He has been a guest at High Theory in the past, and his previous episode on ‘The Environmental Unconscious’ can be found here.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Steven Swarbrick, a coauthor of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Excerpts from a book-in-progress on climate action, liberal sensemaking, and the "world" concept have appeared in Critical Inquiry and are forthcoming in Representations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Brandon Keim, "Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World" (Norton, 2024)

1 januari 2025 | 97 min

What does the science of animal intelligence mean for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us?

Honeybees deliberate democratically. Rats reflect on the past. Snakes have friends. In recent decades, our understanding of animal cognition has exploded, making it indisputably clear that the cities and landscapes around us are filled with thinking, feeling individuals besides ourselves. But the way we relate to wild animals has yet to catch up. In Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (W.W. Norton, 2024), acclaimed science journalist Brandon Keim asks: what would it mean to take the minds of other animals seriously?

In this wide-ranging, wonder-filled exploration of animals’ inner lives, Keim takes us into courtrooms and wildlife hospitals, under backyard decks and into deserts, to meet anew the wild creatures who populate our communities and the philosophers, rogue pest controllers, ecologists, wildlife doctors, and others who are reimagining our relationships to them. If bats trade favors and groups of swans vote to take off by honking, should we then see them as fellow persons—even members of society? When we come to understand the depths of their pleasures and pains, the richness of their family lives and their histories, what do we owe so-called pests and predators, or animals who are sick or injured? Can thinking of nonhumans as our neighbors help chart a course to a kinder, gentler planet? As Keim suggests, the answers to these questions are central to how we understand not only the rest of the living world, but ourselves.

A beguiling invitation to discover an expanded sense of community and kinship beyond our own species, Meet the Neighbors opens our eyes to the world of vibrant intelligence just outside our doors.

Brandon Keim is an independent journalist specializing in animals, nature, and science. His work appears regularly in the New York Times, Atlantic, Nautilus, National Geographic, and elsewhere.

Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)

23 december 2024 | 66 min

Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to landfill. His new book argues that sustainability is not a sacrifice but an upgrade that can bring joy and increased quality of life. The book traces his journey to live more sustainably in a Manhattan apartment but also offers an argument about politics. He asks what narratives are already available to frame environmental degradation deploying a wide range of sources from John Locke to indigenous thinkers. Spodek, doubtful about governments or corporations leading on the environment, favors bottom up change focused on the actions and leadership of individuals. Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems (Amplify, 2025) explores the importance of culture and habit. How did the United States and other nations adopt polluting and passive habits? What can be done to reverse these cultural norms? The solutions range from a WWII level mobilization to a Constitutional Amendment.

Dr. Josh Spodek earned a PhD in Physics and an MBA in entrepreneurial leadership from Columbia University. He is a four-time TEDx speaker author (Initiative and Leadership Step by Step), and leadership coach. He hosts the This Sustainable Life podcast. He has been an Adjunct Professor at New York University. A 2024 recent New York Times article highlights his life changes in Who Says You Can’t Live Off the Grid in Manhattan?

Mentioned:

NOAA’s interactive sea level rise map. NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery (3rd edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Works of Steven Pinker
Spodek Method
Susan’s research on Locke’s Enough and as Good from Perspectives on Politics

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Veronica Strang, "Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis" (Reaktion, 2023)

20 december 2024 | 39 min

Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)

19 december 2024 | 29 min

Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)

19 december 2024 | 50 min

Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

19 december 2024 | 44 min

Stephanie Rutherford, "Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

18 december 2024 | 54 min

Joanna Allan, "Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara" (WVU Press, 2024)

17 december 2024 | 49 min

Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024)

17 december 2024 | 81 min

Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

14 december 2024 | 41 min

Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 december 2024 | 63 min

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Meredith McKittrick explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Dr. McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, Dr. McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

10 december 2024 | 31 min

Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

6 december 2024 | 55 min

J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)

5 december 2024 | 28 min

Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert

27 november 2024 | 69 min

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Dr. Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.

Our guest is: Dr. Sunaura Taylor, who is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

26 november 2024 | 52 min

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

23 november 2024 | 59 min

An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

21 november 2024 | 34 min

Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)

8 november 2024 | 76 min

From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time.

In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (MIT Press, 2024), Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself. With a storyteller’s gift for character, suspense, and detail, Stern crafts a high-stakes narrative that illuminates the strategy, policy, politics, and diplomacy that made Paris possible. Introducing readers to a vivid cast of characters, including Xie Zenhua, Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Bo Lidegaard, chief strategist for Denmark’s Prime Minster, and Indian minister Jairam Ramesh, Stern, who worked alongside President Barack Obama and Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, depicts the pitfalls and challenges overcome, the shifting alliances, the last-minute maneuvering, and the ultimate historic success. The book concludes with a final chapter that describes key developments since 2015 and the author’s reflections on what needs to be done going forward to contain the climate threat. A unique peek behind the curtain of one of the most important international agreements of our time, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement is a vital and fascinating read for anyone who cares about the future of our one shared home.

Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society, concentrating on climate change. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State, where he was President Barack Obama's chief climate negotiator.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Adam Hanieh, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market" (Verso, 2024)

2 november 2024 | 94 min

Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning, "Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

1 november 2024 | 47 min

"Climate change is the biggest crisis of humankind. We can’t watch other people drive our future right against the wall.”

This is a quote by Luisa Neubauer – the most famous German climate activist. As global climate change forecasts become more drastic and fear is spreading, young activists, like Luisa and Alexander, are taking the floor. Both are young, full of courage and zest for action, they want to infect us with their strength to oppose climate change and to take responsibility for the future of our planet. What does the future hold? When it comes to the climate, the predictions are pretty precise by now. And just as frightening.

In this book, Luisa Neubauer, the best-known German climate activist, and the sociologist Alexander Repenning create the history of our future. For humankind is at a crossroads. If we don’t change course now, we’ll eliminate ourselves. Politicians, entrepreneurs, citizens, everyone must take action. But how? One thing is undisputed: There is no planet B. Everyone must inform and organize oneself to save the future. Neubauer and Repenning present solutions that are ready to be implemented and must finally be put into practice. But they also demonstrate the attitude with which we must deal with this exceptional situation: undaunted but level-headed. And unyielding towards those who determine our future. Because the last chance for a positive end to the climate crisis is NOW.

Luisa Neubauer became known through the Fridays for Future movement in Germany. She is one of the main organizers of the weekly large demonstrations and has been committed to climate protection since before FFF. She is also a member of the Alliance 90/The Greens party the Green Youth.

Alexander Repenning a sociologist who has supported the FFF movement from the beginning. He is also involved in other organizations, such as the Right Livelihood Foundation. He is committed to bringing science and politics back into harmony.

Cody Bio: Cody Skahan is a graduate of the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow, and current PhD student at the University of Oxford as a recipient of a Grand Union ESRC doctoral training partnership. His work focuses on the interactions of youth, Indigenous Peoples, and others in the Arctic in regard to environmentalism, particularly in consideration to their diverse and interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures available wherever you get podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024)

29 oktober 2024 | 55 min

Larisa Jasarević, "Beekeeping in the End Times" (Indiana UP, 2024)

26 oktober 2024 | 63 min

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effects of climate change.

Beekeeping in the End Times (Indiana UP, 2024) relates extreme weather events and quieter disasters that have been altering honey ecologies across Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2014. While world-wide endangerment of pollinators, and bees in particular, has been the subject of much global concern, effects of climate change on the indispensable honeybees, remain understudied. Drawing on a five-year long study, the book suggests that local apiarists' field observations resonate with many climate biologists' concerns and speculations about the future of plant-bee relations on the warming planet. Local practice also adds to the record complex and puzzling trends that make honey scarce in otherwise lush, biodiverse landscapes.

To Bosnian Muslims, honeybees are more than pollinators. They are inspired beings whose honey is another form of divinely revelation. To appreciate the meaning of honeybees and to grasp the dire ecological catastrophe underway, Jašarević reads contemporary environmental writings and Sufi texts, she listens to the seasoned beekeepers and collects local wisdom tales. From start to finish, Jašarević pores over key Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, and their popular retellings. The Islamic end-times lore, the book proposes, holds surprising lessons on how to live and strive in the 'not yet,' stalling the apocalypse.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Omer Aijazi, "Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

25 oktober 2024 | 39 min

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their families or societies and rarely enjoy the expected protections of state or community, Aijazi reveals the movements, flows, and intimacies sustained by a landscape that enables alternative modes of life. Blurring the distinctions between story, theory, and activism, he explores what emerges when theory becomes a project of seeing and feeling from the non-normative standpoint of those who, like the book’s protagonists, do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world.

Bringing the critical study of disaster into conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and the capaciousness of affect theory, held accountable to Black studies and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor through which communities living with disaster refuse the conditions of death imposed upon them and create viable lives for themselves, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 oktober 2024 | 53 min

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.

Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity’s impact on the earth. With Dr. Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence—it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.

A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anna Lora-Wainwright, "Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China" (MIT Press, 2021)

20 oktober 2024 | 51 min

Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and wide range of emotions and strategies people develop to respond to toxicity in everyday life.

An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response. Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to nosebleeds—that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. In Resigned Activism, Anna Lora-Wainwright explores the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and the varying forms of activism that develop in response. This revised edition offers expanded acknowledgment of the contributions of Lora-Wainwright’s collaborators in China. Lora-Wainwright finds that claims of health or environmental damage are politically sensitive, and that efforts to seek redress are frustrated by limited access to scientific evidence, growing socioeconomic inequalities, and complex local realities. Villagers, feeling powerless, often come to accept pollution as part of the environment; their activism is tempered by their resignation. Drawing on fieldwork done with teams of collaborators, Lora-Wainwright offers three case studies of “resigned activism” in rural China, examining the experiences of villagers who live with the effects of phosphorous mining and fertilizer production, lead and zinc mining, and electronic waste processing.

The book also includes extended summaries of the in-depth research carried out by Ajiang Chen and his team in some of China’s “cancer villages,” village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence. These cases make clear the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits that underlie China’s economic power.

Dr. Elena Sobrino is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the politics of crisis in the American Rust Belt. She is currently teaching classes on science and technology studies, theories and ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

17 oktober 2024 | 83 min

Lightning Birds

14 oktober 2024 | 41 min

Today we present the first episode of Jacob Smith’s new eco-critical audiobook, Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves. In this audio-only book, Smith uses expert production to craft a wildly original argument about the relations between radio and bird migration. The rest of the book is available, free of charge, from The University of Michigan Press, but this introduction is a great standalone experience that we think Phantom Power listeners will delight in. It tells a truly unique cultural history of radio, describes important scientific discoveries about bird migration through interviews with key researchers, and continues exploring Smith’s singular mode of ecocriticism, combining text-based scholarship with sound art, music, and audio storytelling.

Professor Jacob Smith is Director of the Masters in Sound Arts and Industries Program at Northwestern University and author of numerous books. He is a cultural historian focused on media and sound who never fails to come at his subject matter from an oblique and completely original angle. His first three books focused on the relationship between the media technologies that developed over the course of the twentieth century—the phonograph, radio, film, and TV—and the kinds of performance styles we have come to expect from performers. For example, his 2008 book Vocal Tracks tackles questions such as how radio changed acting and why fake laugh tracks developed on television—and why we feel so weird about canned laughter.

In recent years, Jacob Smith’s work has changed in a couple of ways. Thematically, he took a hard turn towards environmental criticism. His 2015 book Eco-Sonic Media lays out an agenda for studying the negative environmental effects of media culture while also telling a strange alternate history of “green” sound technologies: hand-cranked gramophones with eco-friendly shellac records and needles sourced from cacti instead of diamonds. His next book maintained this eco-critical perspective while revolutionizing the format of the scholarly book. 2019’s ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene was a 10-part audiobook that mined golden age radio shows and sound art to explore the dawn of the Anthropocene era, in which humans emerged as the primary force affecting earth systems. In episode 12 of this podcast, we played an excerpt of that book and interviewed Jake about the process of crafting a book-length scholarly argument in sound by sampling sounds from other eras. Lightning Birds continues this Smith’s work in this innovative vein.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Roberta L. Millstein, "The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 oktober 2024 | 67 min

Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024)

9 oktober 2024 | 46 min

Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, "Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future" (The New Press, 2024)

9 oktober 2024 | 33 min

Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives

6 oktober 2024 | 46 min

Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

29 september 2024 | 54 min

Jonathan Maskit, "Bicycle" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

29 september 2024 | 77 min

Forest Listening Rooms

23 september 2024 | 41 min

What would happen if you took red state rural voters on a walk into the woods with left-wing environmental activists and experimental music fans? Our guest this episode knows the answer.

BRIAN HARNETTY is a composer and an interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change.

While Brian studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, one of his teachers, Michael Finnissy, suggested he look for musical inspiration in his home state of Ohio. Brian took that advice and the result has been eight internationally acclaimed albums. Brian’s music combines archival recordings of interviews and singing—often from the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives—with his original compositions.

For the past decade, Brian has focused on the myth, history, ecology, and economy of Shawnee, a small Appalachian town in Ohio. His 2019 album Shawnee, Ohio was praised by the BBC, the Wire, and named 2019 Underground Album of the Year by MOJO. The album engages with the social and environmental impacts felt by the town and nearby Wayne National Forest in their long history with extractive industries from timber to coal mining to fracking.

But Brian doesn’t just document Shawnee’s narrative—he intervenes in it. He’s an environmental activist of a gentle kind, one who gets area residents of different political stripes to walk in the woods together to listen—to one another and to the forest. All in service of protecting and healing the land. In this episode, we are thrilled to present an audio documentary that Brian Harnetty has produced for Phantom Power about this quietly radical experiment, called Forest Listening Rooms. And afterwards I’ll speak to Brian about his project.

Learn more:

Visit Brian Harnetty’s studio in Ohio.

Check out his Bandcamp page.

Visit his website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 september 2024 | 60 min

Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Dr. Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.

From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2024) tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrea E. Pia, "Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

20 september 2024 | 77 min

Azra Hromadžić, "Riverine Citizenship: A Bosnian City in Love with the River" (CEU Press, 2024)

18 september 2024 | 41 min

John Schofield, "Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

15 september 2024 | 68 min

Thomas White, "China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier" (U Washington Press, 2024)

14 september 2024 | 69 min

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism - in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement - has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western borderlands. However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state’s intensifying nation-building project.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism. In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

Thomas White is lecturer in China and Sustainable Development at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. His research interests include China’s borderlands, political ecology, infrastructure, and Sino-Mongolian relations. China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier (U Washington Press, 2024) is his first monograph.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Faizah Zakaria, "The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia" (U Washington Press, 2023)

4 september 2024 | 42 min

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, "Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility" (U Washington Press, 2024)

27 augusti 2024 | 53 min

Hope Bohanec, "The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs" (Lantern Publishing, 2023)

26 augusti 2024 | 74 min

As consumers become increasingly aware of the animal agriculture industry’s cruelty and environmental devastation, clever industry marketers are adapting with alternative “humane” and “sustainable” labeling and marketing campaigns. In the absence of accurate information, it has never been more important to educate consumers on the realities behind the industry lies, and people are hungry for the truth.

The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs (Lantern Publishing & Media, 2023) features a range of engaging and thought-provoking essays from eighteen notable experts who are at the forefront of this marketing and societal shift, chronicling every aspect with in-depth analyses and intellectual rigor. Among other timely topics, the book explores how the humane hoax intersects with feminism and environmentalism, how it is represented in the media, and the affects it has on human and non-human communities alike. The Humane Hoax will leave the reader questioning everything that they have been conditioned to believe as consumers.

Hope Bohanec has been active in animal protection and environmental activism for thirty years and has published the book The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat? She is the Executive Director of Compassionate Living and the host of the Hope for the Animals Podcast. Hope co-founded the Humane Hoax Project, the Ahimsa Living Project, and has organized numerous online and in-person events including the Humane Hoax Online Conference, the Humane Hoax Chicken Webinar, and the Sonoma County VegFest. Over the last three decades, Hope has worked for the national non-profits United Poultry Concerns and In Defense of Animals and has contributed chapters to two anthologies.

Kyle Johannsen is a Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Damaging Rationality: Exxon-Funded Legal Research and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

25 augusti 2024 | 74 min

Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019)

23 augusti 2024 | 59 min

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilously close to extinction. For the last 20 years, Nick Haddad has worked to identify and save some of the rarest butterflies on earth, a quest that has taken him to both surprisingly ordinary and extraordinarily inhospitable areas, including a swampy, active artillery range on a military installation in North Carolina. It has also led him to some surprising conclusions about the best ways to protect these increasingly endangered butterflies.

In The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature (Princeton UP, 2019), Haddad profiles five such species – the ones he has determined to be the rarest of all – and takes us into each one’s unique habitat, life cycle, and existential challenges. From the Crystal Skipper, bouncing over sand dunes adjacent to vacation homes on barrier islands, to the Schaus’ Swallowtail, confined to increasingly remote areas of the Florida Keys, Haddad shows how human activities have affected rare butterfly populations. His unexpected conclusion is that leaving them in peace is not a viable option; disturbances, both natural and human-caused, are necessary for the ecosystems that support butterfly populations to thrive. One of the hardest lessons for him to absorb was that to save populations, some individuals have to be killed in the process.

Haddad’s intrepid field work – he describes one of his strengths as “an unusual capacity to tolerate harsh environments - informs the story of each butterfly species. His lab’s effort to collect, quantify, propagate, and ultimately perpetuate, the rarest butterflies has led to increasing awareness of how much more biologists have to learn about their natural histories, and how critical such knowledge is to saving them. In perhaps the most dramatic example of unintended consequences, Haddad’s team discovered that the St. Francis Satyr, a small brown butterfly, was protected by regular artillery fire on the Fort Bragg army installation in southern North Carolina. The resulting fires were one disturbance the St. Francis Satyr needed to sustain viable conditions (dams built by beavers was another). In another twist, it turned out that Haddad’s initial efforts to help the species were having the opposite effect. Yet over time, these discoveries led to lessons that ultimately have helped the St. Francis Satyr and can be applied to other conservation efforts.

The Last Butterflies could be read as a warning, but Haddad’s tone is never dire. The book is infused with enthusiasm for conservation efforts, both now and in the future, and with an admiration for the beauty, fragility, and resilience of butterflies. It is an important book for anyone concerned with biodiversity and conservation issues. It’s also an eye-opening and engaging read for anyone with an interest in butterflies.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. She is a longtime butterfly enthusiast and is working, slowly, on a fictional book for middle-grade readers about butterfly conservation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Justine Bendel, "Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals" (Edward Elgar, 2023)

18 augusti 2024 | 79 min

In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises how international courts and tribunals may respond procedurally to an ever-growing list of environmental disputes. In a time of environmental crisis, she lays crucial groundwork for strengthening the application of international environmental law, a topic of increasing relevance for global civil society.

Putting into perspective the practices of various international courts and tribunals, Dr Bendel works within the constraints of the existing judicial framework to sharpen international environmental justice and governance. She provides judges and litigators with tools that they can use when confronted with environmental disputes, to extract the best practices in the interest of improving environmental litigation for each phase of a judicial procedure.

In this podcast, Dr Bendel discusses the complexity of multiple legal, regulatory and guidance frameworks insofar as international environmental law is concerned. She explains how it is highly likely that the subject matter of an environmental dispute will cover common areas or resources that affect global or multilateral interests, which inevitably adds a political dimension to any dispute resolution when it comes to areas that transcend national jurisdictions. Dr Bendel explores how typically bilateral proceedings under international law might be expanded to accommodate the interests of other states – and non-state actors such as international non-governmental organisations – through creatively and flexibly adapting procedures that already exist before international courts and tribunals, including dispute resolution and non-compliance procedures. Now is the time, she says, for international courts and tribunals to be used to resolve environmental disputes and to make authoritative legal determinations on protecting the planet and its precious resources.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. He has a particular interest in, and practitioner experience of, international criminal law and transitional justice. Twitter: @batesmith

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Matthew Archer, "Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability" (NYU Press, 2024)

16 augusti 2024 | 42 min

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.

And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability (New York University Press, 2024) contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.

The book draws on diverse sources of evidence―ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction―and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.

Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

12 Angry Alaskans: Re-Examining the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Case

16 augusti 2024 | 73 min

Andrew R. Basso, "Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

13 augusti 2024 | 73 min

Daniel Kahneman’s Forgotten Legacy: Investigating Exxon-Funded Psychological Research

9 augusti 2024 | 65 min

Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, "Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change" (Oregon State UP, 2021)

6 augusti 2024 | 52 min

Bringing together philosophy, jurisprudence, and a deep concern for the environment, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change offers an inspiring and generative way of thinking about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. In particular, Thomas Kearns and Kathleen Dean Moore provide readers with insight into the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal as well as the wide-ranging and deeply-felt impacts of fracking, interspersing legal analysis, excerpts of Tribunal testimony, and reflections by climate writers like Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber. The book's structure even creatively mirrors that of the Tribunal, offering a collage of insight to any reader interested in human rights and environmental issues—it is a work of deep dedication to thinking critically and deeply about how to face not only the environmental degradation caused by fracking, but also other kinds of harms caused by resource extraction and corporate interests. Rather than slip into climate nihilism, Bearing Witness seeks to name, investigate, and claim rights around environmental harms felt by humans and non-humans alike.

In the face of the increasing, globally-felt impacts of climate change, Kearns and Dean Moore provide us with a human-rights centered framework for engaging with and addressing some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Thomas A. Kearns is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at North Seattle College, and is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory. In 2015, he helped draft the international Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change, and in 2018, co-organized the International Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change, which forms much of the basis for this book. His work is currently centred around facilitating youth climate courts.

Kathleen Dean Moore is a Distinguished Philosophy Professor Emerita at Oregon State University, and longstanding public advocate for climate justice and ecological thriving. Her concern for climate catastrophe led her to leave her academic position to speak and write on environmental crises. Her numerous books and essays—many award-winning—focus on environmental ethics and climate crises, and she has published widely in academic and non-academic fora alike.

Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion.

Further reading and works discussed in this episode:

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking, and Climate Change
Film by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change
Kathleen Dean Moore and Bob Haverluck, Take Heart (OSU Press)
Youth Climate Courts website

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael J. Sheridan, "Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants" (Routledge, 2023)

31 juli 2024 | 63 min

Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality.

In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stephen J. Pyne, "Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park" (U Arizona Press, 2023)

30 juli 2024 | 70 min

Richard D. Oram, "Where Men No More May Reap Or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400-1850" (Birlinn, 2024)

30 juli 2024 | 74 min

Hannah Freed-Thall, "Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons" (Columbia UP, 2023)

25 juli 2024 | 65 min

Anaïs Maurer, "The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists" (Duke UP, 2023)

23 juli 2024 | 51 min

Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)

20 juli 2024 | 87 min

Operating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World (Penn State University Press, 2019) presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and motivate action in order to construct alternative frameworks and establish novel solidarities for the sake of our planetary home.

The selections in this volume explore ecologies of interdependence as a frame for religious, theological, and philosophical analysis and practice. Contributors examine questions of justice, climate change, race, class, gender, and coloniality and discuss alternative ways of engaging the world in all its biodiversity. Each essay, poem, reflection, and piece of art contributes to and reflects upon how to live out entangled differences toward positive global change.

Constructive and practical, global and local, communal and personal, Ecological Solidarities is an innovative contribution to the discourses on relational and liberative thought and practice in religion, philosophy, and theology. It will be welcomed by scholars of World Christianity and theology as well as seminary students, activists, and laity interested in issues of justice and ecology.

Krista E. Hughes is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Muller Center at Newberry College.
Dhawn B. Martin is Executive Director of the Source of Light Center in San Antonio, Texas.
Elaine Padilla is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Latinx/Latin American Studies at the University of La Verne. She is the author of Divine Enjoyment: A Theology of Passion and Exuberance and coeditor of three volumes in the series Christianities of the World.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Diana P. Parsell, "Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees" (Oxford UP, 2023)

18 juli 2024 | 61 min

Kevin Loughran, "Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City" (Columbia UP, 2022)

18 juli 2024 | 64 min

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and community benefits. Yet there are clear economic motives as well—successful parks have helped generate billions of dollars of city tax revenues and real estate development.

In Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Kevin Loughran explores the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago, and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston to offer a critical perspective on the rise of the postindustrial park. He reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals. As urban economies have become restructured around finance, real estate, tourism, and cultural consumption, parks serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investment. Tracing changing ideas about cities and nature and underscoring the centrality of race and class, Dr. Loughran argues that postindustrial parks aestheticize past disinvestment while serving as green engines of gentrification.

A wide-ranging investigation of the political, cultural, and economic forces shaping park development, Parks for Profit reveals the social inequalities at the heart of today’s new urban landscape.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

17 juli 2024 | 76 min

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers―landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners―sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?”

Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. His publications include:

"Making Austria German Again: Austrofascist ‘Home Guards’ against ‘Austrian Legionaries’, 1933-1934," Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2024
"Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938," Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023, Winner of Austrian Studies Association’s Max Kade Prize, 2024
"Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019
"Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kristin J. Jacobson, "The American Adrenaline Narrative" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

14 juli 2024 | 58 min

Kristin J. Jacobson In her new book, The American Adrenaline Narrative (University of Georgia Press), Kristin Jacobson considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability.

To explore these themes, Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary American environmental movement. The forty-plus years since that day also mark the rise in the popularity and marketing of many things as "extreme," including sports, jobs, travel, beverages, gum, makeovers, laundry detergent, and even the environmental movement itself.

Jacobson maps the American eco-imagination via adrenaline narratives, surveying a range of popular and lesser-known primary texts by American authors, including best-sellers such as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place. She also covers lesser-known novels as well as stories found in all types of media ranging from magazines, feature-length and short films, television shows, amateur videos, social media posts, advertising, and blogs.

Jacobson argues for recognizing adrenaline narratives as a distinctive genre because, unlike traditional nature, travel, and sports writing, adrenaline narratives sustain heightened risk or the element of the "extreme" within a natural setting. Additionally, these narratives provide important insight into the American environmental imagination's connection to masculinity and adventure––knowledge that helps us grasp the current climate crisis and see how narrative understanding provides a needed intervention.

Kristin Jacobson is a professor of American literature, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. She completed her Ph.D. at Penn State, her M.A. at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and her B.A. at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023)

12 juli 2024 | 47 min

Timothy Barnard, "Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City" (NUS Press, 2024)

6 juli 2024 | 32 min

Timothy Grieve-Carlson, "American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius" (Oxford UP, 2024)

6 juli 2024 | 65 min

Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

3 juli 2024 | 56 min

John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)

3 juli 2024 | 79 min

Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024)

3 juli 2024 | 54 min

Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women’s lives.

Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas―including Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking―Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press, 2024) repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean’s natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children.

Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation’s people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity.

Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)

28 juni 2024 | 57 min

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.

Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.

What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Thomas Hendriks, "Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession" (Duke UP, 2021)

25 juni 2024 | 67 min

In this episode we are joined by Thomas Hendriks, an anthropologist studying capitalism and resource extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hendriks' work is amongst the most innovative in the anthropological study of capitalism, drawing upon queer theory, feminist ethnography, and phenomenology to make sense of cutting down large trees in the tropical rainforest.

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession (Duke UP, 2021) Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.

Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott conducts fieldwork on Dakelh Territory in Northern British Columbia, on capitalism, forestry, and colonialism. Elliott is studies contestations over profit, property and territory on Indigenous land. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Elsa Devienne, "Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles" (Oxford UP, 2024)

23 juni 2024 | 43 min

The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city's crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public.

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA's engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. They cleaned up and enlarged the beaches--up to three times their original size--and destroyed old piers and barracks to make room for brand-new accommodations, parking lots, and freeways. The members of this powerful "beach lobby" reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared "white flight" from the coast. In doing so, they established Southern California as the national reference point for shoreline planning and coastal access. As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Despite their artificial origins, LA's beaches have proved remarkably resilient. The drastic human interventions into nature brought social and economic benefits to the region without long-term detrimental consequences on the environment. Yet the ongoing climate crisis and rapid sea level rise will eventually force the city to reckon with its past building.

Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford UP, 2024) not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California. Featuring a foreword by Jenny Price, it recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world's greatest coastal metropolises.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)

21 juni 2024 | 52 min

Johanna Oksala, "Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology" (Northwestern UP, 2023)

20 juni 2024 | 82 min

John Soluri, "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (U Texas Press, 2021)

16 juni 2024 | 74 min

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this second edition of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (University of Texas Press, 2021) Dr. John Soluri presents a lively, interdisciplinary study that integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.

Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Dr. Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalisation and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, "At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans" (Columbia UP, 2024)

14 juni 2024 | 53 min

Adam Berg, "The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth" (U Texas Press, 2023)

12 juni 2024 | 45 min

Timothy Morton, "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" (Columbia UP, 2024)

12 juni 2024 | 67 min

Mark Stoll, "Profit: An Environmental History" (Polity Press, 2022)

9 juni 2024 | 76 min

Manisha Anantharaman, "Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability" (MIT Press, 2024)

7 juni 2024 | 40 min

Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024)

6 juni 2024 | 54 min

Elena Kochetkova, "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024)

5 juni 2024 | 66 min

Data Streams

3 juni 2024 | 35 min

Heather White, "60 Days to a Greener Life: Ease Eco-Anxiety Through Joyful Daily Action" (Harper Horizon, 2024)

27 maj 2024 | 67 min

Tad Delay, "Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change" (Verso, 2024)

26 maj 2024 | 66 min

Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

23 maj 2024 | 45 min

An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts.

Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) traces the struggles of one small store in one small town and uncovers the long arc of the modern industrial food system coming into being. In that system, corporate giants offer the kind of abundance, affordability, and convenience that make it all but impossible for small-scale ventures to survive, as Stanton discovered when she joined local efforts to save the nascent food co-op. Drawing on her own deep knowledge of how the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket are politically, ecologically, and economically entangled, she comes to a new understanding of why it’s so hard to effect real change in how we get our food. On the margins of the dominant system, she learns that it’s possible to keep an alternative alive by making a fierce commitment to community and stepping outside her own comfort zone as a white middle-class shopper—a core demographic of today’s locavore movement. In Orange, one of the poorest towns in one of the wealthiest U.S. states, Stanton also tracks the story of American industrial growth, abandonment, and the divisive politics of the present day. Her co-op started out in the former Minute Tapioca factory complex, now a business incubator in one of countless communities trying to anchor capital more permanently. The parallel story of the iconic Minute Tapioca brand shows the rise of mass-produced commodity foods and their role in creating a system with troubling disparities in who is able to afford fresh and healthy food.Food Margins is a complex and compelling story of a de-industrialized, rural community that is imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system. Stanton’s new book can help to fuel those conversations and actions with an insider view of the task at hand and an anthropologist’s sense of how it intersects wider struggles for equity and sustainability.

Cathy Stanton teaches Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Tufts University and lives in north-central Massachusetts, where she has been involved in local food projects for many years. She has written widely about sites of commemoration and heritage tourism, including at industrial and agricultural history sites. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sunaura Taylor, "Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert" (U California Press, 2024)

21 maj 2024 | 77 min

Sarah Cassella, "Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics" (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023)

20 maj 2024 | 47 min

The Climate Crisis as a Problem of Collective Action: A Discussion with Dana Fisher

18 maj 2024 | 41 min

At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans

16 maj 2024 | 50 min

Today’s book is: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024), by Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, which takes readers beneath the waves and along the coasts, to explore how climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Dr. Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. By sharing the stories of scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers, At Every Depth brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists’ research and local and Indigenous knowledge can all complement each other to inform a more sustainable future.

Our guest is: Dr. Tessa Hill, who is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of California, Davis. She teaches and researches oceanography and climate change. She is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she was awarded the Rachel Carson Lecture by the American Geophysical Union.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy these episodes with women in science:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

"Orion" Magazine: A Discussion with Sumanth Prabhaker

15 maj 2024 | 34 min

Sumanth Prabhaker is the editor-in-chief of Orion and the founding editor of Madra Press. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for the journal Ecotone.

Founded in 1982, Orion has evolved as a magazine over the years from the quieter, reverential environmental sensitivity that continues to distinguish it into also a wider awareness of global injustices that especially impact the Global South. In this episode, three essays were discussed that under his leadership, Sumanth Prabhaker nurtured into existence over a span that sometimes stretched into years. First among them is “How the Lark Got Her Crest” by Marianne Jay Erhardt from the Summer 2023 issue. It works from the slightest of bases, the few lines of Aesop’s fable about a lark, into a rather profound piece about how one might bury one’s father “in your head’ like the lark does. Language and honoring one’s parent becomes the grounding in this case. Second up, “The Other Bibles” by Katrina Vanderberg from the Spring 2024 issue began as almost a lark: why not include a book review of The Bible in a special issue devoted to religious rituals? The essay is at once a memorial to a husband who died of AIDS as a result of poorly monitored blood transfusions meant to help treat his hemophilia, as well as exploring the spiritual ecology of texts that come to us via illustrations in Bibles or the handiwork of the Earth itself. Third, the episode concludes by discussing “Natural Selection” by Erica Berry from the Winter 2023 issue. A Tinder ad about dating practices led into a piece on romance and even four Romance novels also written during the Year Without a Summer in 1916 when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia caused famine and disease and led, among other output, to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley setting to work on Frankenstein.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ban Wang, "At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China" (Duke UP, 2022)

15 maj 2024 | 52 min

Inhuman

14 maj 2024 | 21 min

Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)

14 maj 2024 | 62 min

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.

Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)

12 maj 2024 | 24 min

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023).

The book is available Open Access, click here to download.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure.

Per and Achim’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Dan Chapman, "A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land" (Island Press, 2022)

11 maj 2024 | 60 min

In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special.

Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature.

A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 2022) is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.

Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. Connect with him at Matthew Simmons | LinkedIn.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair

6 maj 2024 | 74 min

Salar Mameni, "Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2023)

5 maj 2024 | 67 min

In Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2023), Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.

Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni has published articles in Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review and Canadian Art Journal, and has written for exhibition catalogues in Dubai, Sharjah and Istanbul. Mameni was the curator of “Snail Fever,” at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai that explored art as a pandemic bringing together artists from the region whose works consider the embodied, viral and contaminating nature of sonic and visual aesthetics.

Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John J. Berger, "Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth" (Seven Stories Press, 2023)

3 maj 2024 | 48 min

Michael Gilson, "Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

3 maj 2024 | 53 min

Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen, "Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

1 maj 2024 | 64 min

Hiromi Ito, "Tree Spirits Grass Spirits" (Nightboat Books, 2023)

28 april 2024 | 50 min

Steven C. Beda, "Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

26 april 2024 | 64 min

Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, "Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

20 april 2024 | 35 min

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 april 2024 | 71 min

Joshua Trey Barnett, "Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence" (Michigan State UP, 2022)

16 april 2024 | 51 min

Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

3 april 2024 | 59 min

Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024)

2 april 2024 | 55 min

The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year.

From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen's luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents' disparate lives--her father's consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother's relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock--for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation.

A New York City schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia--and questions her own ability to become a mother--one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna's love for her nephew, Marcus, is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave.

When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific "paradise," where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of twenty-first century New York City, The Limits (Knopf, 2024) is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.

NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

India’s Waste Problem: A Discussion with Pamela Das

29 mars 2024 | 31 min

Rachel S. Gross, "Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America" (Yale UP, 2024)

26 mars 2024 | 37 min

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., "Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

23 mars 2024 | 48 min

Charlie Hertzog Young, "Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future" (Footnote Press, 2023)

19 mars 2024 | 84 min

Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

16 mars 2024 | 66 min

Travis Rieder, "Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices" (Dutton, 2024)

13 mars 2024 | 38 min

Yolanda Ariadne Collins, "Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield" (U California Press, 2024)

12 mars 2024 | 42 min

David E. Gilbert, "Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography" (U California Press, 2024)

12 mars 2024 | 33 min

Flora Lu and Emily Murai, "Critical Campus Sustainabilities: Bridging Social Justice and the Environment in Higher Education" (Springer, 2023)

11 mars 2024 | 53 min

Benjamin J. Pauli, "Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis" (MIT Press, 2019)

9 mars 2024 | 39 min

Originally published in 2019, Benjamin Pauli’s book, Flint Fights Back offers lasting insights into one of the most important drinking water-caused public health crises of American history. In this 2024 interview Pauli shares some explanations from the book but also offers his insights, in this year of the 10th anniversary of the Flint Water Crisis, on what is happening in Flint today and what, after all, we have learned from the fight for clean water in Flint, Michigan. -Patricia Houser, New Books in Environmental Studies Host.

An account of the Flint water crisis shows that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water is part of a broader struggle for democracy.

When Flint, Michigan, changed its source of municipal water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Flint residents were repeatedly assured that the water was of the highest quality. At the switchover ceremony, the mayor and other officials performed a celebratory toast, declaring “Here's to Flint!” and downing glasses of freshly treated water. But as we now know, the water coming out of residents' taps harbored a variety of contaminants, including high levels of lead. In Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis (MIT Press, 2019), Benjamin Pauli examines the water crisis and the political activism that it inspired, arguing that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water was part of a broader struggle for democracy. Pauli connects Flint's water activism with the ongoing movement protesting the state of Michigan's policy of replacing elected officials in financially troubled cities like Flint and Detroit with appointed “emergency managers.”

Currently available for free online: “The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.”

Patricia Houser, Ph.D., AICP, is former professor of geography and urban planning, now focused on writing and environmental research.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Christy Spackman, "The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage" (U California Press, 2023)

8 mars 2024 | 56 min

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University, where she holds a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. She is also Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies. Her academic work focuses on how the sensory experiences of making, consuming, and disposing of food influence and are influenced by “technologies of taste,” her term for the oft-overlooked technologies and practices used to manage the sensory aspects of foods during production.

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

8 mars 2024 | 44 min

Cristina Brito, "Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

4 mars 2024 | 37 min

Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023)

28 februari 2024 | 41 min

The Taste of Water: A Conversation with Christy Spackman

26 februari 2024 | 70 min

James S. Damico and Mark C. Baildon, "How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change" (Teachers College Press, 2022)

13 februari 2024 | 68 min

Climate change and climate denial have remained largely off the radar in literacy and social studies education in the United States. How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change (Teachers College Press, 2022) addresses that gap with the design of the Climate Denial Inquiry Model (CDIM) and clear examples of how educators and students can confront two forms of climate denial: science denial and action denial. The CDIM highlights how critical literacies specifically designed for climate denial texts can be used alongside eco-civic practices of deliberation, reflexivity, and counter-narration to help students discern corporate, financial, and politically motivated roots of climate denial and to better understand efforts to misinform the American public, sow doubt and distrust of basic scientific knowledge, and erode support for evidence-based policymaking and collective civic action. With an emphasis on inquiry-based teaching and learning, the book also charts a path from destructive stories-we-live-by that are steeped in climate denial (humans are separate from nature, the primary goal of society is economic growth without limits, nature is a resource to be used and exploited) to ecojustice stories-To-live by that invite teachers and students to consider more just and sustainable futures.

As mentioned in the podcast, From Climate Denial to Ecojustice is the accompanying website.James S. Damico is Professor of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.

Mark Baildon is an Associate Professor of Foundations of Education and Coordinator of International Collaborations and Partnerships in United Arab Emirates University’s College of Education.

Madden Gilhooly is a public-school teacher and casual academic based on Gadigal land in so-called-Sydney, Australia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)

12 februari 2024 | 49 min

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

"Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.

Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Daniel Capper, "Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World" (Cornell UP, 2022)

5 februari 2024 | 51 min

Ross S. Purves et al., "Unlocking Environmental Narratives: Towards Understanding Human Environment Interactions Through Computational Text Analysis" (Ubiquity Press, 2022)

3 februari 2024 | 27 min

Greg Ellermann, "Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature" (Stanford UP, 2022)

3 februari 2024 | 64 min

Charlotte Coté, "A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast" (U Washington Press, 2022)

30 januari 2024 | 72 min

Marco Armiero et al., "Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism" (MIT Press, 2022)

30 januari 2024 | 70 min

Jared D. Margulies, "The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

24 januari 2024 | 38 min

Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023)

24 januari 2024 | 50 min

Since the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agricultural practices. But who really benefits from Right to Farm Laws? And what can be done to promote real agricultural, rural, and environmental justice? Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC Press, 2023) offers valuable history and incisive commentary on these questions.

Since their adoption, there has yet to be a comprehensive analysis of what Right to Farm laws do and who they benefit. This book offers the first national analysis and guide to these laws. It reveals that they generally benefit the largest operators, like processing plants, while traditional farmers benefit the least. Disfavored most of all are those seeking to defend their homes and environment against multinational corporations that use right-to-farm laws to strip neighboring owners of their property rights. Through what the book calls the "midburden," right-to-farm laws dispossess the many in favor of the few, paving the path to rural poverty.

Empty Fields, Empty Promises summarizes every state's right-to-farm laws to help readers track and navigate their local and regional legal landscape. The book concludes by offering paths forward for a more distributed and democratic agrifood system that achieves agricultural, rural, and environmental justice.

The book is available for purchase or for FREE as an Open Access eBook from the University of North Carolina Press.

Loka Ashwood is associate professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky. Her work develops action-centered methodologies that help frontline communities overcome environmental injustices and strengthen democracy. She is the author of For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America (2018) and co-author of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (6th Edition, 2020).
Aimee Imlay is assistant professor of sociology at Mississippi State University.
Lindsay Kuehn is a public defender in Ramsey County, Minnesota, and a staff attorney with the Farmers' Legal Action Group.
Allen Franco is an assistant federal public defender for the districts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
Danielle Diamond is a visiting fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School.

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explore the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra S. Penn, "Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

20 januari 2024 | 50 min

Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan, "The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929" (Cornell UP, 2023)

18 januari 2024 | 46 min

Political Scientists Patricia Strach (The University at Albany, State University of New York) and Kathleen S. Sullivan (Ohio University) have written a fascinating and important exploration of trash. More precisely, this is a complex examination and analysis of the development of our municipal sanitation processes and structures, highlighting intersecting policy areas, urban and local politics, and racial, gender, and class politics. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (Cornell UP, 2023) has it all: corruption, gender and racial hierarchies, blame defection, rejection of expertise, case studies across a host of different cities around the country, and the collection of, the disposal of, and the innovations of garbage.

Strach and Sullivan examine this multidimensional policy issue from an American political development perspective when the issue really took root in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century. At this point, urban areas saw demographic growth from migration from rural areas as well as the waves of immigrants who came to the U.S. Most U.S. cities found themselves facing the same problem: unsanitary living situations. The initial research found that there were three different forms of trash collection, and they highlighted the processes in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. San Francisco had no formal municipal collection process; instead, the citizens of San Francisco contracted directly with scavengers themselves to remove the garbage. Pittsburgh, as a municipality, contracted out the responsibility—but the process there was one that fed fees back to the municipal leadership. New Orleans, awash in local government corruption, ultimately had a municipal collection program, which was generally far from effective. While these three cities were the basis for the initial research, St. Louis and Charleston were also added to the case studies, with Birmingham and Louisville as secondary examples within the study.

The Politics of Trash also explores the way in which citizens need to engage with and comply with the sanitation programs. In order to urge compliance, cities often called on women’s civic organizations to model and advocate for participation in the garbage process. Obviously, these were white women’s civic organizations and while they had been advocates for sanitation processes, they were generally cut out of the development process since women were not to be too close to politics itself. Strach and Sullivan spent time with the Good Housekeeping magazine archives in order to flesh out this dimension of the analysis. The research also highlights how blame was put on immigrants and people of color when the sanitation programs failed—often because of corruption and lack of sufficient resources.

The authors note throughout the text that the form that we remove and dispose of waste/garbage/trash now is the same as it was 100 years ago. And while we often separate compostables from recyclables from trash, this is not all that different than the ways that people disposed of their garbage in Pittsburgh, and Charleston, and San Francisco a century ago. And many of the same forms of removal remain in place. The Politics of Trash is a lively and fascinating analysis of a part of our lives that we often don’t consider to be political, but it is political, and has been for quite some time.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Neall W. Pogue, "The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement" (Cornell UP, 2022)

18 januari 2024 | 57 min

Gustav Cederlof, "The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba" (U California Press, 2023)

15 januari 2024 | 49 min

Dana R. Fisher, "Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action" (Columbia UP, 2024)

15 januari 2024 | 32 min

We've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsens. Is there any hope of achieving the systemic change we need?

In Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia UP, 2024), Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action—but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Spurred by this lack of progress, climate activism has become increasingly confrontational. Fisher examines the radical flank of the climate movement: its emergence and growth, its use of direct action, and how it might evolve as the climate crisis worsens. She considers when and how activism is most successful, identifying the importance of creating community, capitalizing on shocking moments, and cultivating resilience. Clear-eyed yet optimistic, Saving Ourselves offers timely insights on how social movements can take power back from deeply entrenched interests and open windows of opportunity for transformative climate action.

Dana R. Fisher is the director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. Her books include Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (2006) and American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave (Columbia, 2019).

Patricia Houser, PhD, AICP, is a researcher and writer on environmental issues. After several decades as a professor of geography and urban planning, she has turned to public education and outreach.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)

10 januari 2024 | 47 min

Robert Michael Morrissey, "People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America" (U Washington Press, 2022)

10 januari 2024 | 69 min

Melanie Joy, "How to End Injustice Everywhere" (Lantern, 2023)

8 januari 2024 | 75 min

Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019)

6 januari 2024 | 70 min

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.

The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019) is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Thom van Dooren is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014) and coeditor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (Columbia, 2017).

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

China’s Environmental Footprint in Ghana: Non-State Responses

5 januari 2024 | 31 min

Leigh Claire La Berge, "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary" (Duke UP, 2023)

5 januari 2024 | 37 min

Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)

4 januari 2024 | 39 min

Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024)

4 januari 2024 | 61 min

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.

When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In this book, Dr. Norton tells a new history of the colonisation of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the centre of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorise Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarisation: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019)

2 januari 2024 | 31 min

Robert R. Janes, "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" (Routledge, 2023)

2 januari 2024 | 58 min

Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading?

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat (Routledge, 2023) proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the implications of societal collapse from a multidisciplinary perspective and considers the potential museums have to contribute to the reimagining and transitioning of a new society with the threat of collapse.

Arguing that societal collapse is underway, but that total collapse is not inevitable, Janes maintains that museums are well-positioned to mitigate and adapt to the disruptions of societal collapse. As institutions of the commons, belonging to and affecting the public at large, he contends that museums are both responsible and capable of contributing to the durability and well-being of individuals, families, and communities, and enhancing societal resilience in the face of critical issues confronting our species.

The Museum COP at Tate
Museum pressure groups: The Empathetic Museum, Museum as Progress, Museum Human.
The Australian Museum’s mission statement
Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh
Museum of Homelessness
Horniman Museum

Robert R. Janes is an independent scholar whose work draws on his many year’s experience as a museum director. He is the editor emeritus of the Museum Management and Curatoriship journal, a visiting scholar at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and the founder of the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice. He is the author of multiple books on the social role of museums.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

1 januari 2024 | 44 min

Nature-Study

29 december 2023 | 23 min

In this episode, John Linstrom tells us about Nature-Study, an educational movement that began in the rural classrooms of American Progressive Era. It takes students and learners of all kinds out of the classroom, away from the textbook, and into the world, to observe and learn. It offers us a mode of attunement to the world that we might use to heal the divide between rural and urban, and kindle the kind of social change we need to get the world off fossil fuels.

Our conversation is centered around the new scholarly edition John edited of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Nature-Study Idea (Cornell University Press, 2023), which just came out. It’s the first book in the new The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library, a series for Cornell University Press reintroducing the ecological and critical-agrarian writings of L. H. Bailey (1858-1954). John was one of our first guests on High Theory back in 2020 – so if you want to listen back, you can check out the episode on Ecosphere. John told me when were were preparing to record that there was some debate about the dash in “Nature-Study” back in the day, but that he was on the side of the dashers, because the women teachers who led the movement favored the dash.

John is a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in NYC. He is also the author of a book of poems called To Leave for Our Own Country coming out with Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. He believes in poetry's power to foster communities for change, human and more-than-human stories and visions of climate justice He received his PhD in Literature from New York University and his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. John, Kim, and Saronik spent a lot of time together as grad students at 244 Greene St. in NYC. John and Kim used to run a working group on agriculture and literature, called Farm to Text. John lives in Queens, where gleans deep joy from holding his baby daughter, singing choral music, and eating large quantities of pesto.

The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu, especially for his friend John, in 2023.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020)

19 december 2023 | 78 min

Boria Sax, "Enchanted Forests: The Poetic Construction of a World Before Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

15 december 2023 | 54 min

Jean Yen-chun Lin, "A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities" (Columbia UP, 2023)

14 december 2023 | 63 min

Environmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards.

Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jean Yen-chun Lin demonstrates how a rising middle class acquires the capacity for organising in an authoritarian context. Dr. Lin examines how urban residents create civic life through everyday associational activities—learning to defend property rights, fostering participation, and mobilising to address housing-related grievances. She shows that homeowners cultivated petitioning skills, informational networks, and community leadership, which they would later deploy against incinerator projects. To interact with government agencies, they developed citizen science–based tactics, a middle-class alternative to disruptive protests. Homeowners drew on their professional connections, expertise, and fundraising capabilities to produce reports that boosted their legitimacy in city-level dialogue. Although only one of the three incinerator projects Dr. Lin follows was ultimately cancelled, some communities established durable organisations that went on to tackle other environmental problems.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, A Spark in the Smokestacks casts urban Chinese communities as “schools of democracy,” in which residents learn civic skills and build capacity for collective organising. Through compelling case studies of local activism, this book sheds new light on the formation of civil society and social movements more broadly.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)

11 december 2023 | 39 min

The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Dr. Slobodkin reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility.

Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races living in harsh environments. But as Dr. Slobodkin recounts, drawing on archival research from four continents, the twentieth century saw transformations in nutrition, scientific racism, and international humanitarianism that profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism could accomplish. A new confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with new norms of moral responsibility, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to colonial subjects—and to nature itself.

Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine as a technical problem subject to state control saddled France with untenable obligations. The Starving Empire not only illustrates how the painful history of colonial famine remains with us in our current understandings of public health, state sovereignty, and international aid, but also seeks to return food—this most basic of human needs—to its central place in the formation of modern political obligation and humanitarian ethics.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tom Özden-Schilling, "The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science After the War in the Woods" (Duke UP, 2023)

9 december 2023 | 81 min

Abigail Agresta, "The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

6 december 2023 | 47 min

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived?

In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period.

Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, The Keys to Bread and Wine shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia.

Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Perlin, "The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization" (Patagonia, 2023)

4 december 2023 | 28 min

A Foundational Conservation Story Revived.

Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.”

This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day trees still fulfill these roles for a good portion of the world’s population.

Without vast supplies of wood from forests, the great civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome, the Islamic World, Western Europe, and North America would have never emerged. Wood, in fact, is the unsung hero of the technological revolution that has brought us from a stone and bone culture to our present age.

Until the ascendancy of fossil fuels, wood was the principal fuel and building material from the dawn of civilization. Its abundance or scarcity greatly shaped, as A Forest Journey ably relates, the culture, demographics, economy, internal and external politics and technology of successive societies over the millennia.

The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization (Patagonia, 2023) was originally published in 1989 and updated in 2005. The book's comprehensive coverage of the major role forests have played in human life -- told with grace, fluency, imagination, and humor -- gained it recognition as a Harvard Classic in Science and World History and as one of Harvard's "One Hundred Great Books." Others receiving the honor include such luminaries as Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson. This is a foundational conservation story that should not be lost in the archives. This new, updated and revised edition emphasizes the importance of forests in the fight against global warming and the urgency to protect what remains of the great trees and forests of the world.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tracy E. Perkins, "Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism" (U California Press, 2022)

3 december 2023 | 67 min

Anne Baillot, "From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis" (Open Book Publishers, 2023)

26 november 2023 | 54 min

How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future?

In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establish a philological overview of the changing boundaries of ‘access’ to literary heritage over centuries, deconstructing the western tradition of archiving and how it has led to current digital dissemination practices. Rigorously examining the negative environmental impact of digital publishing and archiving, Baillot proposes an alternative model of preservation and dissemination which reconciles fundamental traditions with the values of social responsibility and sustainability in an era of climate crisis.

Integrating historical, archival and environmental perspectives, From Handwriting to Footprinting illuminates the impact that digitisation has had on the dissemination and preservation of textual heritage and reflects on what its future may hold. It is invaluable reading for anyone interested in textual history from a linguistic or philological perspective, as well as those working on publishing, archival and infrastructure projects that require the storing and long-term preservation of texts, or who want to know how to develop a more mindful attachment to digitised material.

This book is available open access here.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)

22 november 2023 | 66 min

Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)

18 november 2023 | 43 min

Alexa Weik von Mossner, "Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative" (Ohio State UP, 2017)

18 november 2023 | 64 min

Plantationocene

17 november 2023 | 19 min

In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit.

In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraway’s essay, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” Environmental Humanities 6 no. 1 (2015): 159-165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934, and Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’” Earth Systems Science in the Anthropocene ed. Eckhart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Springer, 2006) pp. 13-18. He references B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two (MacMillan, 1962) at the end of our conversation.

Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Watson Institute for International Affairs. He studies the history of science, agriculture, and other forms of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, focusing on the plantation cultures of the Caribbean and Brazil. He was recently the director of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, and many years ago, when he was more optimistic about the current global epoch, he managed grants for the Sierra Club Foundation in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (U Chicago, 2008) and is cooking up two new projects, on the historical connections between natural science and plantation agriculture in the Amazon River basin and the global history of collecting.

The image for this week comes from Neil’s research on the history of plantation agriculture. This drawing of a plantation from Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) was reproduced in José Mariano da Conceição Velozo's Fazendeiro do Brazil Tome III Part II (Lisbon, 1799), in the volume dedicated to coffee production.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Shay Rabineau, "Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails" (Indiana UP, 2023)

12 november 2023 | 59 min

Daniel Macfarlane, "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

11 november 2023 | 48 min

No two nations have exchanged natural resources, produced transborder environmental agreements, or cooperatively altered ecosystems on the same scale as Canada and the United States. Environmental and energy diplomacy have profoundly shaped both countries’ economies, politics, and landscapes for over 150 years.

Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) looks at the history of US-Canada relations through an environmental lens. From fisheries in the late nineteenth century to oil pipelines in the twenty-first century, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the scores of transborder environmental and energy arrangements made between the two nations. Many became global precedents that influenced international environmental law, governance, and politics, including the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Trail Smelter case, hydroelectric megaprojects, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements. In addition to water, fish, wood, minerals, and myriad other resources, Natural Allies details the history of the continental energy relationship - from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels -showing how Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state.

Environmental and energy relations facilitated the integration and prosperity of Canada and the United States but also made these countries responsible for the current climate crisis and other unsustainable forms of ecological degradation. Looking to the future, Natural Allies argues that the concept of national security must be widened to include natural security - a commitment to public, national, and international safety from environmental harms, especially those caused by human actions.

Daniel Macfarlane is associate professor at the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.

Filippo De Chirico is a PhD student in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Caroline Levine, "The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis" (Princeton UP, 2023)

9 november 2023 | 82 min

W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he meant. Auden’s line is importantly from a poem memorializing W.B. Yeats, a politician and a poet. Auden meant that despite Yeats’s poetry, “Ireland [still] has her madness and her weather still.” Yeats’s poetry didn’t stop suffering. But Auden acknowledges that poetry is a “way of happening” that survives and persists. Today’s guest, Caroline Levine, has written a brilliant new book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton UP, 2023). As I read the book, I began asking myself in the manner of Auden: “Does literary criticism make nothing happen? What kind of something might attention to social forms within aesthetic criticism make happen?”

I am excited to talk to Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Previously, she was Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), which won the winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, as well as The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007).

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Colin McFarlane, "Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife" (Verso, 2023)

7 november 2023 | 45 min

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Colin McFarlane, through Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), makes a call to action on one of modern urban life's most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.

The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's concept of 'the right to the city', it uses the notion of 'citylife' to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)

3 november 2023 | 62 min

Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer, "Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

25 oktober 2023 | 45 min

Özge Yaka, "Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles" (U California Press, 2023)

23 oktober 2023 | 55 min

Michael Welsh, "Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem" (U Nevada Press, 2021)

22 oktober 2023 | 89 min

Sonja K. Pieck, "Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)

22 oktober 2023 | 53 min

Stephen Robert Miller, "Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature" (Island Press, 2023)

20 oktober 2023 | 40 min

In March 2011, people in a coastal Japanese city stood atop a seawall watching the approach of the tsunami that would kill them. They believed—naively—that the huge concrete barrier would save them. Instead they perished, betrayed by the very thing built to protect them. Erratic weather, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse now affect every inch of the globe. Increasingly, we no longer look to stop climate change, choosing instead to adapt to it.

Never have so many undertaken such a widespread, hurried attempt to remake the world. Predictably, our hubris has led to unintended—and sometimes disastrous—consequences. Academics call it maladaptation; in simple terms, it’s about solutions that backfire. Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature (Island Press, 2023) by Stephen Robert Miller tells us the stories behind these unintended consequences and about the fixes that can do more harm than good. From seawalls in coastal Japan, to the reengineered waters in the Ganges River Delta, to the artificial ribbon of water supporting both farms and urban centres in parched Arizona, Miller traces the histories of engineering marvels that were once deemed too smart and too big to fail. In each he takes us into the land and culture, seeking out locals and experts to better understand how complicated, grandiose schemes led instead to failure, and to find answers to the technologic holes we’ve dug ourselves into.

Over the Seawall urges us to take a hard look at the fortifications we build and how they’ve fared in the past. It embraces humanity’s penchant for problem-solving, but argues that if we are to adapt successfully to climate change, we must recognize that working with nature is not surrender but the only way to assure a secure future.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

James J. A. Blair, "Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic" (Cornell UP, 2023)

13 oktober 2023 | 46 min

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science.

Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Spanish), a commercial fishing boom and offshore oil discoveries have intensified the sovereignty dispute over the South Atlantic archipelago. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic focuses primarily on military history of the 1982 conflict. However, contested claims over natural resources have now made this disputed territory a critical site for examining the wider relationship between imperial sovereignty and environmental governance.

Dr. Blair argues that by claiming self-determination and consenting to British sovereignty, the Falkland Islanders have crafted a settler colonial protectorate to extract resources and extend empire in the South Atlantic. Responding to current debates in environmental anthropology, critical geography, Atlantic history, political ecology, and science and technology studies, Dr. Blair describes how settlers have asserted indigeneity in dynamic relation with the environment. Salvaging Empire uncovers the South Atlantic's outsized importance for understanding the broader implications of resource management and environmental science for the geopolitics of empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Oil Beach - How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life: A Conversation with Christina Dunbar-Hester

9 oktober 2023 | 58 min

Kendra Coulter, "Defending Animals: Finding Hope on the Front Lines of Animal Protection" (MIT Press, 2023)

8 oktober 2023 | 59 min

Naveeda Khan, "In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South" (Fordham UP, 2023)

26 september 2023 | 54 min

Based on the author’s eight years of fieldwork with the United Nations-led Conference of Parties (COP), In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham UP, 2023) offers an illuminating first-person ethnographic perspective on climate change negotiations. Focusing on the Paris Agreement, anthropologist Naveeda Khan introduces readers to the only existing global approach to the problem of climate change, one that took nearly thirty years to be collectively agreed upon. She shares her detailed descriptions of COP21 to COP25 and growing understanding of the intricacies of the climate negotiation process, leading her to ask why countries of the Global South invested in this slow-moving process and to explore how they have maneuvered it.

With a focus on the Bangladeshi delegation at the COPs, Khan draws out what it means to be a small, poor, and dependent country within the negotiation process. Her interviews with negotiators within country delegations uncover their pathways to the negotiating tables. Through observations of training sessions of negotiators of the Global South, Khan seeks to reveal understandings of what is or is not achievable within negotiated texts and the power of deal-making and deferrals. She profiles individuals who had committed themselves to the climate negotiation process, moving between the Secretariat, Parties, activists, and the wider UN system to bring their principles, strategies, emotions, and visions into view. She explores how the newest pillar of climate action, loss and damage, emerged historically and how developed countries attempted to control it in the process. Khan suggests that we understand the Global South’s pursuit of loss and damage not only as a politics of forcing the issue of a conjoined future upon the Global North, but as a gift to the youth of the world to secure that future.

Deeply insightful and highly readable, In Quest of a Shared Planet is a stirring call to action that highlights the key role responsive and active youth have in climate negotiations. It is an invitation not only to understand the climate negotiation process, but also to navigate it (for those planning to attend sessions themselves) and to critique it—with, the author hopes, sympathy and an eye to viable alternatives.

In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She sits on the board of the JHU Center for Islamic Studies, and serves as affiliate faculty for the JHU Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke, 2012) and River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke, 2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (Routledge, 2010).

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Alda Balthrop-Lewis, "Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

25 september 2023 | 41 min

Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care" (U California Press, 2023)

22 september 2023 | 23 min

Todd E. Vachon, "Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice" (Temple UP, 2023)

22 september 2023 | 37 min

Kathrin Eitel, "Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh" (Routledge, 2022)

21 september 2023 | 48 min

Kathrin Eitel's book Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh (Routledge, 2022) examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through 'infracycles', maintenance practices that tinker with the social and capitalist order, and postcolonial ways of doing politics that co-constitute predominant waste fantasies from which naturecultures ooze out, shaping urban life in their own way.

In this context, socially marginalized waste pickers contest the capitalist system by creating tropes about freedom, labor autonomy, and the will to survive. In this regard, they are also meddling about a new social order that represents the fine line Cambodia is sashaying between tradition and modernity. Waste fantasies that are a result of environmental problematizations, however, perpetuate postcolonial ways of doing politics by exuding notions of waste as detached from its sociocultural context. But ultimately, waste slips through the cracks of these dominant imaginaries and global waste reduction models enacting new versions of what waste and the city is, providing opportunities for another future waste policy.

This book is a unique contribution to the field of infrastructure studies emphasizing the importance of perceiving infrastructure as circular in smaller 'infracycles', rather than linear. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, urban studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

The Introduction of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Kathrin Eitel is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich.

Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jeffrey Angles, ed., "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

21 september 2023 | 51 min

Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of Shigeru Kayama, the science fiction writer who drafted the 1954 original film and its first sequel and, in 1955, published these novellas.

Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama (U Michigan Press, 2023) finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The novellas reveal valuable insights into Kayama’s vision for the Godzilla story, feature plots that differ from the films, and clearly display the author’s strong antinuclear, proenvironmental convictions.

Kayama’s fiction depicts Godzilla as engaging in guerrilla-style warfare against humanity, which has allowed the destruction of the natural world through its irresponsible, immoral perversion of science. As human activity continues to cause mass extinctions and rapid climatic change, Godzilla provides a fable for the Anthropocene, powerfully reminding us that nature will fight back against humanity’s onslaught in unpredictable and devastating ways.

Shigeru Kayama (1904–1975) was a science fiction writer and scenarist whose early stories about monsters and mutated sea creatures attracted the attention of Tōhō Studios, which asked him to draft the first two Godzilla films.

Jeffrey Angles is professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minnesota, 2011) and the award-winning translator of Orikuchi Shinobu’s The Book of the Dead (Minnesota, 2017) and Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Daniel Jaffee, "Unbottled: The Fight Against Plastic Water and for Water Justice" (U California Press, 2023)

17 september 2023 | 56 min

Oscar Webber, "Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812-1907" (Manchester UP, 2023)

17 september 2023 | 61 min

Stefan Helmreich, "A Book of Waves" (Duke UP, 2023)

16 september 2023 | 46 min

In A Book of Waves (Duke UP, 2023), Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wakes and breaks of social histories and futures.

Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics, and computer science define and theorize their objects of study, particularly as these objects — waves, life, sound, code — reach their conceptual limits.

Tamara Fernando is an assistant professor in the History of the Global South, at Stony Brook University, New York. Her research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of labor, environment, and science histories, with a specific focus on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. Her current book project, "Shallow Blue Empire: Knowing the Littoral across the Indian Ocean," aspires to uncover a "history below the water line" through a trans-national account of the pearling industry across the northern Indian Ocean. This work centers on the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar, and the Mergui/Myeik archipelago, elucidating how modes of knowledge about the littoral zone of the ocean were determined in the context of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. She is deeply committed to employing trans-regional and interdisciplinary methods in the study of the past, as well as addressing the question of how to craft global histories of science.

Her second book project, "Submarine Futures: Science and Expertise in the Indian Ocean 1872-2004," traces human engagements with the ocean through three objects: the shipwreck, the nuclear submarine, and the deep-sea port across key nodes in the Indian Ocean. This endeavor explores how scientific disciplines like maritime archaeology continue to shape notions of the Indian Ocean’s “cosmopolitan” and inter-connected pasts.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Katie J. Wells et al., "Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City" (Princeton UP, 2023)

16 september 2023 | 55 min

A Better Way to Buy Books

12 september 2023 | 33 min

Nicole Fabricant, "Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore" (U California Press, 2022)

10 september 2023 | 37 min

Zdenka Sokolickova, "The Paradox of Svalbard: Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic" (Pluto Press, 2023)

9 september 2023 | 49 min

Ryan Tucker Jones, "Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

9 september 2023 | 60 min

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans.

In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission’s rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior.

And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrea Muehlebach, "A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe" (Duke UP, 2023)

8 september 2023 | 38 min

Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, "Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility" (Haymarket, 2023)

2 september 2023 | 64 min

Davide Rodogno, "Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

2 september 2023 | 60 min

Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, "Noah's Arkive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

24 augusti 2023 | 100 min

At a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to build a giant ship and bring aboard animals, who will spend an indefinite amount of time living, sleeping, and eating alongside Noah and his family. The rain begins to fall, and these survivors take refuge on the ark. After forty days, the survivors disembark and then have to figure out how to create a new settlement as the waters recede. This cryptic, elliptical ancient story has inspired theological commentary, architecture, and children’s toys, giving us an abundance of metaphors and narratives to understand our past, present, and future climate crises. Our continuing attempts to critically examine the ark narrative and its long afterlife in our imagination is the subject of Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates’s new book Noah’s Arkive, just published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2023.

Jeffrey Cohen is Dean of Humanities at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Jeffrey’s previous books include Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles (Palgrave, 2006); and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota, 1999). Julian Yates is H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture at the University of Delaware. Julian’s previous books include Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (2017); and Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2002), both from the University of Minnesota Press.

More about the book:

In Noah's Arkive (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dealing with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene.

Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2022)

23 augusti 2023 | 51 min

Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)

22 augusti 2023 | 55 min

Christopher C. Sellers, "Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

21 augusti 2023 | 66 min

Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis (U Georgia Press, 2023) turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.

Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national “poster child” for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an anti-environmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region’s Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.

Christopher Sellers is professor of history at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Hazards of the Job, Crabgrass Crucible, Dangerous Trade, and Landscapes of Exposure, among other publications. He is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including those from the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Library of Medicine. He lives in Stony Brook, New York. Website. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Shelley Ingram and Willow G. Mullins, "Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)

21 augusti 2023 | 63 min

Sally Hawkins et al., "Routledge Handbook of Rewilding" (Routledge, 2022)

20 augusti 2023 | 36 min

Ulbe Bosma, "The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2,000 Years" (Harvard UP, 2023)

20 augusti 2023 | 27 min

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way?

The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard UP, 2023) begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labour; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America.

Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labour migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Satish Kumar and Lorna Howarth, "Regenerative Learning: Nurturing People and Caring for the Planet" (Salt Desert Media, 2022)

19 augusti 2023 | 39 min

Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World

18 augusti 2023 | 13 min

Indra’s Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World

16 augusti 2023 | 15 min

The Silent Epidemic: Coal and the Hidden Threat to Health

15 augusti 2023 | 14 min

We will not find “exposure to burning coal” listed as the cause of death on a single death certificate, but tens of thousands of deaths from asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and other illnesses are clearly linked to coal-derived pollution. As politicians and advertising campaigns extol the virtues of “clean coal,” the dirty secret is that coal kills. In The Silent Epidemic, Alan Lockwood, a physician, describes and documents the adverse health effects of burning coal. Lockwood's comprehensive treatment examines every aspect of coal, from its complex chemical makeup to details of mining, transporting, burning, and disposal—each of which generates significant health concerns. He describes coal pollution's effects on the respiratory, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, and how these problems will only get worse; explains the impact of global warming on coal-related health problems; and discusses possible policy approaches to combat coal pollution.

Coal fueled the industrial revolution and has become a major source of energy in virtually every country. In the United States, almost half of the energy used to generate electricity comes from burning coal. Relatively few people are aware of the health threats posed by coal-derived pollutants, and those who are aware lack the political clout of the coal industry. Lockwood's straightforward description of coal as a health hazard is especially timely, given the barrage of marketing efforts to promote coal as part of “energy independence.” His message is clear and urgent: “Coal-fired plants make people sick and die, particularly children and those with chronic illnesses, and they cost society huge amounts of money desperately needed for other purposes.”

Alan H. Lockwood, M.D. is Emeritus Professor of Neurology and Nuclear Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the lead author of a Physicians for Social Responsibility report on coal’s adverse health effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Vinod Thomas, "Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

14 augusti 2023 | 67 min

Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023)

12 augusti 2023 | 53 min

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now" (Routledge, 2023)

11 augusti 2023 | 53 min

Simone M. Müller, "The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade" (U Washington Press, 2023)

8 augusti 2023 | 63 min

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world's oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after country refused to accept the waste. The ship ended up dumping part of its load in Haiti under false pretenses, and the remaining waste was illegally dumped in the ocean. Two shipping company officials eventually received criminal convictions.

In The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade (University of Washington Press, 2023), Simone M. Müller uses the ship's voyage as a lens to elucidate the global trade in hazardous waste—the movement of material ranging from outdated consumer products and pesticides to barges filled with all sorts of toxic discards—from the 1970s to the present day, exploring the story's international nodes and detailing the downside of environmental conscientiousness among industrial nations as waste is pushed outward. Müller also highlights the significance of the trip's start in Philadelphia, a city with a significant African American population. The geographical origins shed light on environmental racism within the United States in the context of the global story of environmental justice. Activism in response to the ship's journey set an important precedent, and this book brings together the many voices that shaped the international trade in hazardous waste.

Simone M. Müller is DFG Heisenberg Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany and the author of Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)

8 augusti 2023 | 58 min

Richard C. Hoffmann, "The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

7 augusti 2023 | 60 min

Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022)

7 augusti 2023 | 60 min

Housing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2023), written for a lay audience (with policy makers firmly in mind) offers a useful and intelligible overview of our housing system and why it is in ‘crisis’ while acting as an important reminder of how housing contributes to social value, defined as community, health, self development and identity. It argues for a holistic digital map-based planning system that allows for the sensitive balancing of the triple bottom line of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic value. It sets out a vision of what our housing system could look like if we really put the wellbeing of people and planet first, as well as a route map on how to get there.

Written primarily from the point of view of an architect, the account weaves across industry, practice, and academia cross-cutting disciplines to provide an integrated view of the field. The book focuses on the UK housing scene but draws on and provides lessons for housing cultures across the globe. Illustrated throughout with case studies, this is the go-to book for anyone who wants to look at housing in a holistic way.

Flora Samuel is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She helped set up the new School of Architecture at the University of Reading and is former Head of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and the first RIBA Vice President for Research. The author of Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects (Routledge, 2018) she has spent the last decade researching the positive impact of good design on people. Her interests are now moving to land use and social justice, both key to addressing climate change. She is well known as an industry advisor on the social value of the design of housing and places and a strong advocate of social value mapping. She is also known for her unorthodox writings on Le Corbusier, about whom she has published extensively. A mother of three daughters, she is based in Wales.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Cindy McCulligh, "Sewer of Progress: Corporations, Institutionalized Corruption, and the Struggle for the Santiago River" (MIT Press, 2023)

6 augusti 2023 | 63 min

For almost two decades, the citizens of Western Mexico have called for a cleanup of the Santiago River, a water source so polluted it emanates an overwhelming acidic stench. Toxic clouds of foam lift off the river in a strong wind. In Sewer of Progress: Corporations, Institutionalized Corruption, and the Struggle for the Santiago River (MIT Press, 2023), Cindy McCulligh examines why industrial dumping continues in the Santiago despite the corporate embrace of social responsibility and regulatory frameworks intended to mitigate environmental damage. The fault, she finds, lies in a disingenuous discourse of progress and development that privileges capitalist growth over the health and well-being of ecosystems.

Rooted in research on institutional behavior and corporate business practices, Sewer of Progress exposes a type of regulatory greenwashing that allows authorities to deflect accusations of environmental dumping while "regulated" dumping continues in an environment of legal certainty. For transnational corporations, this type of simulation allows companies to take advantage of double standards in environmental regulations, while presenting themselves as socially responsible and green global actors. Through this inversion, the Santiago and other rivers in Mexico have become sewers for urban and industrial waste. Institutionalized corruption, a concept McCulligh introduces in the book, is the main culprit, a system that permits and normalizes environmental degradation, specifically in the creation and enforcement of a regulatory framework for wastewater discharge that prioritizes private interests over the common good.

Through a research paradigm based in institutional ethnography and political ecology, Sewer of Progress provides a critical, in-depth look at the power relations subverting the role of the state in environmental regulation and the maintenance of public health.

Brad H. Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. PhD in Public History. Asst. Prof. of Latin American History at Alabama A&M University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Erika Marie Bsumek, "The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau" (U Texas Press, 2023)

6 augusti 2023 | 57 min

Heather White, "One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet" (Harper Horizon, 2022)

5 augusti 2023 | 67 min

The climate crisis and its resulting eco-anxiety is the biggest challenge of our time. The anxiety that comes with worrying about how environmental harm will impact our—and our children’s—lives can be overwhelming. Learn how to balance practicing daily sustainability actions while caring for your own eco-anxiety in this revolutionary book from noted environmentalist Heather White.

In One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet (Harper Horizon, 2022), White shows you how to contribute to the climate movement through self-discovery and self-care. Utilizing the Service Superpower Profile Assessment included in the text, you’ll discover how your personality, interests, and strengths can be of service to others and the planet. This book will serve as your guide to:

Begin a 21-Day Kickstarter Plan that shares specific sustainable actions you can take
Track your progress with journal prompts and exercises that’ll help you measure mental health benefits
Listen and talk with loved ones about their climate anxiety
Commit to being an eco-aware individual and inspire your family, friends, and community to work toward a regenerative, sustainable world

Setting the intention each day to take a small step— a "one green thing" to care for the planet—can help ease your eco-anxiety, push the culture toward climate solutions, and create a sense of joy.

Heather White is a changemaker, an environment policy expert, an environmental lawyer, a writer, a motivational speaker, a nonprofit executive, and has been a Senate staffer.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Omolade Adunbi, "Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria" (Indiana UP, 2022)

31 juli 2023 | 42 min

Sarah E. Vaughn, "Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation" (Duke UP, 2022)

29 juli 2023 | 64 min

Sarah E. Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke UP, 2022) examines climate adaptation strategies that upend the neat divisions of linear temporality separate the past, present, and the future, and shows how multiple temporalities co-exist in the pressing sense of crisis that engulfs coastal spaces vulnerable to flooding. Her ethnographic account takes us to Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic floods that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equalities as seen through the lens of ‘apan jaat’ (loosely translated from Hindi/Bhojpuri to for our kind or community), which has been the dominant political ideology creating a divide between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese diasporas, in the postcolonial independent nation-state, that has been the site of both plantation slavery and indentured labor during the colonial period.

Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for the limits of ideologies such as ‘apan jaat’ and demands newer forms of political ideation and action. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through engineering experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to bringing ethical questions to bear on the technoscientific climate adaptation projects. Vaughn offers us a complex and compelling narrative that begins from the local, personal, and deeply material aspects of climate adaptation from the Global South while never losing sight of the stakes for these struggles on the global and planetary stages—showing how questions of environmental justice are inextricably tied to questions of historical racialization.

Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023)

25 juli 2023 | 57 min

Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world.

Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals. Prof. Vincanne Adams, is professor Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)

13 juli 2023 | 36 min

Simone Ferracina, "Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet" (Routledge, 2022)

8 juli 2023 | 30 min

Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Simone Ferracina's book Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet (Routledge, 2022) re-thinks potentiality―an object’s ability to change―in architecture and design.

The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts―through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines―a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place.

As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms―as situated individuals and co-authors.

Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Future of Oceans: A Discussion with Chris Armstrong

3 juli 2023 | 35 min

The Bubble Economy: Is Sustainable Growth Possible?

30 juni 2023 | 16 min

The global economy has become increasingly, perhaps chronically, unstable. Since 2008, we have heard about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, banks “too big to fail,” financial regulation (or the lack of it), and the European debt crisis. Wall Street has discovered that it is more profitable to make money from other people's money than by investing in the real economy, which has limited access to capital—resulting in slow growth and rising inequality. What we haven't heard much about is the role of natural resources—energy in particular—as drivers of economic growth, or the connection of “global warming” to the economic crisis. In The Bubble Economy, Robert Ayres—an economist and physicist—connects economic instability to the economics of energy.

Ayres describes, among other things, the roots of our bubble economy (including the divergent influences of Senator Carter Glass—of the Glass-Steagall Law—and Ayn Rand); the role of energy in the economy, from the “oil shocks” of 1971 and 1981 through the Iraq wars; the early history of bubbles and busts; the end of Glass-Steagall; climate change; and the failures of austerity.

Finally, Ayres offers a new approach to trigger economic growth. The rising price of fossil fuels (notwithstanding “fracking”) suggests that renewable energy will become increasingly profitable. Ayres argues that government should redirect private savings and global finance away from home ownership and toward “de-carbonization”—investment in renewables and efficiency. Large-scale investment in sustainability will achieve a trifecta: lowering greenhouse gas emissions, stimulating innovation-based economic growth and employment, and offering long-term investment opportunities that do not depend on risky gambling strategies with derivatives.

Robert U. Ayres, an American-born physicist and economist, is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD, the international graduate business school. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including (with Benjamin Warr) The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Prosperity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas

29 juni 2023 | 60 min

Like wolves, orcas have been loved and loathed throughout history. What created this complicated relationship between humans and whales? And have we changed our attitudes toward them and their habitat needs in time to save them? Science writer and biologist Hanne Strager joins us to share:

How a conversation in a cafeteria led her to remote corners of the world.
Why her sister helped her be in two places at once.
How she learned about whale dialects.
Why the loss of a pod member matters so much.
A discussion of the book The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).

Today’s book is: The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas, by Hanne Strager, which opens as intrepid biology student Hanne Strager volunteers to be the cook on a small research vessel in Norway's Lofoten Islands. This trip would inspire a decades-long journey to learn about the lives of killer whales—and an exploration of people's complex relationships with the biggest predators on earth. In The Killer Whale Journals, Strager brings us along with her as she battles the stormy Arctic seas of northern Norway with fellow biologists intent on decoding whale-song and dialects, interviews First Nations conservationists in Vancouver, observes Inuit hunters in Greenland, and witnesses the dismantling of black market "whale jails" in the Russian wilderness of Kamchatka. Featuring photographs from Paul Nicklen, The Killer Whale Journals reveals rare and intimate moments of connection with these fierce, brilliant predators.

Our guest is: Hanne Strager, who is a biologist, whale researcher, and the future Director of Exhibitions and Visitor Experience at The Whale, a museum in Norway set to open in 2025. She cofounded a whale center in Norway and has served as the Director of Exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. She is the author of A Modest Genius: The Story of Darwin’s Life and How His Ideas Changed Everything, and The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She has served as creator and producer of the Academic Life since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of New Books Network.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re busy in the studio preparing new episodes for your academic journey—and beyond!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)

23 juni 2023 | 29 min

On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project became the subject of a public hearing in a small town near the proposed site. But this time, local politicians and union leaders praised the mine proposal as an asset that would strengthen working-class communities in Minnesota.

In many rural American communities, there is profound tension around the preservation and protection of wilderness and the need to promote and profit from natural resources. In Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range (NYU Press, 2023), Erik Kojola looks at both sides of these populist movements and presents a thoughtful account of how such political struggles play out. Drawing on over a hundred ethnographic interviews with people of the region, from members of labor unions to local residents to scientists, Kojola is able to bring this complex struggle over mining to life. Focusing on both pro- and anti-mining groups, he expands upon what this conflict reveals about the way whiteness and masculinity operate among urban and rural residents, and the different ways in which class, race, and gender shape how people relate to the land. Mining the Heartland shows the negotiation and conflict between two central aspects of the state's culture and economy: outdoor recreation in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and the lucrative mining of the Iron Range.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Illuminations Episode 9: Rituals for a Dying World

22 juni 2023 | 23 min

The Environmental Unconscious

20 juni 2023 | 22 min

Leela Fernandes, "Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State" (U Washington Press, 2022)

17 juni 2023 | 37 min

Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

15 juni 2023 | 76 min

How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable.

In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights.

Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too.

Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield, the University of York, and Queen's University (in Canada), before which he studied at Queen's University Belfast and Lancaster University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), and the regular host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

14 juni 2023 | 30 min

Stephen G. Gross, "Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change" (Oxford UP, 2023)

13 juni 2023 | 74 min

Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems.

In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energy and climate policy from World War II to the present. The book follows the Federal Republic as it passed through five energy transitions from the dramatic shift to oil that nearly wiped out the nation's hard coal sector, to the oil shocks and the rise of the Green movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the co-creation of a natural gas infrastructure with Russia, and the transition to renewable power today. He shows how debates over energy profoundly shaped the course of German history and influenced the landmark developments that define modern Europe. As Gross argues, the intense and early politicization of energy led the Federal Republic to diverge from the United States and rethink its fossil economy well before global warming became a public issue, building a green energy system in the name of many social goals. Yet Germany's experience also illustrates the difficulty, the political battles, and the unintended consequences that surround energy transitions.

By combining economy theory with a study of interest groups, ideas, and political mobilization, Energy and Power offers a novel explanation for why energy transitions happen. Further, it provides a powerful lens to move beyond conventional debates on Germany's East-West divide, or its postwar engagement with the Holocaust, to explore how this nation has shaped the contemporary world in other important ways.

Stephen G. Gross is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University.

Filippo De Chirico, History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tessa Farmer, "Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

8 juni 2023 | 42 min

Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems required to facilitate clean water in their homes and neighborhoods.

As a community that was originally not included in Cairo's municipal systems, the residents of Ezbet Khairallah built their own potable water and wastewater infrastructure. But when the city initiated a piped sewage removal system, local residents soon found themselves with little to no power over their own water supply or wastewater removal. Throughout this transition, residents worked together to collect water at the right times to drink, bathe, do laundry, cook, and clean homes. These everyday practices had deep implications for the health of community members, as they struggled to remain hydrated, rid their children of endemic intestinal worms, avoid consuming water contaminated with sewage, and mediate the impact of fluctuating water quality.

Farmer examines how the people of Cairo interact with one another, with the government, and with social structures in order to navigate the water systems (and lack thereof) that affect their day-to-day lives. Farmer's extensive ethnographic fieldwork during the implementation of the Governorate of Cairo's septic system shines through in the compelling stories of community members. Well Connected taps into the inherent sociality of water through social contacts, moral ideology, interpersonal relationships, domestic rhythms, and the everyday labor of connecting.

Tessa Farmer is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Anthropology Department and the program in Global Studies, where she directs the Global Studies–Middle East & South Asia track within the Global Studies major.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tobias Ide, "Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts" (MIT Press, 2023)

7 juni 2023 | 56 min

Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023) explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes.

Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations.

Dr. Tobias Ide is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. His work broadly focuses on the intersections of environmental change and environmental politics with peace, conflict, and security.

Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)

6 juni 2023 | 36 min

Rob Marchant, "East Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

6 juni 2023 | 59 min

East Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is an ambitious integration of ecological, archaeological, anthropological land use sciences, drawing on human geography, demography and economics of development across the East Africa region. It focuses on understanding and unpicking the interactions that have taken place between the natural and unnatural history of the East African region and trace this interaction from the evolutionary foundations of our species (c. 200,000 years ago), through the outwards and inwards human migrations, often associated with the adoption of subsistence strategies, new technologies and the arrival of new crops.

The book will explore the impact of technological developments such as transitions to tool making, metallurgy, and the arrival of crops also involved an international dimension and waves of human migrations in and out of East Africa. Time will be presented with a widening focus that will frame the contemporary with a particular focus on the Anthropocene (last 500 years) to the present day. Many of the current challenges have their foundations in precolonial and colonial history and as such there will be a focus on how these have evolved and the impact on environmental and human landscapes. Moving into the Anthropocene era, there was increasing exposure to the International drivers of change, such as those associated with Ivory and slave trade. These international trade routes were tied into the ensuing decimation of elephant populations through to the exploitation of natural mineral resources have been sought after through to the present day. The book will provide a balanced perspective on the region, the people, and how the natural and unnatural histories have combined to create a dynamic region. These historical perspectives will be galvanized to outline the future changes and the challenges they will bring around such issues as sustainable development, space for wildlife and people, and the position of East Africa within a globalized world and how this is potentially going to evolve over the coming decades.

Rob Marchant is Professor of Tropical Ecology in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York, UK.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)

2 juni 2023 | 52 min

The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation?

In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world.

Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her study in a rich narrative of the engineers who designed the system in conjunction with contingent political and environmental conditions. The result demonstrates how addressing earthquake dangers is no small task: it means trying to change relationships between the environment, society, and technology. Doing so, she critiques universalist and techno-centric approaches to hazard risk mitigation and celebrates the potential of contextually appropriate and broadly supported efforts.

¡Alerta! takes readers on a vivid journey into the world of Mexican earthquake risk mitigation, with critical insights for anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars, as well as specialists in the geosciences, engineering, and emergency management.

Mentioned in this episode:

Donna Riley’s interview with Lee Vinsel on the NBN Peoples & Things series.

Elizabeth Reddy is Assistant Professor of Engineering, Design, & Society at the Colorado School of Mines, with a joint appointment in Geophysics.

Liliana Gil is an anthropologist. She is incoming Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

31 maj 2023 | 52 min

John D. Aber, "Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change" (Yale UP, 2023)

29 maj 2023 | 57 min

Christina Gerhardt, "Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean" (U California Press, 2023)

23 maj 2023 | 48 min

Philip Gooding, "Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

22 maj 2023 | 57 min

Rob Verchick, "The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience" (Columbia UP, 2023)

19 maj 2023 | 75 min

One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus―and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded―is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will have to adjust.

His well-research and multi-faceted book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (Columbia UP, 2023) is a tour de force that is engaging, informative and a book that is hard to put down. Topics range from the potential loss of the Joshua Tree to the dangers our coral reefs face. Learning from “Lucy,” our three million year old ancestor who can be found in the Hall of Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, is a lesson Verchick tells us, can open new windows into “a saga of resilience and adaptation.” He also illustrates how intersectionality can help us listen, learn and understand how interconnected networks of oppression are woven into the fabric of global warming and climate change.

Rob Verchick examines how we can manage the risks that we can no longer avoid, laying out our options as we face climate breakdown. Although reducing carbon dioxide emissions is essential, we need to adapt to address the damage we have already caused. Verchick explores what resilience looks like on the ground, from early humans on the savannas to today’s shop owners and city planners. He takes the reader on a journey into the field: paddling through Louisiana’s bayous, hiking in one of the last refuges of Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert, and diving off Key Largo with citizen scientists working to restore coral reefs. The book emphasizes disadvantaged communities, which bear the brunt of environmental risk, arguing that building climate resilience is a necessary step toward justice.

Engaging and accessible for nonexpert concerned citizens, The Octopus in the Parking Garage empowers readers to face the climate crisis and shows what we can do to adapt and thrive.

Robert Verchick just became a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Fellow and will be working on the impact our current environment has on oceans and coasts this year. He is one of the leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and designed climate-resilience policies in the Obama administration.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ailton Krenak, "Life Is Not Useful" (Polity Press, 2023)

17 maj 2023 | 56 min

Indigenous thinker and leader, Ailton Krenak, exposes the destructive tendencies of our ‘civilization’ in Life is not Useful (Polity, 2023), which is translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias & Alex Brostoff. The problematic symptoms of our modernity include rampant consumerism, environmental devastation, and a narrow and restricted understanding of humanity’s place on this Earth. For many centuries, Brazil’s Indigenous peoples have bravely faced threats of total annihilation and, in extremely adverse conditions, have reinvented their lives and communities.

At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the rest of the world to reconsider its lifestyle, Ailton Krenak’s clear and urgent thinking emerges with newfound impact and offers a vital perspective on the enormous challenges we face today: the ravages of the pandemic and the devastation caused by global warming, to name just two. Krenak questions the value of going back to normal when ‘normal’ is a vision of humanity divorced from nature, actively destroying the planet and digging deep trenches of inequality between peoples and societies. The ‘civilized’ world insists on giving life a purpose but life is not ‘useful’ and ‘civilization’ is not destiny. We must learn to embrace the joy of living life to its fullest, and inhabit the stillness that comes with not always being useful. In the wake of the pandemic, we have an opportunity to create deep and meaningful change in the way we live: this, more than ever, is a time to listen to voices that are one with the body of the Earth.

Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)

13 maj 2023 | 75 min

China's Green Consensus: A Discussion with Virginie Arantes

12 maj 2023 | 24 min

Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)

10 maj 2023 | 45 min

Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)

10 maj 2023 | 59 min

Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)

9 maj 2023 | 45 min

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?

These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin, 2023), Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems--from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster--ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Bryan Alexander, "Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

9 maj 2023 | 62 min

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)

4 maj 2023 | 52 min

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have shaped the course of human events. Frankopan's extensive research, coupled with his accessible writing style, makes for an engaging read that reframes our understanding of the world and our place in it.

One of the strengths of The Earth Transformed is the way in which Frankopan connects seemingly disparate events to highlight the far-reaching impact of climate change. For example, he explains how the Vikings emerged as a result of catastrophic crop failure, and how the collapse of cotton prices due to unusual climate patterns led to regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad. Through such connections, Frankopan demonstrates how past empires that failed to act sustainably were met with catastrophe, providing valuable lessons for our current environmental crisis.

Overall, The Earth Transformed is a timely and important book that sheds light on the enduring relationship between humans and the natural world. It challenges readers to reckon with our species' impact on the environment and to consider how we can act sustainably to prevent further harm. Frankopan's interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research with scientific insights, makes for a compelling and thought-provoking read that will leave readers with a new perspective on the world around us.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Darrel Moellendorf, "Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2022)

1 maj 2023 | 64 min

Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

27 april 2023 | 48 min

Timothy R. Pauketat, "Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America" (Oxford UP,

27 april 2023 | 47 min

Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping account of what happened when Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change.

Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve centuries ago (AD 800-1300 CE)—which resulted in the warmest temperatures in the northern hemisphere since the "Roman Warm Period," a half millennium earlier. Reconstructing these climatic events and the cultural transformations they wrought, Pauketat guides readers down ancient American paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, some trod by Spanish conquistadors just a few centuries later. The book follows the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys, made remarkable pilgrimages, and migrated long distances to new lands.

Along the way, readers discover a new history of a continent that, like today, was being shaped by climate change—or controlled by ancient gods of wind and water. Through such elemental powers, the history of Medieval America was a physical narrative, a long-term natural and cultural experience in which Native people were entwined long before Christopher Columbus arrived or Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs.

Spanning from North to Central America, Gods of Thunder focuses on remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations separated by a thousand miles or more. Key archaeological sites are featured in every chapter, leading us down an evidentiary trail toward the book's conclusion that a great religious movement swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields thanks to global warming a thousand years ago. The author also includes a guide to visiting the archaeological sites discussed in each chapter of the book.

Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Wendy Lynne Lee, "This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

26 april 2023 | 40 min

Wendy Lynne Lee's This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2022) provides students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental philosophy and ethics.

Mitigating the effects of climate change will require global cooperation and lasting commitment. Of the many disciplines addressing the ecological crisis, philosophy is perhaps best suited to develop the conceptual foundations of a viable and sustainable environmental ethic. This is Environmental Ethics provides an expansive overview of the key theories underpinning contemporary discussions of our moral responsibilities to non-human nature and living creatures.

Adopting a critical approach, author Wendy Lynne Lee closely examines major moral theories to discern which ethic provides the compass needed to navigate the social, political, and economic challenges of potentially catastrophic environmental transformation, not only, but especially the climate crisis. Lee argues that the ethic ultimately adopted must make the welfare of non-human animals and plant life a priority in our moral decision-making, recognizing that ecological conditions form the existential conditions of all life on the planet. Throughout the text, detailed yet accessible chapters demonstrate why philosophy is relevant and useful in the face of an uncertain environmental future.

This is Environmental Ethics is essential reading for undergraduate students in courses on philosophy, geography, environmental studies, feminist theory, ecology, human and animal rights, and social justice, as well as an excellent graduate-level introduction to the key theories and thinkers of environmental philosophy.

Wendy Lynne Lee is a professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University. Lee has published about 45 scholarly essays in her areas of expertise—philosophy of language (particularly later Wittgenstein), philosophy of mind/brain, feminist theory, theory of sexual identity, post-Marxian theory, nonhuman animal welfare, ecological aesthetics, aesthetic phenomenology, and philosophy of ecology. Her previous work includes the book Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse (Lexington 2017).

Özlem Yılmaz is a philosopher of science, with a focus on issues related to plant biology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Brett Christophers, "Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World" (Verso, 2023)

25 april 2023 | 75 min

"Global Environmental Politics" Celebrates 20 Years of Success

22 april 2023 | 19 min

The Promise of Multispecies Justice

21 april 2023 | 33 min

How might we imagine justice in times of ecological harm? How are human struggles for social justice entangled with the lives of other beings including plants, animals, fungi, and microbes? What is at stake when claims are made about who or what is the subject of justice?

These questions and more are explored in this conversation between Terese Gagnon and Sophie Chao, co-editor of the new volume The Promise of Multispecies Justice from Duke University Press.

In addition to unpacking key questions posed by the volume Terese and Sophie discuss some of the volume’s chapters, which are empirically rooted in Asia. These chapters cover topics of spectral justice in the Indian Himalayas, and justice for humans and “pests” on banana plantations in the Philippines region of Mindanao. Additionally, Sophie shares about her research on more-than-human solidarities in racial justice protests in the Indonesian-controlled province of West Papua. This interdisciplinary conversation covers critical developments in the social sciences and humanities as well as works of contemporary art and poetry including by Chamorro scholar Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry.

Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice.

Related podcasts

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)

20 april 2023 | 55 min

John Miller, "The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter" (British LIbrary, 2022)

12 april 2023 | 56 min

Brian Kateman, "Meat Me Halfway" (Prometheus Books, 2022)

12 april 2023 | 86 min

We know that eating animals is bad for the planet and bad for our health, and yet we do it anyway. Ask anyone in the plant-based movement and the solution seems obvious: Stop eating meat.

But, for many people, that stark solution is neither appealing nor practical. In Meat Me Halfway: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet (Prometheus Books, 2022), author and founder of the reducetarian movement Brian Kateman puts forth a realistic and balanced goal: mindfully reduce your meat consumption. It might seem strange for a leader of the plant-based movement to say, but meat is here to stay. The question is not how to ween society off meat but how to make meat more healthy, more humane, and more sustainable. In this book, Kateman answers the question that has plagued vegans for years: why are we so resistant to changing the way we eat, and what can we do about it?

Exploring our historical relationship with meat, from the domestication of animals to the early industrialization of meatpacking, to the advent of the one-stop grocery store, the science of taste, and the laws that impact our access to food, Meat Me Halfway reveals how humans have evolved as meat eaters. Featuring interviews with pioneers in the science of meat alternatives, investigations into new types of farming designed to lessen environmental impact, and innovations in ethical and sustainable agriculture, this down-to-earth book shows that we all can change the way we create and consume food.

Brian Kateman is an award-winning author and freelance journalist. His op-eds have appeared in dozens of media outlets, including The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, Vox, Salon, TechCrunch, The Independent, Fortune and The New York Daily News. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Isabel, and rescue dogs, Tobey and Cooper.

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kirstin Munro, "The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households" (Bristol UP, 2023)

12 april 2023 | 48 min

Thomas M. Lekan, "Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 april 2023 | 78 min

How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari?

In Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford UP, 2020), Thomas M. Lekan illuminates the controversial origins of this national park by examining how Europe's greatest wildlife conservationist, former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning documentarian Bernhard Grzimek, popularized it as a global destination. In the 1950s, Grzimek and his son Michael began a quest to save the Serengeti from modernization and "overpopulation" by remaking an imperial game reserve into a gigantic zoo for the earth's last great mammals. Grzimek, well-known to German audiences through his long-running television program, A Place for Animals, used the film Serengeti Shall Not Die to convince ordinary Europeans that they could save nature. Yet their message sidestepped the uncomfortable legacies of German colonial exploitation in the region that had endangered animals and excluded local people. After independence, Grzimek raised funds, brokered diplomatic favors, and convinced German tourists to book travel packages—all to persuade Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere that wildlife would fuel the young nation's economic development. Grzimek helped Tanzania to create almost a dozen new national parks by 1975, but wooing tourists conflicted with rights of the Maasai and other African communities to inhabit the landscape on their own terms. Grzimek's global priorities eventually clashed with Nyerere's nationalist ones, as a more self-assertive Tanzania resented conservationists' meddling and failed promises.

A story that demonstrates the conflicts between international conservation, nature tourism, decolonization, and national sovereignty, Our Gigantic Zoo explores the legacy of the man who portrayed himself as a second Noah, called on a sacred mission to protect the last vestiges of paradise for all humankind.

Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. "Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019. "Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrew Curley, "Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation" (U Arizona Press, 2023)

11 april 2023 | 53 min

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.

This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. In Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press, 2023) geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change. The rise and fall of coal magnify the nuance and complexity of change. Historical and contemporary issues intermingle in everyday life with lasting consequences.

Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Cooperative Extension System

10 april 2023 | 21 min

In this episode of High Theory, Karl Dudman tells us about the Cooperative Extension System.

Formed in 1914 as an extension of the Land Grant University system in the United States, the Cooperative Extension System is an extraordinarily public model of scientific communication. There is an extension officer in every county of the US. The original goal was to transmit academic scientific knowledge on agriculture to America’s farmers, but the program’s remit has expanded over the past hundred years. And it varies widely from place to place. You might go to an extension office to test the soil of your rose bed, to find a food pantry, or attend a kids exercise class. You might also have a conversation about climate change.

In the full version of our conversation, Karl discussed the National Extension Climate Initiative which aims to unite climate change education and research across the cooperative extension system and Christopher Henke’s book, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT Press, 2008).

Karl Dudman is doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science Technology and Society. He does qualitative research on climate science in the US. His ongoing fieldwork, hosted by the North Carolina State Climate Office, examines how actors within climate science, coastal management and local politics navigate accelerating sea level rise in the context of widespread ambivalence towards the mainstream climate change narrative. Karl is also a photographer, and through his work explores the politics of competing cultural relationships with landscapes, and their subsequent representation.

This week’s image is a photograph of two men in a field of tall grass taken November 11, 2008 by Dennis Pennington, Bioenergy Educator, Michigan State University Extension.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Christopher J. Preston, "Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals" (MIT Press, 2023)

8 april 2023 | 51 min

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.

Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book—farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans—offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery.

Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals (MIT Press, 2023) is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, touching on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices. More important, perhaps, the book offers a road map—and a measure of hope—for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.

Christopher J. Preston is a writer and professor based in Missoula, MT. His work at the University of Montana centers on wildlife, technology, and climate change. Christopher has written for The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Discover, The Conversation, Aeon, Slate.com, Philosophical Salon, the Wall Street Journal, and The BBC. His award-winning book, The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World, has been translated into six languages. He gives talks in state parks, libraries, and breweries across Montana to audiences interested in conservation, climate change, and technology. In early 2023, he won an annual award from the International Society for Environmental Ethics for his work as a public philosopher.

Callie Smith is a poet and museum educator with a PhD in English. She currently lives in Louisiana.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Joseph Giacomelli, "Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

5 april 2023 | 41 min

Gender and Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh

31 mars 2023 | 22 min

Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

28 mars 2023 | 29 min

Winning & Losing in the Emerging EV Wars/The Aftershocks of the EV Transition Could Be Ugly

27 mars 2023 | 97 min

Sara Rich, "Mushroom" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

25 mars 2023 | 45 min

Adam Sowards, "Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

24 mars 2023 | 53 min

Adam Sowards, "Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

24 mars 2023 | 53 min

Seeing Truth in the Climate Crisis

23 mars 2023 | 36 min

Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson, "Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions" (Routledge, 2020)

20 mars 2023 | 30 min

Ezra Rashkow, "The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020" (Oxford UP, 2023)

16 mars 2023 | 48 min

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife?

Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with intensive theoretical interrogations, Ezra Rashkow's book The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020 (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a global intellectual history of efforts to ‘protect’ indigenous peoples and their cultures, usually from above. It also offers a critique of the activist impulse to cry ‘Save the tigers!’ and ‘Save the tribes!’ together in the same breath. It is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India but rather a history of discourses—including Adivasis’ own—about what is perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival. Examining views of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss in western and central India—particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing not only conservation and development-induced displacement but also dehumanizing animal analogies comparing endangered tigers and tribes—the book problematizes the long history of human endangerment and extinction discourse. In doing so, it shows that fears of tribal extinction actually predated scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. Only by confronting this history can we begin to decolonize this discourse.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Seeing Truth in the Lab

9 mars 2023 | 36 min

Book Chat: Oceanic Writing

9 mars 2023 | 54 min

Film Chat: "Whale Island" (2020)

8 mars 2023 | 56 min

William Carruthers, "Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology" (Cornell UP, 2022)

5 mars 2023 | 80 min

Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)

2 mars 2023 | 44 min

Ronald L. Trosper, "Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands" (U Arizona Press, 2022)

1 mars 2023 | 49 min

David Bond, "Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment" (U California Press, 2022)

21 februari 2023 | 68 min

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than managing the effects. This history of our present promises to re-situate scholarly understandings of fossil fuels and renovate environmental critique today. David Bond challenges us to consider what forms of critical engagement may now be needed to both confront the deleterious properties of fossil fuels and envision ways of living beyond them.

David Bond is the Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action and teaches on the environment and public action. Trained as an anthropologist, Bond studies oil spills and their imprint on environmental science and governance. His work shows how toxic disruptions can fix vital relations with new forms of knowledge and care.

Cody Skahan ([email protected]) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, media and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog here where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anna Zeide, "US History in 15 Foods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

20 februari 2023 | 39 min

Robyn Sloggett and Marcelle Scott, "Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage" (Routledge, 2022)

18 februari 2023 | 74 min

The Politics of Bicycling

16 februari 2023 | 91 min

Matthew S. Henry, "Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

15 februari 2023 | 56 min

Brian Lander, "The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire" (Yale UP, 2022)

15 februari 2023 | 43 min

Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)

14 februari 2023 | 62 min

Getting to Net Zero: A Conversation with Christian Arno

13 februari 2023 | 65 min

Kimon and Richard speak with Christian Arno, founder and CEO of Pawprint, about how companies can effectively achieve sustainability goals.

As a young child growing up in Aberdeen, Christian was interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. His first venture was in comic book sales, and his first clients were his parents and schoolmates on the bus. When his father learned more about the finances of Christian’s venture, he shut the enterprise down, an early lesson in “regulation.”

For university, Christian attended Oxford, where he studied languages. At around this time, the Dotcom boom began, and Christian created a website advertising translation services. He began to receive customer inquiries, and soon enough, was able to establish a revenue stream from recurrent clients.

The most important thing that Christian learned while building Lingo24 was how to take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization). Christian was able to land bigger companies despite a lack of experience. Searchers would find his professionally-created website, purchase services, eventually leading Christian to start hiring employees to accommodate the growing demand.

In the 20 years of running the company before exiting, Christian was able to grow Lingo24 to a maximum size of 230 people with a peak revenue of around $50 million in a year. Despite this success, Christian felt it was time to move on to another venture.

In the mid-2010s, Christian’s father, formerly an oil and gas entrepreneur, reversed course and became a climate activist with Extinction Rebellion. Through conversations with his father, Christian came to believe that the second act of his career should attempt to address the environmental issues that threaten him, his father, and billions around the world.

Christian’s new company is a software platform, Pawprint, that educates, motivates, and aligns employees of companies around sustainable development goals. The CEO of a company signs up, creating accounts for employees. The employees are placed into teams where they compete to reduce their CO2 emissions. The CEO is able to set various financial or non-financial awards for the best-performing employees.

Pawprint doesn’t just track the results. It also gives employees various actions and pieces of advice, over 500 in total, to improve their environmental impact.

Christian talks about his passion for Pawprint and the excitement of working on project with social impact. His big piece of advice for entrepreneurs: Start doing what you care about as early possible. Don’t wait!

Links

About our Hosts:

Kimon Fountoukidis:

Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. He founded both companies in the mid-90s with zero capital, and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. He is passionate about sharing his success with others and working entrepreneurs of all kinds to help them achieve their goals.

Richard Lucas:

Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser for years, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels. He was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991, where continues to invest in promising companies and helps other entrepreneurs realise their dreams.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

10 februari 2023 | 60 min

How a California Electricity Utility Caused Deadly Wildfires

8 februari 2023 | 66 min

John F. Ahern, "Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

8 februari 2023 | 35 min

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are special places known for their distinctive flora, including pine-oak forests, sandplain grasslands, and sand dunes peppered with bearberry shrubs. Unfortunately, this unique sense of place is under threat. In recent decades, contemporary landscape practices have come to depend on environmentally stressful fertilizers and irrigation systems, replacing this sensitive ecoregion’s native flora with generic turfgrasses and popular commercial nursery trees and shrubs that could exist anywhere.

Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) seeks to reverse this damaging trend by offering landscape professionals, local officials, and homeowners a sustainable approach to landscape design based on the ecoregion’s native plants and plant communities. Presenting detailed discussions of Cape Cod’s natural history, Jack Ahern focuses on the principal plant communities that define its landscape character and that are well adapted to local soils and growing conditions, including climate change. The book also includes strategies for ecological planting design and a portfolio of photographs of active ecologically designed landscapes.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Philip Gooding, "On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

7 februari 2023 | 67 min

“Tech” Journalism and the Many Lives of Stewart Brand

7 februari 2023 | 68 min

Christiaan De Beukelaer, "Trade Winds: A Sailing Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping" (Manchester UP, 2023)

5 februari 2023 | 49 min

Emily Strasser, "Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)

5 februari 2023 | 60 min

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs.

It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day.

Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow.

Cody Skahan ([email protected]) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Spencer D. Segalla, "Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

4 februari 2023 | 85 min

Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; the 1959 Malpasset dam collapse in Fréjus, France, which devastated the Algerian immigrant community in the town but which was blamed on Algerian sabotage; and the 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, which set off a public relations war between the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and which ignited a Moroccan national debate over modernity, identity, architecture, and urban planning. Spencer Segalla argues for the integration of environmental events into narratives of political and cultural decolonization. Empire and Catastrophe will interest environmental historians, North Africa area studies specialists, and historians of France and French imperialism. Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 is available open access online for no charge.

Dr. Segalla, professor of history at the University of Tampa, completed his Ph.D. at Stonybrook in 2003. In addition to Empire and Catastrophe, he has published The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 with the University of Nebraska Press in 2009.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Iza Ding, "The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)

3 februari 2023 | 45 min

What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell, 2022) shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion surveys. She demonstrates in vivid detail how China's environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the physical environment. They assuage public outrage by appearing responsive, benevolent, and humble. But performative governance is hard work. Environmental bureaucrats paradoxically work themselves to exhaustion even when they cannot effectively implement environmental policies. Instead of achieving "performance legitimacy" by delivering material improvements, the state can shape public opinion through the theatrical performance of goodwill and sincere effort. The Performative State also explains when performative governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam and the United States show that all states, democratic and authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance.

Iza Ding is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Her work has appeared in World Politics, the China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, and other academic journals.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

J. Brent Morris, "Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (UNC Press, 2022)

31 januari 2023 | 75 min

Corey Lee Wrenn, "Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony" (SUNY Press, 2021)

28 januari 2023 | 84 min

Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread health problems related to animal product consumption disrupt long held nutritional ideologies. Already a top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, Ireland has committed to expanding animal agriculture despite impending crisis. The nexus of climate change, public health, and animal welfare present a challenge to the hegemony of the Irish state and neoliberal European governance. Efforts to resist animal rights and environmentalism highlight the struggle to sustain economic structures of inequality in a society caught between a colonialist past and a globalized future.

Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony (SUNY Press, 2021) explores the vegan Irish epistemology, one that can be traced along its history of animism, agrarianism, ascendency, adaptation, and activism. From its zoomorphic pagan roots to its legacy of vegetarianism, Ireland has been more receptive to the interests of other animals than is currently acknowledged. More than a land of "meat" and potatoes, Ireland is a relevant, if overlooked, contributor to Western vegan thought.

Corey Lee Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She is the author of several books, including A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stephanie C. Kane, "Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

25 januari 2023 | 45 min

Climate of Denial: Why Do Americans Doubt Climate Change?

23 januari 2023 | 33 min

Helen Anne Curry, "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" (U California Press, 2022)

21 januari 2023 | 50 min

Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)

19 januari 2023 | 40 min

The Climate Change Scientist: A Conversation with Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu

12 januari 2023 | 61 min

What is the difference between global warming and climate change? This episode explores:

What led Dr. Wu into STEM, and to the study of climate change.
Why the term global warming is misleading, and potentially confusing.
Why weather around the world is getting more extreme.
What she foresees for the future, and what we can do to change that.
Why human choices matter on much a larger scale than most people realize.
A discussion of the article “Looking Back on America’s Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal”.

Today’s article is: Looking Back on America's Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal by Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, which provides an overview of the record-breaking heat and historic floods of 2022. Dr. Wu discusses how the new abnormal is increasingly seen as the new weather pattern, why it’s dangerous to normalize this, and what we can do change it. “Welcome to the New Abnormal” was published in The Conversation on September 21, 2022.

Our guest is: Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, who is a climate scientist. Dr. Wu uses climate models to project future climate change and its potential impacts on the hydrological cycle, including precipitation, extreme storms and flood risks. She also collaborates with researchers in ice core science and stable isotope geochemistry investigate climate and environmental change in the past ten thousand years. Dr. Wu received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2000 where she studied environmental geography. She joined the University of Dayton department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences in 2004 after completing three-year post-doctoral research at Pennsylvania State University. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact scientific journals, and received close to two million dollars in external funding for her research. Dr. Wu teaches a variety courses mainly in the field of climate change, environmental geosciences, and Geographical Information Systems.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

The Conversation article: 2022's US Climate Disasters: A tale of too much rain and too little
The Conversation article: For a Flooded Midwest Climate Forecasts Offer Little Comfort
Bedaso, Z., & Wu, S. Y. (2020). Daily precipitation isotope variation in Midwestern United States: Implication for hydroclimate and moisture source. Science of The Total Environment, 713, 136631.
Yuan, W., Wu, S. Y., Hou, S., Xu, Z., & Lu, H. (2019). Normalized Difference Vegetation Index‐based assessment of climate change impact on vegetation growth in the humid‐arid transition zone in northern China during 1982–2013. International Journal of Climatology, 39(15), 5583-5598.
Wu, Y., Ji, H., Wen, J., Wu, S.-Y., Xu, M., Tagle, F., Duan, W., Li, J. (2018). The characteristics of regional persistent heavy precipitation events over eastern monsoon China during 1960-2013. Global and Planetary Change, 172, pp.414-427.

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we go inside the academy to learn directly from experts. We embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Poverty, Race, and Rural Sanitation

10 januari 2023 | 61 min

Char Miller, "Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril" (Chin Music, 2022)

7 januari 2023 | 61 min

Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Mediterranean

6 januari 2023 | 56 min

Mathew Gandy, "Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space" (MIT Press, 2022)

30 december 2022 | 33 min

In his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Dr. Gandy’s long-standing fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Dr. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether “urban political ecology,” broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences, and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.

In this episode, Tayeba Batool talks to Dr. Mathew Gandy about his inspiration to write this book, and how an attention to spontaneous ecologies adds to the critical discourse on “new cultures of nature” and the “constellation” of diverse ecological relations, ideas, and assemblages. Moving beyond planned urban spaces (such as parks), Dr. Gandy argues that an attention to the “marginal or interstitial spaces of urban nature” or wastelands brings forward the most compelling assemblages of relations, biodiversity, and life in cities. The conversation also highlights the role of language in setting up taxonomic borders and ideological agendas for species and diversity, and advocates caution against global theories of urban change. Dr. Gandy also shares his thoughts on future direction of urban political ecology and how the book innovates across disciplines of botany, geography, cultural history, and urban studies.

You can also learn more about his film project, “Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin” here.

Dr. Mathew Gandy is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography and Fellow of King’s College at University of Cambridge. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sayan Dey, "Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems" (Routledge, 2022)

26 december 2022 | 44 min

The ‘Domino Effect’: Global and Regional Climate Change Impacts on Food Supply Chains

22 december 2022 | 22 min

Finis Dunaway. "Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2021)

22 december 2022 | 75 min

Brenden W. Rensink, "The North American West in the Twenty-First Century" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

21 december 2022 | 60 min

Munira Khayyat, "A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon" (U California Press, 2022)

18 december 2022 | 62 min

Michael Weeks, "Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

17 december 2022 | 84 min

In 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their planned agricultural community, which they named Greeley, was centered around small landholdings, shared irrigation, and a variety of market crops. One hundred years later, Greeley was the home of the world’s largest concentrated cattle-feeding operation, with the resources of an entire region directed toward manufacturing beef. How did that transformation happen? Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado (U Nebraska Press, 2022) is animated by that question.

Expanding outward from Greeley to all of northern Colorado, Cattle Beet Capital shows how the beet sugar industry came to dominate the region in the early twentieth century through a reciprocal relationship with its growers that supported a healthy and sustainable agriculture while simultaneously exploiting tens of thousands of migrant laborers. Michael Weeks shows how the state provided much of the scaffolding for the industry in the form of tariffs and research that synchronized with the agendas of industry and large farmers. The transformations that led to commercial feedlots began during the 1930s as farmers replaced crop rotations and seasonal livestock operations with densely packed cattle pens, mono-cropped corn, and the products pouring out of agro-industrial labs and factories. Using the lens of the northern Colorado region, Cattle Beet Capital illuminates the historical processes that made our modern food systems.

Michael Weeks is a lecturer of history at Utah Valley University.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB. MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or Department of Defense.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Off-Shore Aesthetics

16 december 2022 | 20 min

Cynthia Radding, "Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain" (U Arizona Press, 2022)

16 december 2022 | 59 min

Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)

14 december 2022 | 40 min

Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

13 december 2022 | 40 min

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.

Sample takeaways:

China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.

Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What Went Wrong in the 1970s in the USA?: A Discussion with Bill McKibben

12 december 2022 | 44 min

Sarah Milne, "Corporate Nature: An Insider's Ethnography of Global Conservation" (U Arizona Press, 2022)

12 december 2022 | 53 min

Matthew Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

10 december 2022 | 68 min

Prakash Kashwan, "Climate Justice in India" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

9 december 2022 | 58 min

Max Haiven, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2022)

8 december 2022 | 54 min

Palm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we live.

In Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto Press, 2022), Max Haiven tells a sweeping story that touches on everything from empire to art, from war to food, and from climate change to racial capitalism. By tracing the global history of this ubiquitous elixir we see how capitalism creates surplus populations: people made dependent on capitalist wages but denied the opportunity to earn them - a proportion of humanity that is growing in our age of racialized and neo-colonial dispossession.

Inspired by revolutionary writers like Eduardo Galeano, Saidiya Hartman, C.L.R. James and Rebecca Solnit, this kaleidoscopic and experimental book seeks to weave a story of the past in the present and the present in the past.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and director of the Reimagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He writes articles for both academic and general audiences and is the author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. He is currently working on a book titled Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Char Miller, "West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement" (Maverick Books, 2022)

2 december 2022 | 82 min

Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry, "Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

30 november 2022 | 48 min

Sally Weintrobe et al., "Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death" (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022)

29 november 2022 | 55 min

Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) offers ways to work with the unthinkable and emotionally unendurable current predicament of humanity. The style and writing interweave passion and reflection, animation and containment, radical hope, and tragedy to reflect the dilemmas of our collective crisis. The authors model a relational approach in their styles of writing and in the book's structure. Four chapters, each with a strikingly original voice and insight, form the core of the book, held either end by two jointly written chapters. In contrast to a psychology that focuses on individual behavior change, the authors use a transdisciplinary mix of approaches (depth psychology and psychotherapy, earth systems, deep ecology, cultural sociology, critical history, group and institutional outreach) to bring into focus the predicament of this period. While the last decade required a focus on climate denial in all its manifestations (which continues in new ways), a turning point has now been reached. Increasingly extreme weather across the world is making it impossible for simple avoidance of the climate threat.

Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe address how climate psychology illuminates and engages the life and death challenges that face terrestrial life. This book will appeal to three core groups. First, mental health and social care professionals wanting support in containing and potentially transforming the malaise. Second, activists wanting to participate in new stories and practices that nurture their engagement with the present social and cultural crisis. Third, those concerned about the climate emergency, wanting to understand the deeper context for this dangerous blindness.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael Bess, "Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

29 november 2022 | 50 min

Public Participation and Contested Hydropower Development in the Mekong River Basin

24 november 2022 | 23 min

Kasia Paprocki, "Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh" (Cornell UP, 2021)

24 november 2022 | 64 min

In Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell UP, 2021), Kasia Paprocki challenges two well-worn assumptions about climate change and its relationship with the political economy of development and agriculture, in Bangladesh, which helps shed light on how climate change becomes a politically contested category, in countries across the Global South. The first, is that climate change is simply a contemporary phenomenon without a longer history embedded in the ecology, economics, politics, and social relations in the region. Second, that climate change is the driver of the increased vulnerability of large swaths of the Bangladeshi population, like the community she closely follows in Khulna, in the southwestern part of the country.

Through fine-grained ethnographic and archival detail, Paprocki engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant conflicts in advancing certain ‘climate adaptation’ agendas, which have dire consequences for the most marginalized.

She looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country's rural poor, these promises ring hollow.

As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all-consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh.

Archit Guha is a PhD researcher at the Duke University History Department.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Cajetan Iheka, "African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics" (Duke UP, 2021)

22 november 2022 | 69 min

In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.

Dr. Cajetan Iheka is a Professor in the English Department at Yale University. Before African Ecomedia he published Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature in 2018, which won two prizes - the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the African Literature Association First Book Prize. Dr. Iheka has also edited the volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and co-edited another titled African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.

Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022)

22 november 2022 | 67 min

Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

22 november 2022 | 39 min

Ann-Christine Duhaime, "Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2022)

22 november 2022 | 58 min

Why is it so difficult to adopt a more sustainable way of life, even when convinced of the urgency of the environmental crisis? If adopting new behaviors beneficial for the environment is so challenging at the individual level, no wonder it is even harder at the community or governmental levels. Seeing individual and collective behaviors not changing, or not rapidly enough, eventually leads to the belief that nothing can be done and that human beings are just “hard-wired” that way.

This is where, quite unexpectedly, neuroscience can help us tackle the multidimensional and unprecedented problem that is the environmental crisis. In Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime argues that by considering the long evolutionary history of the human brain and its reward-system, one can better understand, and therefore grow less frustrated about, why adopting sustainable behaviors can be so challenging. “Our brains are amazing," writes Dr. Duhaime, "– fine-tuned, capable, adaptable, to handle the incredible tasks of human life in its infinite variety and with its infinite day-to-day challenges. […] But there is a mismatch between the pace of evolution of this extraordinary able, pulsating, three-pound bundle of sparks and what we need to meet the challenge of this extraordinary rapid Age of the Anthropocene.”

It is this mismatch that Dr. Duhaime proposes to analyze in this surprising book. Using insights provided by research at the intersection of neuroscience, environmental sciences and a number of other fields, Minding the Climate invites us to think about what a “sustainable brain” might look like and how to achieve it.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Towards a Green China

18 november 2022 | 39 min

Jennifer Eaglin, "Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 november 2022 | 78 min

As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world.

Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP, 2022) offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this program. By 1985, over 95% of all new cars in the country ran exclusively on ethanol, and, after consumers turned away from them when oil was cheap, the government successfully promoted flex fuel cars instead. Yet, as Jennifer Eaglin shows, the industry's growth came with associated environmental and social costs in the form of water pollution from liquid waste generated during ethanol distillation and exploitative rural labor practices that reshaped Brazil's countryside.

By examining the shifting perceptions of the industry from a sugar byproduct to a national energy solution to a global clean energy option, Sweet Fuel ultimately reveals deeper truths about what a global large-scale transition away from fossil fuels might look like and challenges idealized views of green industries.

Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Towards a Green China

18 november 2022 | 39 min

David McDermott Hughes, "Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity" (Duke UP, 2017)

16 november 2022 | 55 min

In Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017), David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of everyday life. Only by rejecting arguments that oil is economically, politically, and technologically necessary, and by acknowledging our complicity in an immoral system, can we stem the damage being done to the planet.

David McDermott Hughes is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. In research and teaching, he explores ways in which people exploit each other while exploiting nature, environments, and the entire biosphere. He has written ethnography, history, and public criticism on topics as diverse as settler colonialism, racism, slavery, land reform, climate change, oil, and renewable energy – in Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and the European South. He is the author of many other books, with his most recent titled Who Owns the Wind? Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy (Verso Press, 2021). He is also a scholar-activist, having served as president, chief negotiator, and climate justice chair of the Rutgers faculty labor union.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ryan Poll, "Aquaman and the War Against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

14 november 2022 | 43 min

Jan Selby et al., "Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

11 november 2022 | 64 min

What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increased drought, more famine, heightened social vulnerability, and large-scale political and violent conflict; indeed, many claim that this future is already with us. Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge UP, 2022), however, shows that this is mistaken. Focusing especially on the links between climate change, water and security, and drawing on detailed evidence from Israel-Palestine, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere, it shows both that mainstream environmental security narratives are misleading, and that the actual security implications of climate change are very different from how they are often imagined. Addressing themes as wide-ranging as the politics of droughts, the contradictions of capitalist development and the role of racism in environmental change, while simultaneously articulating an original 'international political ecology' approach to the study of socio-environmental conflicts, Divided Environments offers a new and important interpretation of our planetary future.

Jan Selby joined the University of Sheffield in June 2020 as Professor of Politics and International Relations. After completing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Lancaster (2002), Jan's first post was as a lecturer in Lancaster's Department of Politics and IR. After a short stint at Aberystwyth, he then moved to the Department of IR, University of Sussex, where he worked for 15 years (2005-20). He held several leadership positions at Sussex, including Head of Department (2007-09), Director of Research (2011-20), and Director of the cross-disciplinary Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research (2012-18). Professor Selby’s research and teaching focus on climate change, water and energy politics, though he also works periodically on themes in IR theory, and conflict, peacebuilding and development.

Sidney Michelini is a PhD student working on climate and conflict at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Martin Puchner, "Literature for a Changing Planet" (Princeton UP, 2022)

10 november 2022 | 40 min

Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe.

Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming.

In Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton UP, 2022), Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change—and how we might change paths before it’s too late. From the Epic of Gilgamesh and the West African Epic of Sunjata to the Communist Manifesto, Puchner reveals world literature in a new light—as an archive of environmental exploitation and a product of a way of life responsible for climate change. Literature depends on millennia of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and resource extraction, from the clay of ancient tablets to the silicon of e-readers. Yet literature also offers powerful ways to change attitudes toward the environment. Puchner uncovers the ecological thinking behind the idea of world literature since the early nineteenth century, proposes a new way of reading in a warming world, shows how literature can help us recognize our shared humanity, and discusses the possible futures of storytelling. If we are to avoid environmental disaster, we must learn to tell the story of humans as a species responsible for global warming. Filled with important insights about the fundamental relationship between storytelling and the environment, Literature for a Changing Planet is a clarion call for readers and writers who care about the fate of life on the planet.

Prof. Martin Puchner is Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sustainable Peatland Management and Transboundary Haze in Southeast Asia

10 november 2022 | 25 min

Thom van Dooren, "A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions" (MIT Press, 2022)

7 november 2022 | 66 min

June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)

7 november 2022 | 61 min

In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health.

Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme events. Ranging from pre-Columbian flooding in the Andes to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this book focuses on long-range recovery and recuperation, rather than short-term disaster relief. Written in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the author shows how lessons learned about civil society, governance, climate change, inequality and trauma from natural disasters have their echoes in the challenges of today’s uncertain world.

June Carolyn Erlick is the Editor-in-Chief of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America and Publications Director at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of five books, including Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context (Routledge, 2018), Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced, the Irma Flaquer Story (Seal Press, 2004) and A Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia's Invisible War (University of Texas Press, 2010). She teaches journalism at Harvard Extension and Summer Schools and coordinates the journalism capstone and internship programs there.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sarah T. Hines, "Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia" (U California Press, 2021)

2 november 2022 | 53 min

Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture

31 oktober 2022 | 47 min

Andreas Malm, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Verso, 2021)

27 oktober 2022 | 35 min

Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)

20 oktober 2022 | 40 min

John Suval, "Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)

19 oktober 2022 | 58 min

The squatter—defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"—had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered the nation.

With one eye on Washington and the other on flashpoints across the West, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2022) tracks squatters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush-era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas. The sweeping narrative reveals how claiming western domains became stubbornly intertwined with partisan politics and fights over the extension of slavery. While previous generations of statesmen had maligned and sought to contain illegal settlers, Democrats celebrated squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraged their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party's power grew. The US-Mexican War led many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion. Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery's spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic leaders allowed territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from agents of Manifest Destiny into foot soldiers in battles that ruptured the party and the country.

Deeply researched and vividly written, Dangerous Ground illuminates the overlooked role of squatters in the United States' growth into a continent-spanning juggernaut and in the onset of the Civil War, casting crucial light on the promises and vulnerabilities of American democracy.

John Suval holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a former editor of the Papers of Andrew Jackson and Research Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He lives in West Virginia. Website.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Julie Sze, "Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger" (U California Press, 2020)

14 oktober 2022 | 65 min

Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

13 oktober 2022 | 51 min

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West.

Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict.

In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress.

Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost as well as a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press: 2018). You can follow Scott on Twitter at @water_futures.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China’s Next Act. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rafico Ruiz, "Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier" (Duke UP, 2021)

13 oktober 2022 | 60 min

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast.

In Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (Duke UP, 2021), Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

Rafico Ruiz is the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He holds an ad personam PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and Communication Studies from McGill University. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier and the co-editor with Melody Jue of Saturation: An Elemental Politics.

Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental justice, digital and film cultures, and community media-use practices.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)

12 oktober 2022 | 87 min

Saheed Aderinto, "Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria" (Ohio UP, 2022)

10 oktober 2022 | 60 min

Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)

10 oktober 2022 | 63 min

M. Margaret McKeown, "Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas" (Potomac Books, 2022)

10 oktober 2022 | 53 min

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-presidential nominee, as a target of impeachment proceedings, and for his tenure as the longest-serving justice from 1939 to 1975. His most enduring legacy, however, is perhaps his advocacy for the environment.

Douglas was the spiritual heir to early twentieth-century conservation pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. His personal spiritual mantra embraced nature as a place of solitude, sanctuary, and refuge. Caught in the giant expansion of America's urban and transportation infrastructure after World War II, Douglas became a powerful leader in forging the ambitious goals of today's environmental movement. And, in doing so, Douglas became a true citizen justice.

In a way unthinkable today, Douglas ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, bringing him admiration from allies in conservation groups but raising ethical issues with his colleagues. He became a national figure through his books, articles, and speeches warning against environmental dangers. Douglas organized protest hikes to leverage his position as a national icon, he lobbied politicians and policymakers privately about everything from logging to highway construction and pollution, and he protested at the Supreme Court through his voluminous and passionate dissents.

Douglas made a lasting contribution to both the physical environment and environmental law--with trees still standing, dams unbuilt, and beaches protected as a result of his work. His merged roles as citizen advocate and justice also put him squarely in the center of ethical dilemmas that he never fully resolved. M. Margaret McKeown's Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas (Potomac Books, 2022) elucidates the why and how of these tensions and their contemporary lessons against the backdrop of Douglas's unparalleled commitment to the environment.

William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jennifer Wenzel, "The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature" (Fordham UP, 2019)

7 oktober 2022 | 51 min

Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)

29 september 2022 | 65 min

Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)

28 september 2022 | 35 min

NBN Classic: Kate Brown, "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)

25 september 2022 | 47 min

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk.

Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

NBN Classic: Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019)

24 september 2022 | 48 min

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected—and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem.

Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017)

23 september 2022 | 47 min

Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historical explanations for the world ecological crises and the global crisis in capitalism. Using the framework of "cheapness," A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017) takes the reader through the long history of the search for lower production costs, extending from European colonial conquests in the fifteenth century up to present agroindustrial systems. This quest for cheapness originated with European colonists' desire to separate Society—themselves—from Nature—everything else. All forms of "Nature" were categorized by colonist and capitalists so that they could be efficiently used for production. Human beings were often included in this contrived category of Nature. Colonized people, the indigenous, women, and brown people were considered akin to non-human nature. In the process of employing cheapness as a "strategy" across space and time, colonial and capitalist powers have devastated land, destroyed indigenous populations, and exploited workers. Resistance to cheapness is described in the book too, but in Moore and Patel's depiction of the modern world, this resistance seems insignificant compared to the power and momentum of the cheapness strategy. The refusal to pay the true costs of production eventually led to crises because nature was cheap, but never free; debts mounted. “The modern world happened” according to Patel and Moore, “because externalities struck back” (21). Global warming is the best example of these debts but the book exposes many others.

To engage as broad of an audience as possible, the book is structured in a simple way making it useful for researchers, a general audience, and as a teaching text. The introduction begins with the example of the chicken nugget, the production of which exemplifies all seven "cheap things." The chapter then gives an outline of the argument. After the introduction, the reader is walked through relatively self-contained chapters on each of the seven cheap things: cheap nature, cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap lives. Any chapter can be read in isolation as an example of how the concept of cheapness works in different ecological and economic realms but together they give the reader an understanding of the encompassing and destructive power of "cheapness." As Patel explains in the interview, the book was designed to engage an "intersectional" activist audience. Those interested in indigenous rights, class, race, and ecological issues will all find something interesting, and likely infuriating, in this book.

Readers might be disappointed by the brevity of the conclusion however, which attempts to offer some solutions to current global crises. Here Patel and Moore lay out the basic structure for a "reparations ecology" that calls for profound changes, not simply in world economic and political relations, but in humans' attitude towards nature, both human and non-human forms. Hopefully Patel and Moore will elaborate further on the important concept of reparations ecology in their future works. In the meantime, anyone interested in the origins of the most pressing problems facing humanity today must give Patel and Moore's thesis serious consideration.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Fred Spier, "How the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers" (CRC Press, 2022)

22 september 2022 | 77 min

Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)

22 september 2022 | 82 min

Martin Kalb, "Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa" (Berghahn, 2022)

21 september 2022 | 54 min

Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022)

20 september 2022 | 40 min

Nancy Fraser, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It" (Verso, 2022)

20 september 2022 | 59 min

Joshua Duclos, "Wilderness, Morality, and Value" (Lexington Books, 2022)

20 september 2022 | 68 min

Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021)

19 september 2022 | 24 min

Philip Lymbery, "Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future" (Bloombury, 2022)

19 september 2022 | 38 min

Mrill Ingram, "Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth" (Temple UP, 2022)

16 september 2022 | 46 min

Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise

16 september 2022 | 28 min

Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)

15 september 2022 | 21 min

Jennifer L. Allen, "Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany" (Harvard UP, 2022)

14 september 2022 | 75 min

Neoliberalism

6 september 2022 | 21 min

Peter S. Alagona, "The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities" (U California Press, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 66 min

The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities (U California Press, 2022) tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth’s ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet?

The Accidental Ecosystem is the first book to explain this phenomenon from a deep historical perspective, and its focus includes a broad range of species and cities. Cities covered include New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Digging into the natural history of cities and unpacking our conception of what it means to be wild, this book provides fascinating context for why animals are thriving more in cities than outside of them. Author Peter S. Alagona argues that the proliferation of animals in cities is largely the unintended result of human decisions that were made for reasons having little to do with the wild creatures themselves. Considering what it means to live in diverse, multispecies communities and exploring how human and non-human members of communities might thrive together, Alagona goes beyond the tension between those who embrace the surge in urban wildlife and those who think of animals as invasive or as public safety hazards. The Accidental Ecosystem calls on readers to reimagine interspecies coexistence in shared habitats, as well as policies that are based on just, humane, and sustainable approaches.

Peter S. Alagona is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist at the University of Florida. Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 69 min

Erin James, "Narrative in the Anthropocene" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 44 min

Josh Milburn, "Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

31 augusti 2022 | 81 min

Frederico Freitas, "Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

26 augusti 2022 | 71 min

Becky O'Connor, "The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment" (Harriman House, 2022)

25 augusti 2022 | 62 min

Mathew Lawrence and Adrienne Buller, "Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis" (Verso, 2022)

23 augusti 2022 | 45 min

Adrienne Buller (The Value of a Whale) and Mathew Lawrence (Planet on Fire) have penned a radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic politics: Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis (Verso, 2022).

The question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset manager capitalism and the explosive concentration of wealth within the hands of the already super-rich. This new oligarchy controls every part of our social and economics lives. In the face of crisis, the authors warn that mere redistribution within current forms of ownership is not enough; our goal must be to go beyond the limits of the current system, dominated by private enclosure and unequal ownership. Only by reimagining how our economy is owned and by whom can we address the crises of our time - from the fallout of the pandemic to ecological collapse - at their roots. Building from this insight, the authors argue the systemic change we need hinges on a new era of democratic ownership: a reinvention of the firm as a vehicle for collective endeavour and meeting social needs. Against the new oligarchy of the platform giants, a digital commons that uses our data for collective good, not private profit. In place of environmental devastation, a new agenda of decommodification - of both nature and needs - with a Green New Deal and collective stewardship of the planet’s natural wealth. Together, these proposals offer a road map to owning the future, and building a better world.

Adrienne Buller is Director of Research at the UK-based think tank Common Wealth.

Mathew Lawrence is Common Wealth's founder and director.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Poison Paradigm: What a Toxic Chemical Tells us about the Politics of Science

19 augusti 2022 | 59 min

We are exposed to thousands of toxic chemicals daily. This is no accident; it is by design. They are everywhere – coating our consumer products, in our food packaging, being dumped into our lakes and sewers, and in countless other places. However, for the most part, regulators say that we need not worry.

That assessment is based on a simple 500-year-old adage, “the dose makes the poison.” The logic is simple: anything is poisonous, depending on how large a dose. Dosing yourself with a miniscule amount of lead will cause no harm; while drinking an enormous amount of water will kill you. Regulators then try to find safe exposure levels for these chemicals—and they assume a simple, direct relationship (less is fine, more is worse). So, no matter how toxic the chemical, you only need to worry if it passes a certain exposure threshold.

But what if that’s wrong?

This episode of Darts and Letters predecessor, Cited, asks that question. This episode is a central part of Darts and Letters’ DNA. We’re interested in the politics of science and academia. We like asking questions like who gets to be the expert, how does funding impact research outcomes, that kind of stuff.

This is a story about how what one chemical, bisphenol A, or “BPA”, tells us about the politics of science.

—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-

You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————

For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Temperatures on the Rise: Adapting to Heat Extremes in South Asia

19 augusti 2022 | 29 min

Between March and May of this year, large parts of India and Pakistan were hit by a severe heat wave that claimed at least 90 lives and seriously impacted people's livelihoods and the environment. What made this heat wave so different and possibly worse than previous ones? Who was particularly at risk? And where does India stand in terms of adaptation strategies? In this episode, Hanna Geschewski talks with climate change researchers Dr. Chandi Singh and Dr. Emmanuel Raju about the recent heat wave and how to deal with increasingly frequent temperature extremes.

Dr. Chandni Singh is a Senior Researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India. She is also a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC where she covered topics of vulnerability and adaptation in Asia in the Assessment Report 6 published in March 2022. She works on examining what drives differential vulnerability to climate change and how and why certain people adapt while others don’t or can’t. Dr. Singh wrote about the 2022 heat wave in her New York Times guest essay, “Spring Never Came to India This Year.”

Dr. Emmanuel Raju is an Associate Professor at the Global Health Section at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He is also currently the Director of the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE), which provides a platform for interdisciplinary research on disaster and climate change. Dr. Raju recently co-authored a study titled "Climate Change made devastating early heat in India and Pakistan 30 times more likely," which highlighted the most severe impacts of the recent heat wave and how it can be attributed to climate change.

Hanna Geschewski is a PhD researcher in Human Geography at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen in Norway, focusing on socio-ecological adaptation processes in Tibetan refugee settlements in Karnataka, India.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Annah Lake Zhu, "Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China" (Harvard UP, 2022)

18 augusti 2022 | 37 min

Paolo Squatriti, "Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

17 augusti 2022 | 53 min

The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan

16 augusti 2022 | 50 min

Max Foran, "The Subjugation of Canadian Wildlife: Failures of Principle and Policy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)

16 augusti 2022 | 47 min

Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

16 augusti 2022 | 50 min

Animals are staging a revolution—they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2022) threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how animals will push back. Animal Revolution is a passionate, provocative, cogent call for us to do so.

Ron Broglio reveals how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. We can try to frame such disruptions as environmental intervention or through the lens of philosophy or biopolitics, but regardless the animals persist beyond our comprehension in reminding us that we too are part of an animal world. Animals see our technologies and machines as invasive beings and, in a nonlinguistic but nonetheless intensive mode of communicating with us, resist our attempts to control them and diminish their habitats. In doing so, they expose the environmental injustices and vulnerabilities in our systems.

A witty, informative, and captivating work—at the juncture of posthumanism, animal studies, phenomenology, and environmental studies—Broglio reminds us of our inadequacy as humans, not our exceptionalism.

Ron Broglio is professor of English, director of Desert Humanities, and associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. He is author or editor of several books, including Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life and Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art.

Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Adam Sundberg, "Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

12 augusti 2022 | 100 min

J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, "The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945" (Harvard UP, 2016)

10 augusti 2022 | 68 min

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke's book The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard UP, 2016) explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.

More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption.

We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.

J.R. McNeill holds the appointment of University Professor at Georgetown University, serving as a faculty member of the School of Foreign Service and History Department. Professor McNeill is also a past president of American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association.

Peter Engelke is the Deputy Director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center.

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist at the University of Florida. Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Environmental Catastrophe

9 augusti 2022 | 16 min

Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

9 augusti 2022 | 54 min

Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)

8 augusti 2022 | 64 min

What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, a nuclear scientist, and an investigative journalist? Working together beginning in early 2020, Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, the authors of Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Presses universitaires de France and Disclose, 2021) have now shared with readers the meaningful and provocative results of just such a collaboration. Revisiting the history of France's nuclear weapons program over a period of three decades (following an initial set of atmospheric and underground detonations in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966), Toxique is a scientific and journalistic interrogation of the immediate and long-term health and environmental effects of the 193 bombs the French military exploded in the region, exposing civilians, as well as French military and other personnel to the fallout and radiation emitted by these explosions.

The significance of this interdisciplinary investigation cannot be overstated. As Toxique shows, these nuclear detonations continue to have harmful effects on the everyday lives of thousands of local residents, along with those veterans who served in the area. As Philippe and Statius have shown, the toxicity of these nuclear blasts has been consistently underestimated and misrepresented by the French military and state. Holding important implications for the victims of these detonations in terms of both recognition and financial compensation, the book and its accompanying online platform, Moruroa Files, have made a huge impact. I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with these remarkable researchers and writers and hope listeners will learn from and enjoy our conversation. The more people within and beyond the field of French Studies who are aware of this damaging past and present, the better.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael J. Hathaway, "What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make" (Princeton UP, 2022)

8 augusti 2022 | 68 min

China’s Role in the Future of Green Energy

5 augusti 2022 | 23 min

American Chernobyl, Part 2: The Most Poisonous Place in the USA

5 augusti 2022 | 59 min

America's Chernobyl, Part 1: Living in a Poison Town

4 augusti 2022 | 53 min

Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis, "A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)

4 augusti 2022 | 31 min

In 2003 Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two and a half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie. Over the next seventeen years, Delcomyn, with help from his friend James L. Ellis scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned these acres into prairie. In A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers (Southern Illinois UP, 2021), they document their journey and reveal the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows. It has been said, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” This book shows us how.

The first book to celebrate a smaller, more private restoration, A Backyard Prairie offers a vivid portrait of what makes a prairie. Delcomyn and Ellis describe selecting and planting seeds, recount the management of a prescribed fire, and capture the prairie’s seasonal parades of colorful flowers in concert with an ever-growing variety of animals, from the minute eastern tailed-blue butterfly to the imperious red-winged blackbird and the reclusive coyote.

This book offers a unique account of their work and their discovery of a real backyard, an inviting island of grass and flowers uncovered and revealed. We often travel miles and miles to find nature larger than ourselves. In this rich account of small prairie restoration, Delcomyn and Ellis encourage the revival of original prairie in our backyards and the patient, beauty-seeking soul sleeping within ourselves.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor, "Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity" (Routledge, 2020)

3 augusti 2022 | 50 min

The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020) brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key interdisciplinary inquiries:

Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes.

Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality.

Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities.

Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere.

Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Carl H. Nightingale, "Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

1 augusti 2022 | 63 min

Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

29 juli 2022 | 58 min

Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee, "Eco Bible: An Ecological Commentary on Genesis and Exodus" (ICSD, 2021)

29 juli 2022 | 60 min

The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change

28 juli 2022 | 33 min

If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!)

Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration with 99% Invisible. It tells a vivid story of science, politics, nature, and a heated battle over a small town’s beloved lighthouse.

The forces of nature versus the forces of human willpower has been an eternal struggle. This is an evocative short documentary, melding history with salient reminders: in the face of climate change, the struggle is becoming more and more intense.

We’ve got one more episode for this week, and then we’ll be moving on to a different theme! Stay tuned for more of our classic content, and get ready for new episodes of Darts and Letters right here on the New Books Network starting on September 16th.

—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-

You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

—————————-CONTACT US————————-

To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email [email protected] or tweet Gordon directly.

———-CREDITS———-

Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by 99% Invisible’s Delaney Hall and Cited's Sam Fenn.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)

27 juli 2022 | 108 min

Rosetta S. Elkin, "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

20 juli 2022 | 41 min

Jeannie N. Shinozuka, "Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

15 juli 2022 | 51 min

Laura A. Ogden, "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke UP, 2021)

15 juli 2022 | 64 min

Evan Berry, "Climate Politics and the Power of Religion" (Indiana UP, 2022)

14 juli 2022 | 58 min

Nick Higham, "The Mercenary River: Private Greed, Public Good--A History of London's Water" (Headline, 2022)

13 juli 2022 | 59 min

Elena Conis, "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" (Bold Type Books, 2022)

13 juli 2022 | 49 min

The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT—only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What changed?

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022) traces the surprising history of DDT’s rapid rise, infamous fall, and controversial revival to reveal to show that we’ve been taking the wrong lesson from DDT’s cautionary tale. Historian Elena Conis uncovers new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the ban but in fact the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She makes a compelling case that the real threat was not DDT itself but the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change the ways we make decisions about new scientific discoveries and technologies, Conis argues, we’re doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people at risk—both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge or consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from pesticides to vaccines to COVID-19 to climate change, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science—as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts—in order to combat the war on facts and protect ourselves and our environment.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

12 juli 2022 | 47 min

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.

Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

David Silkenat is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several books, including Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War, a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tony Hall, "Great Trees of Britain and Ireland: Over 70 of the Best Ancient Avenues, Forests and Trees to Visit" (Read Media, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 59 min

Boasting Europe's largest number of ancient oaks and yews, Britain and Ireland are home to forests that can be traced back for centuries, feature amazing avenues lined with trees hundreds of years old, and include some truly majestic individual trees.

Tony Hall is Head of the Arboretum at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In Great Trees of Britain and Ireland (Read Media, 2022) he profiles over 70 of our amazing ancient trees, avenues and forests, revealing their locations across Britain and Ireland. Hall takes the reader on a tremendous tree journey, with treasures such as the stunning wilderness of the highlands of Scotland, home to remnants of the Caledonian Forest, where huge Scots pines grow that are direct descendants from those that first arrived after the last ice age 9,000 years ago. In Ireland, Hall encounters 'Dark Hedges', the imposing beech avenue featured in Game of Thrones, as well as the Muckross yew, one of the country's oldest yews growing in the cloister at Muckross Abbey.

In this book, learn about oaks that witnessed ancient battles at the 'Gateway of the Dead' in Wales, and how in central and southern England, the once royal hunting forests from past centuries are now home to some of the best ancient woodland anywhere in Europe and provide a refuge for rare fauna and flora. Great Trees of Britain and Ireland offers a guide to the best ancient trees, avenues and forests across Britain and Ireland, but also aims to help protect these irreplaceable treasures, by telling their stories and making them more accessible.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Meng Zhang, "Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market" (U Washington Press, 2021)

6 juli 2022 | 44 min

Adrienne Buller, "The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism" (Manchester UP, 2022)

5 juli 2022 | 49 min

Max Ajl, "A People's Green New Deal" (Pluto Press, 2021)

5 juli 2022 | 52 min

Paul Dobryden, "The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder" (Northwestern UP, 2022)

1 juli 2022 | 56 min

The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern UP, 2022) traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early twentieth century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, cinema architecture, and studio practices, Paul Dobryden demonstrates how cinema envisioned and interrogated hygienic concerns about environmental disorder.

Framing hygiene within the project of national reconstruction after World War I, The Hygienic Apparatus explores cinema’s material contexts alongside its representations of housework, urban space, traffic, pollution, disability, aging, and labor. Reformers worried about the health risks associated with moviegoing but later used film to popularize hygienic ideas, encouraging viewers to see the world and themselves in relation to public health objectives. Modernist architecture and design fashioned theaters into regenerative environments for fatigued spectators. Filmmakers like F. W. Murnau and Slatan Dudow, meanwhile, explored the aesthetic and political possibilities of dirt, contagion, intoxication, and disorder. Dobryden recovers a set of ecological and biopolitical concerns to show how the problem of environmental disorder fundamentally shaped cinema’s relationship to modernity. As accessible as it is persuasive, the book adds to a growing body of scholarship on biopolitics within German studies and reveals fresh ways of understanding the apparatus of Weimar cinema.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, "Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World" (W. W. Norton, 2021)

30 juni 2022 | 68 min

Victor Seow, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

29 juni 2022 | 77 min

Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky, "Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power" (MIT Press, 2022)

29 juni 2022 | 51 min

Michael Hannah, "Extinctions: Living and Dying in the Margin of Error" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

28 juni 2022 | 58 min

Min Hyoung Song, "Climate Lyricism" (Duke UP, 2022)

28 juni 2022 | 74 min

Matthew T. Huber, "Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet" (Verso, 2022)

17 juni 2022 | 46 min

Juli Berwald, "Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs" (Riverhead Books, 2022)

16 juni 2022 | 65 min

Ellen Griffith Spears, "Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945" (Routledge, 2019)

15 juni 2022 | 69 min

Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (Routledge, 2019) turns a fresh interpretive lens on the past, drawing on a wide range of new histories of environmental activism to analyze the actions of those who created the movement and those who tried to thwart them.

Concentrating on the decades since World War II, environmental historian Ellen Griffith Spears explores environmentalism as a "field of movements" rooted in broader social justice activism. Noting major legislative accomplishments, strengths, and contributions, as well as the divisions within the ranks, the book reveals how new scientific developments, the nuclear threat, and pollution, as well as changes in urban living spurred activism among diverse populations. The book outlines the key precursors, events, participants, and strategies of the environmental movement, and contextualizes the story in the dramatic trajectory of U.S. history after World War II. The result is a synthesis of American environmental politics that one reader called both "ambitious in its scope and concise in its presentation."

This book provides a succinct overview of the American environmental movement and is the perfect introduction for students or scholars seeking to understand one of the largest social movements of the twentieth century up through the robust climate movement of today.

Ellen Griffith Spears is a professor in the interdisciplinary New College and the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945 (2019/20) and the award-winning Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (2014).

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Alison F. Richard, "Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

14 juni 2022 | 70 min

Nadia Y. Kim, "Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA" (Stanford UP, 2021)

14 juni 2022 | 72 min

Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)

13 juni 2022 | 71 min

Martin Williams, "When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be" (Princeton UP, 2021)

10 juni 2022 | 55 min

The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant land, fed by rivers and lakes. The Sahara sustained abundant plant and animal life, such as Nile perch, turtles, crocodiles, and hippos, and attracted prehistoric hunters and herders. What transformed this land of lakes into a sea of sands? When the Sahara Was Green describes the remarkable history of Earth's greatest desert--including why its climate changed, the impact this had on human populations, and how scientists uncovered the evidence for these extraordinary events.

From the Sahara's origins as savanna woodland and grassland to its current arid incarnation, Martin Williams takes us on a vivid journey through time. He describes how the desert's ancient rocks were first fashioned, how dinosaurs roamed freely across the land, and how it was later covered in tall trees. Along the way, Williams addresses many questions: Why was the Sahara previously much wetter, and will it be so again? Did humans contribute to its desertification? What was the impact of extreme climatic episodes--such as prolonged droughts--upon the Sahara's geology, ecology, and inhabitants? Williams also shows how plants, animals, and humans have adapted to the Sahara and what lessons we might learn for living in harmony with the harshest, driest conditions in an ever-changing global environment.

A valuable look at how an iconic region has changed over millions of years, When the When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals the desert's surprising past to reflect on its present, as well as its possible future.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

9 juni 2022 | 69 min

Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)

8 juni 2022 | 56 min

Gernot Wagner, "Geoengineering: The Gamble" (Polity, 2021)

7 juni 2022 | 63 min

Pavla Simková, "Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

6 juni 2022 | 90 min

The Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston's "hidden shores." While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers and harbor seals, others resemble manicured parks or have the appearance of wooded hills rising gently out of the water. Largely ignored by historians and previously home to prisons, asylums, and sewage treatment plants, this surprisingly diverse ensemble of islands has existed quietly on the urban fringe over the last four centuries. Even their latest incarnation as a national park and recreational hub has emphasized their separation from, rather than their connection to, the city. In this book, Dr. Pavla Simková reinterprets the Boston Harbor Islands as an urban archipelago, arguing that they have been an integral part of Boston since colonial days, transformed by the city's changing values and catering to its current needs. Drawing on archival sources, historic maps and photographs, and diaries from island residents, this absorbing study attests that the harbor islands' story is central to understanding the ways in which Boston has both shaped and been shaped by its environment over time.

Simková's clear and articulate writing style is accessible to academics and the general reader alike, and the book functions almost as well as a historically-informed travelogue as it does a serious academic overview. An environmental history, this work very much focuses on the shifting landscape and every-changing relationship between the islands and the urban centre, but we cannot help but discuss the social currents that both underpinned and were subjected to these shifts. There are many more avenues worthy of future exploration, most notably, with the book beginning in the 17th Century we learn a great deal about the Boston Harbor Islands' development under European colonists and settlers and how they specifically impacted the development of the area — but much less about their earlier history under Native civilians, some of whom were forcibly relocated by settler-colonialists. As Simková herself notes, her specialisation is more contemporary, but she nonetheless touches on the issue in an earlier article for Island Studies Journal (2021).

Pavla Šimková's Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2021.

Aliide Naylor is a freelance journalist, editor, translator, and the author of The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (Bloomsbury, 2020). I traditionally focus on Russia, Northern and Eastern Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Chris Gratien, "The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier" (Stanford UP, 2022)

3 juni 2022 | 68 min

In this episode, I talk to Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, about his new book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022).

The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology. Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.

The music for this episode is Jazz Mice by Stefan Kartenberg.

Deren Ertas is a PhD student in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. You can reach her on Twitter @drnrts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

David George Haskell, "Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction" (Viking, 2022)

3 juni 2022 | 65 min

We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution's creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animal groups and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution.

Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets, and shows that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, just, and beautiful. The appreciation of the beauty and brokenness of sound is therefore an important guide in today's convulsions and crises of change and inequity.

Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction (Viking, 2022) is an invitation to listen, wonder, belong, and act.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sarah Mittlefehldt, "Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics" (U Washington Press, 2013)

2 juni 2022 | 54 min

Rob Dunn, "A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species" (Basic Book, 2021)

2 juni 2022 | 62 min

Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan, "Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities" (U California Press, 2021)

1 juni 2022 | 68 min

What would it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? In recent years, cities have stepped up efforts to address climate and sustainability crises. But progress has not been fast enough or gone deep enough. If communities are to thrive in the future, we need to quickly imagine and implement an entirely new approach to urban development: one that is centered on equity and rethinks social, political, and economic systems as well as urban designs. With attention to this need for structural change, Reimagining Sustainable Cities advocates for a community-informed model of racially, economically, and socially just cities and regions. The book aims to rethink urban sustainability for a new era.

In Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities (U California Press, 2021), Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan ask big-picture questions of interest to readers worldwide: How do we get to carbon neutrality? How do we adapt to a climate-changed world? How can we create affordable, inclusive, and equitable cities? While many books dwell on the analysis of problems, Reimagining Sustainable Cities prioritizes solutions-oriented thinking--surveying historical trends, providing examples of constructive action worldwide, and outlining alternative problem-solving strategies. Wheeler and Rosan use a social ecology lens and draw perspectives from multiple disciplines. Positive, readable, and constructive in tone, Reimagining Sustainable Cities identifies actions ranging from urban design to institutional restructuring that can bring about fundamental change and prepare us for the challenges ahead.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Paul Huebener, "Nature's Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis" (U Regina Press, 2020)

1 juni 2022 | 34 min

Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)

31 maj 2022 | 62 min

Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim, "Song of the Earth: Understanding Geology and Why It Matters" (Oxford UP, 2021)

31 maj 2022 | 63 min

Adam M. Romero, "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture" (U California Press, 2021)

30 maj 2022 | 45 min

Richard Seymour, "The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism" (Indigo Press, 2022)

27 maj 2022 | 45 min

Kate Luce Mulry, "An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic" (NYU Press, 2021)

25 maj 2022 | 72 min

When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. In An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021), Dr. Kate Mulry examines ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, showing how agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited.

In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. This book investigates how Restoration officials endeavoured to recover control and counteract any lingering questions about the king’s rightful authority after this long exile by reforming and cultivating environments on both sides of the Atlantic.

An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Paul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)

25 maj 2022 | 61 min

The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.

The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.

Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers (Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.

Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Chris Begley, "The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival" (Basic Books, 2021)

24 maj 2022 | 67 min

John Markoff, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand" (Penguin, 2022)

24 maj 2022 | 52 min

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live.

In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world.

John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Diana McCaulay, "Daylight Come" (Peepal Tree Press, 2020)

24 maj 2022 | 36 min

Mayfair Yang, "Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)

24 maj 2022 | 85 min

An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Different chapters examine how: Buddhist ontology avoids anthropocentrism, fengshui (Chinese geomancy) can help protect the landscape from economic development, popular religion organizes tree-planting, ancient dream interpretation practices avoided constructing the possessive individual subjectivity of modern consumerism, Buddhist rituals and ethics promoted compassion for animals and modern recycling, Confucian ancestor rituals and tombs have deterred industrial expansion, and also how Daoism’s potential role to deter desertification in northern China was stymied by state operations in contemporary China.

A significant advance in the field of Chinese environmental anthropology, the outstanding scholars in this volume provide a unique and much needed contribution to the scholarship on China and the environment.

Mayfair Yang is professor of religious and East Asian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored two monographs: Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China (American Ethnological Society Prize) and Re-enchanting Modernity in China: Ritual Economy and Religious Civil Society in Wenzhou) and has edited two books: Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation and Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China.

Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Eve Darian-Smith, "Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis" (Stanford UP, 2022)

23 maj 2022 | 50 min

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford UP, 2022), Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

Darian-Smith looks deeply into each of these three cases of catastrophic wildfires and finds key similarities in all of them. As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmentalism has become an essential political tool enabling the rise of extreme right governments and energizing their populist supporters. These are the governments that deny climate science, reject environmental protection laws, and foster exclusionary worldviews that exacerbate climate injustice.

The fires in Australia, Brazil and the United States demand acknowledgment of the global systems of inequality that undergird them, connecting the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment. Darian-Smith argues that these wildfires are closely linked through capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and resource extraction. In thinking through wildfires as environmental and political phenomenon, Global Burning challenges readers to confront the interlocking powers that are ensuring our future ecological collapse.

Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022)

23 maj 2022 | 74 min

Cleo Wölfle Hazard, "Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice" (U Washington Press, 2022)

23 maj 2022 | 45 min

Liz Carlisle, "Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming" (Island Press, 2022)

23 maj 2022 | 52 min

A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia.

In Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming (Island Press, 2022), Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.

Liz Carlisle is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. Born and raised in Montana, she got hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester, which led to a decade of research and writing collaborations with farmers in her home state. She has written three books about regenerative farming and agroecology: Lentil Underground (2015), Grain by Grain (2019, with co-author Bob Quinn), and most recently, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming (2022). She is also a frequent contributor to both academic journals and popular media outlets, focusing on food and farm policy, incentivizing soil health practices, and supporting new entry farmers. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography, from UC Berkeley, and a B.A. in Folklore and Mythology, from Harvard University. Prior to her career as a writer and academic, she spent several years touring rural America as a country singer.

Susan Grelock-Yusem, PhD, is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Comstock Publishing, 2021)

23 maj 2022 | 55 min

Christopher W. Wells, "Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader" (U Washington Press, 2018)

20 maj 2022 | 64 min

Corey Byrnes, "Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges" (Columbia UP, 2019)

19 maj 2022 | 71 min

Alicia Puglionesi, "In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire" (Scribner, 2022)

18 maj 2022 | 64 min

The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the present that might bring into being a more just future.

In Whose Ruins could easily be categorized as Environmental History or Native Studies. But Puglionesi forges a book that is more than either field could accomplish alone. The “power” of the book’s subtitle has a double meeting: political power and the energy sources of a capitalist economy (oil, hydropower, and nuclear energy).

The book is organized into four sections, or “sites,” that visit four evocative land features: a hulking, conical earth mound in present-day West Virginia adjacent to a decommissioned state prison; wells dug into the ground in smalltown Pennsylvania; rocks that tell stories (they’re etched with petroglyphs) along the Susquehanna River with kin fragmented elsewhere; the Sonoran Desert rich with pottery, uranium, and physicists, both white and Native. In each of these sites, people with different political projects—some announced, some implicit—have generated multiple accounts of the landscapes and ideas of value.

Within a context of shifting political power, white-settler stories about each site displaced empirical knowledge of Native labor, skill, presence, and endurance with harmful fables of white origins and of Native communities’ need for white “rescue.” Into the present day, the effect has been to justify white theft of Native land and deadly violence against tribal communities for the purposes of resource extraction. In the end, even the false white origin stories became a resource to commodify.

Puglionesi is a writer of poetry, fiction, academic scholarship, and, now, In Whose Ruins, a mass-market trade publication. She holds a PhD in History of Medicine and is a lecturer in Medicine, Science and Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. On the page, Puglionesi has a friendly, funny, quiet presence—an affable Where’s Waldo that centers the relationships of historical actors (including spirits) and the work of scholars such as Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Eve Tuck.

This conversation explores ways of living in good relation via writing; the status of truth; the relevance of singer-songwriter Prince for labor studies; and many other themes. It discusses the important book by Chadwick Allen, Earthworks Rising (Minnesota, 2022). In an unrecorded snippet, we also swap names of our favorite local indie bookstores. So check out Red Emma’s the next time you’re in Baltimore, MD (or on Bookshop.org) and Symposium, Riff Raff, and Paper Nautilus when your compass points to Providence, RI.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Irune Gabiola, "Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres" (Peter Lang, 2020)

18 maj 2022 | 65 min

In Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres (Peter Lang, 2020), Irune del Rio Gabiola examines the power of affect in structuring decolonizing modes of resistance performed by social movements such as COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). Despite a harsh legacy of colonialism, indigenous communities continue suffering from territorial displacements, dispossession, and human rights abuses due to extractivist projects that are violently destroying their land and, therefore, the environment. In particular, the Lenca communities in Honduras have been negatively affected by Western ideas of progress and development that have historically eliminated ancestral knowledges and indigenous ecological cosmologies while reinforcing Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, by reflecting on and articulating strategies for resisting neoliberalism, COPINH and its cofounder Berta Cáceres' commitment to environmental activism, ecofeminism, and intersectional struggles has contributed affectively and effectively to the production of democratic encounters in pursuit of social justice. In homage to Berta, who was brutally assassinated for her activism in 2016, this book takes the reader on an affective journey departing from the violent affects experienced by the Lencas due to colonial disruption, contemporary industrialization, and criminalization, towards COPINH's political and social intervention fueled by outrage, resistance, transnational solidarity, care, mourning, and hope. In this way, subaltern actors nurture the power to--in line with Brian Massumi's interpretation of affect--transform necropolitics into natality with the aim of creating a fairer and better world

The host, Elize Mazadiego, is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and author of Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968 (Brill, 2021). She works on Modern and Contemporary art, with a specialization in Latin American art history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jacob Doherty, "Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability" (U California Press, 2021)

18 maj 2022 | 52 min

Kai Bosworth, "Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

16 maj 2022 | 46 min

Abby Seiff, "Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

12 maj 2022 | 40 min

Jeff D. Colgan, "Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order" (Oxford UP, 2021)

10 maj 2022 | 47 min

Taylor Eggan, "Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination" (U Virginia Press, 2022)

9 maj 2022 | 98 min

Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan E. Kallman, "Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

5 maj 2022 | 34 min

Pandemic Perspectives 9: Covid, 'Scientism,' and the Betrayal of the Enlightenment

4 maj 2022 | 61 min

Jo Guldi, "The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights" (Yale UP, 2022)

3 maj 2022 | 62 min

Tracey Williams, "Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea" (Unicorn, 2022)

29 april 2022 | 42 min

Lukas Ley, "Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

29 april 2022 | 50 min

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life: toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted.

As Lukas Ley shows, the residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure, ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this predicament through the temporal lens of a “meantime,” a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better future—a “chronic present.”

Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it—and shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding.

Lukas Ley is head of research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Larry E. Swedroe and Samuel C. Adams, "Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing" (Harriman House, 2022)

28 april 2022 | 62 min

Mary Louise Pratt, "Planetary Longings" (Duke UP, 2022)

27 april 2022 | 69 min

Faisal H. Husain, "Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire" (Oxford UP, 2021)

22 april 2022 | 104 min

Deborah Gordon, "No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World" (Oxford UP, 2021)

19 april 2022 | 48 min

Jeff Sebo, "Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 april 2022 | 41 min

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities.

Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes (Oxford UP, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how.

Jeff Sebo is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, and Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program at New York University. He is also on the executive committee at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the advisory board for the Animals in Context series at NYU Press.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Merging the Local with the Global: A Conversation with a Malaysian Youth Climate Advocate

18 april 2022 | 26 min

Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

15 april 2022 | 62 min

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ecosphere

13 april 2022 | 22 min

Laura J. Martin, "Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration" (Harvard UP, 2022)

13 april 2022 | 60 min

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.

Restoration has been a touchstone of United States environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? In Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022), Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.

In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for Scientific American, Slate, Environmental History, Environmental Humanities, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and other publications.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. She is also the creator and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Bethany Wiggin et al., "Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

13 april 2022 | 69 min

Pandemic Perspectives 6: COVID and the Importance of Political Understanding

13 april 2022 | 53 min

Paul Stephenson, "New Rome: The Empire in the East" (Harvard UP, 2022)

6 april 2022 | 54 min

Pandemic Perspectives 5: Necessarily Global--How the Pandemic Forces Us To Think Bigger

6 april 2022 | 45 min

Hilda Lloréns, "Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice" (U of Washington Press, 2021)

5 april 2022 | 68 min

Urban Climate Change and Adaptation: Messages from the IPCC Report for Southeast Asia

4 april 2022 | 37 min

“An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are the greatest climate risks for the region and where are we in terms of adapting to them? And why are the concepts of maladaptation and climate resilient development important as we focus our attention on urgent climate action?

This episode delves into these issues. It also discusses the significance of including references to climate justice, colonialism and indigenous knowledge in the report, to future international climate action.

This episode was recorded on 14 March 2022 and covers the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the 6th Assessment Report, published on 28 February 2022.

Professor Chow (@winstontlchow) is Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Singapore Management University and an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Lead Author. His research interests include urban vulnerability to climate change, urban heat island science, impacts and mitigation, and sustainability in urban climatology.

Quynh Le Vo (@voquynhle) works as the climate campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth Finland. She received a NIAS-SUPRA scholarship in 2021 while writing her master’s thesis on the Asian Development Bank’s climate adaptation projects in Southeast Asia.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)

29 mars 2022 | 53 min

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest.

Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support.

Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ilan Kelman, "Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries" (UCL Press, 2022)

29 mars 2022 | 44 min

Sophie Chao, "In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua" (Duke UP, 2022)

29 mars 2022 | 64 min

Heather Goodall, "Georges River Blues: Swamps, Mangroves and Resident Action, 1945–1980" (ANU Press, 2022)

25 mars 2022 | 54 min

John Bellamy Foster, "The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology" (Monthly Review Press, 2021)

23 mars 2022 | 102 min

It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for.

In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecology left off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation.

The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible.

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a number of books, including Marx’s Ecology. With The Return of Nature he won the 2020 Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize. He is also the editor and a frequent contributor at the socialist periodical The Monthly Review.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)

23 mars 2022 | 49 min

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

"Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.

Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Peter B. Lavelle, "The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China" (Columbia UP, 2020)

22 mars 2022 | 69 min

The Future of Disorder: A Discussion with Helen Thompson

22 mars 2022 | 48 min

Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, "All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 mars 2022 | 43 min

All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility.

By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends onreckoning with this past.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund, "Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 65 min

Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss, "Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species" (U Washington Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 56 min

Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza, "A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism" (Oxford UP, 2021)

15 mars 2022 | 81 min

Leadership and Humility: A Conversation with Major General Ken Wisian

14 mars 2022 | 59 min

Jo Handelsman, "A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet" (Yale UP, 2021)

7 mars 2022 | 56 min

A World without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet (Yale University Press, 2021) by celebrated biologist Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climate change, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery.

Humans depend on soil for 95 percent of global food production, yet let it erode at unsustainable rates. In the United States, China, and India, vast tracts of farmland will be barren of topsoil within this century. The combination of intensifying erosion caused by climate change and the increasing food needs of a growing world population is creating a desperate need for solutions to this crisis.

Writing for a nonspecialist audience, Jo Handelsman celebrates the capacities of soil and explores the soil-related challenges of the near future. She begins by telling soil’s origin story, explains how it erodes and the subsequent repercussions worldwide, and offers solutions. She considers lessons learned from indigenous people who have sustainably farmed the same land for thousands of years, practices developed for large-scale agriculture, and proposals using technology and policy initiatives.

Jo Handelsman is the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and a Vilas Research Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Handelsman previously served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama.

Kayla Cohen provided research and creative contributions to A World Without Soil. She completed a master’s degree with distinction in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics.

Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. A Syrian multinational, he studied at Yale and earned a certificate in beekeeping from SOILS Permaculture Association Lebanon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Zerzan, "When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics" (Feral House, 2021)

4 mars 2022 | 60 min

Architecture, Climatic Privilege, and Migrant Labour in Singapore

3 mars 2022 | 21 min

Michael Méndez, "Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement" (Yale UP, 2020)

2 mars 2022 | 47 min

Erin Drew, "The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century" (UVA Press, 2021)

1 mars 2022 | 84 min

Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)

1 mars 2022 | 44 min

From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era.

Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world.

Now, author Megan Kate Nelson examines the larger context of this American moment, illuminating Hayden’s survey as a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war. Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner, 2022) follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation.

A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation’s history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States.

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She has written about the Civil War, US western history, and American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Monitor. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa, and she has taught at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. Nelson is the author of Saving Yellowstone, The Three-Cornered War, Ruin Nation, and Trembling Earth. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sequoia Nagamatsu, "How High We Go in the Dark: A Novel" (William Morrow, 2022)

1 mars 2022 | 28 min

Julia Dehm, "Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

28 februari 2022 | 30 min

Sean Kelly, "Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation" (Integral Imprint, 2020)

28 februari 2022 | 62 min

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), about his 2021 book Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (Integral Imprint, 2020). Along with his abiding interest in the work of Jung, Hegel, and Edgar Morin, Kelly’s current research areas include the evolution of consciousness, integral ecologies, and transpersonal and integral theory. In Becoming Gaia, he draws upon an impressive range of scholarship from such fields as Big History, comparative religion, transpersonal psychology, and integral philosophies. Regular listeners may find Kelly’s work a wonderful complement to some of the other authors and topics we’ve shared on this channel. I found the book—and our chat—fascinating.

Kelly is not alone in suggesting we are living in end times. With climate chaos, an accelerating mass extinction, and signs of civilizational collapse, the Earth community is being drawn into a planetary near-death experience! These end times, however, also mark the threshold of new planetary identity in the making. Kelly reveals the features of this new identity and invites us to consciously participate in its making. Guided by the ideal of Gaia as "concrete universal," Kelly offers compelling insights on the nature of an emerging world spirituality that some describe as a second Axial Age—on the elements of a complex-integral ethics for the Planetary Era, and on the role of the death/rebirth archetype for understanding the charged field of contemporary climate activism.

The book culminates with an inspiring meditation on the possibility, in these end times, of a third way beyond both hope and despair. In contrast to the restrictive anthropocentrism and technocentrism of mainstream discourse around the Anthropocene, Kelly speaks instead of the Gaianthropocene as our new geological epoch. It is an epoch where, even and especially as we face the fires of planetary initiation, we can awaken to our deeper nature as living members of Gaia, the living Earth in and through whom we have our being.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Mary Menton and Philippe Le Billon, "Environmental Defenders: Deadly Struggles for Life and Territory" (Routledge, 2021)

18 februari 2022 | 63 min

Kian Goh, "Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 februari 2022 | 34 min

Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021), Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam—and the mobilization of community groups to fight the perceived injustices and oversights of these plans. Looking through the lenses of urban design and socioecological spatial politics, Goh reveals how contested visions of the future city are produced and gain power.

Goh describes, on the one hand, a growing global network of urban environmental planning organizations intertwined with capitalist urban development, and, on the other, social movements that themselves often harness the power of networks. She explores such initiatives as Rebuild By Design in New York, the Giant Sea Wall plan in Jakarta, and Rotterdam Climate Proof, and discovers competing narratives, including community resiliency in Brooklyn and grassroots activism in the informal “kampungs” of Jakarta. Drawing on participatory fieldwork and her own background in architecture and urban design, Goh offers both theoretical explanations and practical planning and design strategies. She reframes the critical concerns of urban climate change responses, presenting a sociospatial typology of urban adaptation and considering the notion of a “just” resilience. Finally, she proposes a theoretical framework for designing equitable and just urban climate futures.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Molly P. Rozum, "Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

11 februari 2022 | 62 min

Mimi Sheller, "Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2020)

10 februari 2022 | 90 min

Lina Zeldovich, "The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

3 februari 2022 | 67 min

Pankaj Jain, "Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India" (Routledge, 2018)

31 januari 2022 | 50 min

Jennifer Scheper Hughes, "The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas" (NYU Press, 2021)

31 januari 2022 | 60 min

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive

Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas.

The Church of the Dead offers a counter-history of American Christian origins. It centers the power of Indigenous Mexicans, showing how their Catholic faith remained intact even in the face of the faltering religious fervor of Spanish missionaries. While the Europeans grappled with their failure to stem the tide of death, succumbing to despair, Indigenous survivors worked to reconstruct the church. They reasserted ancestral territories as sovereign, with Indigenous Catholic states rivaling the jurisdiction of the diocese and the power of friars and bishops.

Christianity in the Americas today is thus not the creation of missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the colonial mortandad, the founding condition of American Christianity. Weaving together archival study, visual culture, church history, theology, and the history of medicine, Jennifer Scheper Hughes provides us with a fascinating reexamination of North American religious history that is at once groundbreaking and lyrical.

Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

James Heisig, "Of Gods and Minds: In Search of a Theological Commons" (Chisokudō Publications, 2019)

27 januari 2022 | 77 min

One of the trailblazers in the field of Japanese philosophy, James W. Heisig, delivered his five lectures in 2019 at Boston College as the Duffy Lectures in Global Christianity. These lectures were compiled into this book, Of Gods and Minds: In Search of a Theological Commons (Nagoya & Brussels: Chisokudō Publications, 2019). In them the author begins from the assumption that if the Christian God is to have global significance, it will not merely be a matter of Christianity accepting cultural and religious diversity and retreating from its mission of converting the entire world to its own way of thinking about God. The conversion to tolerance and hospitality towards other modes of belief and practice marks a watershed for Christianity, but only as a transition to straighten out its past in the face of a graver, commoner concern: the care of an earth abused by human civilization and devalued by organized religion. The author approaches this question from a broader consideration of the origins and functions of gods in minds and from there suggests grounding metaphors of the divine and its relationship to the natural world in a nothingness beyond being and becoming.

During our interview, I asked Jim: The ongoing challenges of bringing our ecological concerns and street activism to the centerstage of our intellectual and philosophical discussions in academia are daunting. We (academics) tend to create another specialised branch of "environmental philosophy" or "philosophy of nature" as an elective rather than the core discourse in the field of philosophy. I asked him what is needed for philosophers and specialists of religious studies to take seriously the practical concept of the "care of an earth." His nuanced answer was this: a "revolution."

We also delved into the concept of nothingness as "connectedness" and the logic of soku 即 as a particular rendering of it in reference to contemporary Japanese philosophy. The examples he provided towards the end of the interview was stunning to say the least: A genuine connectedness between humans and nature, which also means to be faithful to emergences of gods in our minds from diverse cultural and historical backgrounds, should look like Kintsugi 金継ぎ. It can not only heal what is once broken but the process of healing can be beautiful and renew our appreciation of what we have broken once. We hope that philosophy programs from around the world will follow this revolutionary practice of connectedness.

Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, "Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors" (PublicAffairs, 2021)

21 januari 2022 | 55 min

Heidi Wang-Kaeding, "China's Environmental Foreign Relations" (Routledge, 2021)

21 januari 2022 | 19 min

Environmental protection and climate actions has embedded in China’s foreign policy and the Chinese government has recently pledged to make the Belt and Road Initiative “open, green, and clean”. How far is this an agenda designed primarily for international consumption? How do domestic interest groups respond to China’s environmental foreign relations? To what extent can they influence and shape China’s domestic and international environmental discourse?

In this episode, Heidi Wang-Kaeding talks to Vorawan Wannalak about her recently published book China’s Environmental Foreign Policy (2021, Routledge), which explores China’s attempts to assert alternative norms – “Ecological Civilization” - in the global environmental governance and highlights the importance of domestic forces as a key factor that influence diverse and contradictory environmental behaviors of China at international levels.

Over recent decades, China has moved from being a follower towards taking on a leadership role in global environmental governance. This book discusses this important development. It examines the key role of Chinese interest groups, showing how through various domestic dynamics they have influenced how China has approached issues such as climate change and the environment. Focusing on examples of multilateral environmental treaties, bilateral cooperation, and the proposition of alternative norms – the idea of China as an "ecological civilisation" – the book provides crucial insights on the evolution of China’s approach to international relations and engagement with global environmental governance, and contributes to the discussion of what kind of power China is poised to become.

Dr. Heidi Wang-Kaeding is a lecturer in International Relations at Keele University and a co-founder of the Hong Kong Studies Association, based in the UK.

Vorawan Wannalak is a PhD student at the University of Potsdam. She was a 2021 Virtual SUPRA Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies..

You may also be interested in another Nordic Asia Podcast mentioned by Heidi, in which Mette Halskov Hansen discusses the concept of ecological civilization here.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Cornell UP, 2021)

19 januari 2022 | 62 min

Traci Brynne Voyles, "The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

19 januari 2022 | 83 min

Colin Jerolmack, "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town" (Princeton UP, 2021)

19 januari 2022 | 65 min

Ruth Mostern, "The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History" (Yale UP, 2021)

14 januari 2022 | 81 min

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationships of the river's varied ecosystems--grasslands, riparian forests, wetlands, and deserts--and the ecological and cultural impacts of their policies. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend.

This scale, detail, and clarity of this work was inspiring. Ruth Mostern's long-term environmental history of the Yellow River, is not the story of a single channel but of a series of landscapes and entanglements between the human and natural world. Replete with detailed explanations of physical geography and water management technologies, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale UP, 2021) succeeds not only in meticulously addressing the geographical and cultural heart of Chinese history, but also in speaking to our present moment through its recurring portrayal of the relationship between environmental awareness and political possibility.

Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Alexander Etkind, "Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources" (Polity Press, 2021)

10 januari 2022 | 83 min

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, "Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism" (Duke UP, 2021)

7 januari 2022 | 60 min

Edie Widder, “Ocean Enlightenment” (Open Agenda, 2021)

31 december 2021 | 68 min

Saumya Roy, "Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings" (Profile Books, 2021)

30 december 2021 | 43 min

In 2016, the city of Mumbai was blanketed in toxic smog. The source? Fires at the nearby dumping ground of Deonar: the country’s oldest. The Deonar fire became an embarrassment for Mumbai, coming right before an international expo meant to announce the city to international investors and business.

Law enforcement immediately blamed scrap dealers who lived alongside the landfill. The pickers are men and women–poor, sometimes very young–who comb the mountain for waste that can be resold: metal, plastic, cloth and, if they’re lucky, gold and jewelry.

Saumya Roy’s Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings (Profile Books, 2021) looks into the lives of a few of these pickers, as they try to survive among the mountains of trash, as government officials and judges squabble above them trying to figure out what to do. More of Saumya’s work on landfills can be found here.

In this interview, we talk about the trash mountains of Deonar, the families that live there, and how they navigate life on the fringes of one of India’s largest cities.

Saumya Roy is a journalist and activist based in Mumbai. In 2010, she co-founded the Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai's poorest micro-entrepreneurs; through this she met the community who depend on Deonar. Her writing has appeared in Forbes India Magazine, wsj.com and Bloomberg News among others, and she has contributed a chapter to Dharavi: The Cities Within (HarperCollins India: 2013), an anthology of essays on Asia's largest slum.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Mountain Tales. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action

29 december 2021 | 20 min

Jennifer Fay, "Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene" (Oxford UP, 2018)

27 december 2021 | 112 min

Charles Sheppard, “Coral Reefs: Science and Survival” (Open Agenda, 2021)

27 december 2021 | 134 min

Dave Goulson, "Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse" (Harper, 2021)

24 december 2021 | 60 min

Janna Coomans, "Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

15 december 2021 | 50 min

Pankaj Jain, "Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability" (Ashgate, 2011)

13 december 2021 | 48 min

Jade S. Sasser, "On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change" (NYU Press, 2018)

13 december 2021 | 55 min

Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”—and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back—and why now? In On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change (New York University Press, 2018), Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground—until now.

Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Although well-intentioned—promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community—these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible.

On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.

Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. witter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, "Technology in World Civilization" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 december 2021 | 75 min

Kate Rigby, "Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

10 december 2021 | 78 min

David Moon et al., "Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History" (White Horse Press, 2021)

8 december 2021 | 66 min

Negotiated Environmentalism: Influences of Domestic Interest Groups in China’s Environmental Foreign Relations

6 december 2021 | 27 min

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, exit from coal and ending deforestation. She also reveals some insights from the annual Southeast Asia Climate Survey reports, such as perceptions in the region of the US as a climate leader and the (dis)connects between climate action and COVID-19 responses.

Sharon Seah is Senior Fellow and Coordinator at the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. She co-edited 50 Years of ASEAN and Singapore (World Scientific: 2017) and Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans (NUS Press: 2019). Prior to academia, Ms Seah worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore and the National Environment Agency for fifteen years. She may be reached at [email protected].

Quynh Le Vo is a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Thane Gustafson, "Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change" (Harvard UP, 2021)

3 december 2021 | 48 min

With COP26 and high fossil fuel prices, energy is back in the headlines. And Russia, as one of the world’s largest producers of hydrocarbons, is part of the conversation--most recently, in Putin’s refusal to expand oil production to ease global prices.

The world is coming up on three major transitions—peak use of fossil fuels, renewables competing with non-renewables, and a warming climate likely to surpass the 1.5 degree threshold set by the IPCC.

What do those trends mean for Russia: a great power, a major oil and gas producer, an Arctic country covered in permafrost, and an economy with strong, but increasingly outdated, levels of technological development.

Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Professor Thane Gustafson, examines how Russia might react—or be forced to react—to a changing environment and energy market.

In this interview, the three of us will talk about how Russia will have to change as the world warms. As the world shifts to renewables, will Russia be able to keep up? As Arctic ice melts, will Russia see shipping opportunities? And will climate change get greater salience among the Russian public?

Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. A widely recognized authority on Russian political economy and formerly a professor at Harvard University, he is the author of many books, notably The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe (Harvard University Press: 2020) and Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Harvard University Press: 2017), as well as Russia 2010: And What It Means for the World (Vintage: 1995), coauthored with Daniel Yergin.

We’re also joined in this interview by Yvonne Lau. Yvonne is the Asia Markets Reporter for Fortune Magazine, with a longtime interest in Russia, especially its post-Soviet economic development and its growing ties with China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Klimat. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Holmes McDowell et al., "Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

30 november 2021 | 67 min

The volume, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (University of Illinois Press, 2021), illustrates the power of performing diverse environmentalisms to highlight alternative ways of human beingness to improve the prospects for maintaining life on the planet under threat. In the interview, I spoke with editors John McDowell and Rebecca Dirksen, who detail how poetics and performance represent strategies in managing human and nonhuman entanglements with contemporary, wicked problems (e.g., threats to bicultural diversity and rampant environmental degradation, unresolved colonial histories, and capitalist pressures). Understanding diverse environmentalisms as embodiments of knowing demonstrates “the power of performances and expressive culture to move people to action: resisting, negotiating, and finding solutions to environmental problems. These are not only performances of diverse environmentalisms, but sources of inspiration and strength for us all” (261).

Performing Environmentalisms is an edited volume of ten essays broken up into three parts: Perspectives on Diverse Environmentalisms, Performing the Sacred, and Environmental Attachments. The compilation demonstrates how environmentalisms as artistic expression serve to curate tradition and create space for cultural sustainability. The array of case studies generates new strategies that incorporate a diverse set of peoples—injecting their knowledge, experiences, and practices into global conversations. Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a must read for anyone interested in investigating how creative, alternative sets of environmentalisms interpreted though traditional knowledges are integral to navigating local and global climate and ecological issues.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Margaret D. Jacobs, "After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands" (Princeton UP, 2021)

29 november 2021 | 69 min

Shaking the World: How Geology Can Help Us Address the Big Challenges of the 21st Century

26 november 2021 | 16 min

Southeast Asia is the most tectonically and geologically active region on Earth. These processes have enriched the mountains and basins with world-famous mineral and energy resources, fresh water, and highly productive soils. However, the same geological processes are responsible for incredible destruction – from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These natural hazards, coupled with the effects of human-induced climate change, are driving significant change. To talk us through these changes, Dr Sabin Zahirovic joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, exposing how climate change is amplifying existing vulnerabilities in Southeast Asia. He explains how understanding past and current geological process can help us reduce risks from natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, but also address the huge challenges faced by growing populations and increased vulnerabilities resulting from climate change.

About Sabin Zahirovic:

Dr Sabin Zahirovic is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sabin's research focuses on global plate tectonics and mantle evolution, and particularly for the Tethyan and Asian regions. He completed his PhD titled “Post-Pangea global plate kinematics and geodynamic implications for Southeast Asia” at the University of Sydney in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Papua New Guinea research stream of the ARC ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub at the University of Sydney. He now leads the Tectonics and Geodynamics stream of a collaborative industry project with BHP. In 2020, Sabin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to explore the rise and demise of massive reefs and carbonate platforms on Australian continental margins. Sabin is a past recipient of the GSA Voisey Medal, the Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award, and the AIPS NSW Tall Poppy award.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Gavin Van Horn et al., "Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set" (Center for Humans and Nature, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 66 min

Kenneth O'Reilly, "Asphalt: A History" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 90 min

Josep M. Coll, "Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation" (Routledge, 2021)

19 november 2021 | 58 min

I recently sat down with Josep M. Coll to discuss his new book Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation (Routledge, 2021). This book is the latest and final in a series published by Routledge that includes titles by some brilliant systems thinkers I have had the fortune to interview previously on this podcast (Managing Creativity, Córdoba-Pachón; Systems Thinking for Turbulent Times, Hodgson, Part 1 & Part 2; and The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking, Ison and Straw). Series editor Gerald Midgley refers to this collection as "an essential reference point for anyone looking for innovative ways to effect systemic change, or engaging with complex problems". And Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking is the icing on the cake!

Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking explores a radical new conception of business and management. It is grounded on the reconnection of humans with nature as the new competitive advantage for living organizations and entrepreneurs that aspire to regenerate the economy and drive a positive impact on the planet, in the context of the Anthropocene. Organizations, today, struggle in finding a balance between maximizing profits and generating value for their stakeholders, the environment and the society at large. This happens in a paradigm shift characterized by unprecedented levels of exponential change and the emergence of disruptive technologies. Adaptability, thus, is becoming the new business imperative. How can, then, entrepreneurs and organizations constantly adapt and, at the same time, design the sustainable futures they'd like?

This book explores the benefits of applying Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking to sustainable management. Grounded in Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies, it offers a modern scientific perspective fundamentally based on the concepts of bio-logical adaptability and lifefulness amidst complexity and constant change. The book introduces the new concept of the Gaia organization as a living organism that consciously helps perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. It is subject to the natural laws of transformation and the principles of oneness, emptiness, impermanence, balance, self-regulation and harmonization. Readers will find applied Eastern systems theories such as the Yin-Yang and the Five Elements operationalized through practical methodologies and tools such as T-Qualia and the Zen Business model. They are aimed at guiding Gaia organizations and entrepreneurs in leading sustainable transformations and qualifying economic growth.

Highly actionable, the book offers a vital toolkit for purpose-driven practitioners, management researchers, students, social entrepreneurs, systems evaluators and change-makers to reinvent, create and mindfully manage sustainable and agile organizations that drive systemic transformation.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Climate Change and Individual Moral Duties

17 november 2021 | 24 min

J. Shapiro and J-A. McNeish, "Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance" (Routledge, 2021)

16 november 2021 | 53 min

Judith Shapiro and John-Andrew McNeish's book Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance (Routledge, 2021) emphasizes how the spectrum of violence associated with natural resource extraction permeates contemporary collective life.

Chronicling the increasing rates of brutal suppression of local environmental and labor activists in rural and urban sites of extraction, this volume also foregrounds related violence in areas we might not expect, such as infrastructural developments, protected areas for nature conservation, and even geoengineering in the name of carbon mitigation. Contributors argue that extractive violence is not an accident or side effect, but rather a core logic of the 21st Century planetary experience. Acknowledgement is made not only of the visible violence involved in the securitization of extractive enclaves, but also of the symbolic and structural violence that the governance, economics, and governmentality of extraction have produced. Extractive violence is shown not only to be a spectacular event, but an extended dynamic that can be silent, invisible, and gradual. The volume also recognizes that much of the new violence of extraction has become cloaked in the discourse of "green development," "green building," and efforts to mitigate the planetary environmental crisis through totalizing technologies. Ironically, green technologies and other contemporary efforts to tackle environmental ills often themselves depend on the continuance of social exploitation and the contaminating practices of non-renewable extraction. But as this volume shows, resistance is also as multi-scalar and heterogeneous as the violence it inspires.

Dr Marc Hudson is a research fellow in the politics of industrial decarbonisation policy at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, UK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nancy Langston, "Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene" (Brandeis UP, 2021)

15 november 2021 | 42 min

Jordan Salama, "Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena" (Catapult, 2021)

12 november 2021 | 41 min

Jen Corrinne Brown, "Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West" (U Washington Press, 2017)

12 november 2021 | 61 min

Andrew Leigh, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 november 2021 | 42 min

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely.

Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Populist movements thrive on short-termism because they focus on their followers' immediate grievances. Leigh argues that we should be long-termers: broaden our thinking and give big threats the attention and resources they need.

Leigh outlines the biggest existential risks facing humanity and suggests remedies for them. He discusses pandemics, considering the possibility that the next virus will be more deadly than COVID-19; warns that unchecked climate change could render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable; describes the metamorphosis of the arms race from a fight into a chaotic brawl; and examines the dangers of runaway superintelligence. Moreover, Leigh points out, populism (and its crony, totalitarianism) not only exacerbates other dangers but is also a risk factor in itself, undermining the institutions of democracy as we watch.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Chris McLaughlin, "Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

10 november 2021 | 56 min

On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished.

Miraculously, many pets did manage to survive. But in the months that followed the hurricane, thousands of them were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, and movie stars and celebrities were airlifting food and endorsing seven-figure checks, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could.

Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs (UP of Mississippi, 2021)spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind. McLaughlin tells the moving stories of the people she met along the way, both those who lost everything to the hurricane and those working beside her rescuing and transporting animals away from the neglected, derelict conditions in which they barely survived. Within this story of tragedy and cruelty, suffering and ignorance, Mississippi Barking also bears witness to selfless acts of bravery and compassion, and the beauty and heroics of those who risked everything to save the animals that could not save themselves.

Chris McLaughlin is founder and executive director of the Animal Rescue Front. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston with a BA in earth sciences, she lives in Massachusetts with two cats. This is her first book.

Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which was optioned for TV/Film development in 2021. A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Julia E. Ault, "Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

9 november 2021 | 55 min

When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2021) complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain.

Julie Ault is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015 before joining the faculty at Utah. She is currently a faculty fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center with the goal of developing her second book project, tentatively entitled Solidarity & Socialist Riches: East German Diplomacy, Environment & Technology, 1949-1989. Her research interests include the environment, transnational networks, social movements, socialism, and the Cold War.

Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at [email protected] or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Todd LeVasseur, "Climate Change, Religion, and our Bodily Future" (Lexington Books, 2021)

3 november 2021 | 62 min

Gero Leson, "Honor Thy Label: Dr. Bronner's Unconventional Journey to a Clean, Green, and Ethical Supply Chain" (Portfolio, 2021)

2 november 2021 | 74 min

Supply chains - and, especially, their points of failure - have become a global hot topic, encouraging us all to take a closer look at how goods move around the globe. Dr. Gero Leson has spent the better part of his career developing supply chains from the ground up, modeling a community-driven approach that holds a vision of interconnection and a broader understanding of success for Western culture.

At natural soap company Dr. Bronner’s, Leson and his colleagues and collaborators have developed ingredient supply chains for key ingredients, including palm oil, cocoa, and olive oil, that have aimed to honor people and process as much as product. At times, the results have been humbling, but, also, educational and human-centered. Working in communities around the globe, including Ghana, India, and Sri Lanka, Leson’s sourcing stories demonstrate how working closely with people and recognizing the role of serendipity can have surprising and dynamic results--and lead to regenerative, more socially just supply chains. In Honor Thy Label: Dr. Bronner's Unconventional Journey to a Clean, Green, and Ethical Supply Chain (Portfolio, 2021), Leson shares case studies of his work and offers insight into the complexity of critical supply chain issues, including sustainability, regenerative organic agriculture, and fair trade.

Dr. Gero Lasen is the vice president of special operations at Dr. Bronners, a top-selling brand of soaps in North America. After joining the company in 2005, he helped its transition to sourcing all major ingredients directly from certified fair trade and organic projects, built from scratch and supplied by small scale farms. Under his leadership, Dr Bronners has become a pathfinder in the global movement to establish socially just and environmentally responsible supply chains. Leson holds a masters in physics and a doctorate in environmental science and engineering. He is a regular speaker on business, sustainability, fair trade, and regenerative organic agriculture.

Dr. Susan Grelock Yusem is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Gregg Mitman, "Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia" (New Press, 2021)

2 november 2021 | 44 min

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.

Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (New Press, 2021) tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire.

Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.

A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An award-winning author and filmmaker, his recent films and books include The Land Beneath Our Feet and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. He lives near Madison, Wisconsin. Website.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Bronwyn Adcock, "Currowan: A Story of Fire and a Community During Australia's Worst Summer" (Black Inc., 2021)

29 oktober 2021 | 55 min

Wonders of the Mekong: Rethinking Sustainable Development and Resilience in Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake

28 oktober 2021 | 20 min

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock" (Beacon Press, 2019)

27 oktober 2021 | 56 min

Nicolette Hahn Niman, "Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat" (Chelsea Green, 2021)

26 oktober 2021 | 53 min

Andrea E. Duffy, "Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

25 oktober 2021 | 70 min

Paulina Ochoa Espejo, "On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place" (Oxford UP, 2020)

21 oktober 2021 | 65 min

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn?

Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities—but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls.

To escape all this, Paulina Ochoa Espejo's book On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (Oxford UP, 2020) presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties.

This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions—not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Climate Change, Oceans and Gender

20 oktober 2021 | 26 min

Eunice Blavascunas, "Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe's Last Primeval Forest" (Indiana UP, 2020)

20 oktober 2021 | 60 min

Patricia Newman and Annie Crawley, "Planet Ocean: Why We All Need a Healthy Ocean" (Millbrook Press, 2021)

20 oktober 2021 | 56 min

Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)

18 oktober 2021 | 43 min

There’s nothing more vital to survival than water.

“Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person.

Scrupulously researched, Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink (Thomas Dunne, 2020) is full of shocking stories about contaminated water found throughout the U.S. and about the everyday heroes who have successfully forced changes in the quality and safety of our drinking water. Contamination is not the only critical water issue. The U.S. government predicts that forty of our fifty states-and 60 percent of the earth's land surface-will soon face alarming gaps between available water and the growing demand for it. Without action, food prices will rise, economic growth will slow, and political instability is likely to follow.

Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also had an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors-the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan-every day.

Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Let There Be Water reveals the methods and techniques of the often-offbeat inventors who enabled Israel to lead the world in cutting-edge water technology.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rocio Gomez, "Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

15 oktober 2021 | 46 min

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" (Princeton UP, 2021)

15 oktober 2021 | 48 min

Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020)

15 oktober 2021 | 73 min

Jenny Nelson, “Harnessing the Sun” (Open Agenda, 2021)

11 oktober 2021 | 132 min

Jaime Lowe, "Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Line of California's Wildfires" (MCD, 2021)

6 oktober 2021 | 46 min

David B. Williams, "Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound" (U Washington Press, 2021)

6 oktober 2021 | 61 min

Milieudefensie v. Shell: A Tipping Point in Climate Change Litigation against Corporations?

6 oktober 2021 | 23 min

Ranae Lenor Hanson, "Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

5 oktober 2021 | 56 min

Mark Maslin, “Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact” (Open Agenda, 2021)

30 september 2021 | 119 min

Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle, "Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food" (Island Press, 2019)

27 september 2021 | 74 min

How can farmers adapt to climate changes? How can regenerative farmers have livelihoods that nourish themselves and their communities? How can we break free of the commodity mindset and rethink the US food system? Bob Quinn’s remarkable memoir of his decades living and working on a Montana farm offers unique insights into all of these pressing questions, with creativity, intelligence, and a healthy dash of humor.

Quinn is a farmer and sustainable business leader. He founded a regional mill for organic and heritage grains, an organic snack company, a biofuel business, Montana’s first wind farm, and Kamut International. Kamut, an ancient grain Quinn revived from a pint jar of seed found in a neighbor’s basement, is now grown on 100,000 acres of certified organic cropland and made into over 3,500 products worldwide.

In Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food (Island Press, 2019), co-written with Liz Carlisle, he shares the stories of these innovative projects. Through his narrative, Quinn offers readers an insightful ground-level look at the history of the organic food movement, as well as hope for the future.

Bob Quinn, PhD is a leading green businessman, with successful ventures in both organic agriculture and renewable energy. Raised on a 2,400 acre wheat and cattle ranch in Montana, Quinn earned a Ph.D. in plant biochemistry at UC Davis before coming home to farm in 1978. He served on the first National Organic Standards Board, which spurred the creation of the USDA’s National Organic Program, and has been recognized with the Montana Organic Association Lifetime of Service Award, The Organic Trade Association Organic Leadership Award, and Rodale Institute’s Organic Pioneer Award. Bob remains active in research, and has co-authored pioneering studies on the nutritional benefits of ancient grain.

Susan Grelock Yusem, PhD is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Laura Paskus, "At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate" (U New Mexico Press, 2020)

23 september 2021 | 58 min

Forces of Production, Climate Change, and Canadian Fossil Capitalism

22 september 2021 | 24 min

Gonzalo Lizarralde, "Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed" (Columbia UP, 2021)

22 september 2021 | 48 min

Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)

22 september 2021 | 45 min

Robin Globus Veldman, "The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change" (U California Press, 2019)

17 september 2021 | 68 min

Princeton UP's "Pedia" Series: Beautiful, Short Books About Big, Important Subjects

17 september 2021 | 32 min

Bruce Clarke, "Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

17 september 2021 | 73 min

Ann Vileisis, "Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish" (Oregon State UP, 2020)

15 september 2021 | 50 min

From rocky coves at Mendocino and Monterey to San Diego’s reefs, abalone have held a cherished place in California culture for millennia. Prized for iridescent shells and delectable meat, these unique shellfish inspired indigenous artisans, bohemian writers, California cuisine, and the popular sport of skin diving, but also became a highly coveted commercial commodity. Mistakenly regarded as an inexhaustible seafood, abalone ultimately became vulnerable to overfishing and early impacts of climate change.

As the first and only comprehensive history of these once abundant but now tragically imperiled shellfish, Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California’s Iconic Shellfish (Oregon State University Press, 2020) guides the reader through eras of discovery, exploitation, scientific inquiry, fierce disputes between sport and commercial divers, near-extinction, and determined recovery efforts. Combining rich cultural and culinary history with hard-minded marine science, grassroots activism, and gritty politics, Ann Vileisis chronicles the plight of California’s abalone species and the growing biological awareness that has become crucial to conserve these rare animals into the future.

Abalone reveals the challenges of reckoning with past misunderstandings, emerging science, and political intransigence, while underscoring the vulnerability of wild animals to human appetites and environmental change. An important contribution to the emerging field of marine environmental history, this is a must-read for scientists, conservationists, environmental historians, and all who remember abalone fondly.

About the author: Ann Vileisis is an award-winning independent scholar. Her books explore our human relationship with nature, food, and the environment through history, providing deeper perspective and insight into pressing modern-day issues. She is author of Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back and Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands. Vileisis has spoken about her books to audiences across America.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andy Hoffman, “Saving the World at Business School (Part 2)” (Open Agenda, 2021)

13 september 2021 | 141 min

Andy Hoffman “Saving the World at Business School (Part 1)” (Open Agenda, 2021)

10 september 2021 | 86 min

Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 september 2021 | 47 min

Ken Meter, "Building Community Food Webs" (Island Press, 2021)

8 september 2021 | 62 min

Stephen J. Pyne, "The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next" (U California Press, 2021)

8 september 2021 | 40 min

Emily O'Gorman, "Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin" (U Washington Press, 2021)

8 september 2021 | 47 min

Emma Marris, "Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

8 september 2021 | 55 min

Nayanika Mathur, "Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

7 september 2021 | 98 min

Arnab Dey, "Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

7 september 2021 | 80 min

Joanna Haigh, “Solar Impact: Climate and the Sun” (Open Agenda, 2021)

6 september 2021 | 113 min

Keith Pluymers, "No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

3 september 2021 | 59 min

Jessica Fanzo, "Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

3 september 2021 | 37 min

Camelia Dewan, "Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh" (U Washington Press, 2021)

3 september 2021 | 24 min

Climate change is one of the key challenges of our time and large amounts of development aid are allocated towards adaptation in the Global South. Yet, to what extent do such projects address local needs and concerns?

In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Camelia Dewan to discuss her latest book: Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press, 2021), and her fieldwork experience in Bangladesh. Vulnerable to floods, erosion and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Both an ethnography of Bangladeshi development professionals and rural people in the coastal zone, “Misreading the Bengal Delta” critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a "climate change victim". Dewan examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions.

Camelia Dewan is an environmental anthropologist focusing on the anthropology of development. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys, "Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

1 september 2021 | 47 min

Jemma Wadham, "Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 september 2021 | 35 min

Paul Sabin, "Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism" (Norton, 2021)

31 augusti 2021 | 46 min

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens’ movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions.

And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance’s secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations.

Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government’s ability to advance the common good.

Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrew Flachs, "Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India" (U Arizona Press, 2019)

27 augusti 2021 | 60 min

Kirsten A. Greer, "Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire" (UNC Press, 2020)

25 augusti 2021 | 53 min

Benjamin R. Cohen et al., "Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 55 min

Jonathan E. Robins, "Oil Palm: A Global History" (UNC Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 55 min

Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows in Oil Palm: A Global History (UNC Press, 2021), sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.

Jonathan E. Robins is Associate Professor of Global History at Michigan Technology University. He earned his PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 2010 and taught at Morgan State University before joining the faculty at Michigan Tech in 2012. He studies the histories of commodities and how they've reshaped societies, industries, and our planet. His first book, Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2016.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral student in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lee McIntyre, "How to Talk to a Science Denier" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 72 min

Alexander Menrisky, "Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

16 augusti 2021 | 80 min

Karen Sanctuaries: Memory, Biodiversity and Political Sovereignty

13 augusti 2021 | 27 min

Seeds, plants and food can act as repositories of memory and identity, thus countering the alienation caused by displacement. How does this manifest in the case of Karen refugee communities across the world holding on to a connection to their homeland in Myanmar? And how is the Karen people’s struggle for political sovereignty connected to global biodiversity and climate change issues? Terese Gagnon discusses these questions, as well as the role of the Karen territory as a biodiversity and political refuge, and how this has changed since the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021.

Terese Gagnon is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow on "Climate and Sustainability in Asia" at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University. Her dissertation is about Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty across landscapes of home and exile. She is co-editor of the book Movable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory.

Terese is in conversation with Quynh Le Vo, a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki, who has recently spent a month in virtual residency at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN covering environmental and development questions.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Margarita M. Balmaceda, "Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union" (Wilson Center, 2021)

13 augusti 2021 | 50 min

Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)

10 augusti 2021 | 48 min

Hillary Angelo, "How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

29 juli 2021 | 52 min

Michael G. Hillard, "Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry" (Cornell UP, 2021)

27 juli 2021 | 68 min

From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the nation in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production, however, the industry eventually slid toward failure. What happened? Shredding Paper unwraps the changing US political economy since 1960, uncovers how the paper industry defined and interacted with labor relations, and peels away the layers of history that encompassed the rise and fall of Maine's mighty paper industry.

Michael G. Hillard deconstructs the paper industry's unusual technological and economic histories. For a century, the story of the nation's most widely read glossy magazines and card stock was one of capitalism, work, accommodation, and struggle. Local paper companies in Maine dominated the political landscape, controlling economic, workplace, land use, and water use policies. Hillard examines the many contributing factors surrounding how Maine became a paper powerhouse and then shows how it lost that position to changing times and foreign interests.

Through a retelling of labor relations and worker experiences from the late nineteenth century up until the late 1990s, Hillard highlights how national conglomerates began absorbing family-owned companies over time, which were subject to Wall Street demands for greater short-term profits after 1980. This new political economy impacted the economy of the entire state and destroyed Maine's once-vaunted paper industry. Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry (Cornell UP, 2021) truthfully and transparently tells the great and grim story of blue-collar workers and their families and analyzes how paper workers formulated a folk version of capitalism's history in their industry. Ultimately, Hillard offers a telling example of the demise of big industry in the United States.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Renewable Energy Revolution in East Asia and the Nordics

26 juli 2021 | 40 min

The world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries.

In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assistant Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and coordinator of Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, moderates a discussion on the various barriers and opportunities countries in Asia and the Nordics face in trying to take advantage of this renewable energy revolution. He is joined by Paul Midford a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, in Yokohama, Japan, Espen Moe, a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and Eric Zusman, senior policy researcher and area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan.

The talk focuses on two new books: New Challenges and Solutions for Renewable Energy: Japan, East Asia and Northern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Midford and Moe, and Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia (Springer, 2021), edited by Zusman with Hooman Farzaneh and Yeora Chae.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael Moore, "We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

23 juli 2021 | 67 min

From the Archives: Building a Sustainable Future through Urban Governance with Dr Sophie Webber

22 juli 2021 | 24 min

With two megacities and strong economic growth, Indonesia has seen dramatic rates of rural-urban migrations. According to the World Bank, nearly 70 percent of Indonesia's population are expected to live in cities by 2045. While this transition has undoubtedly boosted the country's economic growth, it has also brought to the fore all the challenges that come with rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation. From traffic congestion to informal settlements, lack of clean water and waste management services, and widespread flooding, Indonesia's cities suffer significant human and economic costs, and are now highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change.

In 2020, Dr Sophie Webber spoke with Dr Natali Pearson about urban governance, and how urban resilience is being rolled out as a policy solution for cities such as Jakarta and Semarang in Indonesia, that are trying to adapt to the many shocks and stresses associated with urbanisation and climate change.

About Sophie Webber:

Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer, who conducts research about the political economies of climate change and international development assistance, principally in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. In particular, Sophie studies how 'truth' (knowledge claims and expertise), 'capital' (financial flows and investments), and policy packages structure relations between the minority and majority worlds. Methodologically, this research requires relational fieldwork, examining how climatological and developmental crises and problems are interpreted, storied, and managed, both by local and governmental authorities, as well as by distant international experts such as the World Bank. In 2020, Sophie was awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate the social, economic and environmental impacts of large-scale sand and water extraction to build protective infrastructure in vulnerable cities. Through a qualitative study of climate change hotspots in Indonesia and Fiji, this project will generate new knowledge about the potentials and limits of urban resilience infrastructure to protect cities against climate change.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stacia Ryder et al., "Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures" (Routledge, 2021)

20 juli 2021 | 34 min

Through various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures (Routledge, 2021) explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene - the current geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Every aspect of sustainability politics requires a close analysis of equity implications, including problematizing the notion that humans as a collective are equally responsible for ushering in this new epoch. Environmental justice provides us with the tools to critically investigate the drivers and characteristics of this era and the debates over the inequitable outcomes of the Anthropocene for historically marginalized peoples.

The contributors to Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene focus on a critical approach to power and issues of environmental injustice across time, space, and context--drawing from twelve national contexts: Austria, Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Nicaragua, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. Beyond highlighting injustices, the volume highlights forward-facing efforts at building just transitions, with a goal of identifying practical steps to connect theory and movement and envision an environmentally and ecologically just future. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners focused on conservation, environmental politics and governance, environmental and earth sciences, environmental sociology, environment and planning, environmental justice and global sustainability and governance. It will also be of interest to social and environmental justice advocates and activists.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Gina G. Warren, "Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement" (U Washington Press, 2021)

20 juli 2021 | 80 min

Guest Gina Warren discusses her newest book Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement, published May 2021 by University of Washington Press. Warren chronicles her experience in starting a backyard chicken flock from bringing home day old chicks, feeding and housing them, and eventually butchering and cooking them as meat. Rather than offering practical advice or a how-to-guide to raising chickens, Warren instead demonstrates thoughtful grappling with what it means to be an ethical eater in a capitalist society.

Warren’s journey with ethical eating begins as a vegetarian seeking alternative ways to acquire animal protein while causing the least amount of harm to animals and the environment and taking an active role in producing her own food. Warren states her mission clearly: “I chose to increase the overlapping territory in the Venn diagram between what I consume and what goods I can understand as part of a continuous process.” While raising a small flock of egg-laying chickens, Warren interrogates the industrial food system and the cruelties inflicted on poultry. However, Warren is also critical of the backyard chicken movement and the inequities in class privilege it can reveal. The Silicon Valley Tour de Coop brings up some complex paradoxes, revealing that the ability to raise chickens may be a product of privilege, and chicken zoning regulations are largely products of environmental racism and redlining. While raising animals and plants for food in urban areas can be a powerful act of undermining capitalism with agriculture, Warren points out many ways that these are still exclusive and incomplete actions. Similarly, in her chapter about dumpster diving for food to feed herself and her chickens, Warren acknowledges that being white, young, and female – “someone who doesn’t look like they need to be dumpster diving” - protects her in an encounter with the police.

Warren writes with unflinching and unsentimental candor about the end of the chickens’ lives when she teaches a small group of interested learners about humane butchering. Her respect for their lives and pragmatic gratitude for their deaths is moving. The final chapters explore the act of eating meat, and Warren describes some delicious sounding preparations of liver pate, chicken feet, and stir-fried intestines, as well as the pleasure and pride of preparing meals for friends and family that align with her ethical values.

Warren’s creative writing MFA and English PhD serve her well in blending narrative and research with a journalistic style that is accessible and entertaining while also mounting a well-supported critique of food systems.

Gina G. Warren writes about animals, the natural world, and human relationships for publications such as Orion, Creative Nonfiction, and Terrain.org. She raises a flock of chickens in her backyard.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nicoletta Batini, "The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet" (Island Press, 2021)

13 juli 2021 | 57 min

Aase J. Kvanneid, "Perceptions of Climate Change from North India: An Ethnographic Account" (Routledge, 2021)

12 juli 2021 | 31 min

Aase Kvaneid’s new book explores local perceptions of climate change through ethnographic encounters with the men and women who live at the front line of climate change in the lower Himalayas.

From data collected over the course of a year in a small village in an eco-sensitive zone in North India, this book presents an ethnographic account of local responses to climate change, resource management and indigenous environmental knowledge. Aase Kvanneid’s observations cast light on the precarious reality of climate change in this region and bring to the fore issues such as access to water, NGO intervention and climate information for farmers. In doing so, she also explores classic topics in the study of rural India including ritual, gender, social hierarchy and political economy. Overall, this book shows how the cause and effect of climate change is perceived by those who have the most to lose and explores how the impact of climate change is being dealt with on a local and global scale.

Aase J. Kvanneid is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Oslo.

She is in conversation with Professor Rita Braru, Senior Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Todd M. Kerstetter, "Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin" (Texas Tech UP, 2019)

9 juli 2021 | 62 min

From the Archives: Supporting Sustainable Farming Practices in Cambodia with Professor Daniel Tan

8 juli 2021 | 20 min

Improper pest management has led to significant yield loss in rice and other crop harvests in Cambodia, causing economic losses to farmers and environmental disruption through ill-informed chemical use. The use of broad-spectrum pesticides as a solution to all observed pests is commonplace in the rice and mung bean fields of lowland Cambodia and can be linked to unsuitable sources of agricultural information.

In 2020, Professor Daniel Tan caught up with Dr Natali Pearson over Zoom to chat about his lifelong work supporting sustainable farming practices in Cambodia, including through targeted capacity-building programs and the development of image-rich mobile phone applications to assist Cambodian farmers with insect pest identification and crop management.

About Daniel Tan:

Daniel is Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He is also the Country Coordinator for Cambodia at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and a member of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture, the Sydney Nano Institute, and the Charles Perkins Centre. Daniel’s research focuses on crop agronomy, specifically abiotic stress. He has conducted extensive research in Southeast Asia, including a very successful program that aimed to improve smallholder farmer livelihoods in Cambodia, with funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).

Daniel currently has collaborative research links at CSIRO Plant Industry (Narrabri), the University of Oxford, NSW Department of Agriculture, Applied Horticultural Research (Sydney), Texas A&M University (USA) the United States Department of Agriculture (Lubbock, Texas, USA) and ICRISAT, India. Daniel has been a member of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology (AIAST) since 1991. He is also on the Editorial Boards of the 'Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture' and 'Frontiers of Plant Science'.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kristin Poling, "Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

8 juli 2021 | 59 min

Jenny Price, "Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto" (W. W. Norton, 2021)

5 juli 2021 | 56 min

Yanzhong Huang, "Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

2 juli 2021 | 57 min

Popular discussions of China’s growth prospects often focus on the success or failure specific industries. They might address the challenges rising wages pose to the export manufacturing sector, or the emergence of the new data-fueled tech sector. But one of the most important determinants of a country’s long-run economic growth is human capital—the education and health of its people.

In Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State (Cambridge UP, 2020), Yanzhong Huang shows how China’s environmental problems have created a health crisis with long-run consequences. It then digs into the reasons why despite all the centralized power China’s leaders showed in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, these same leaders have found it difficult to address the country’s rampant air, water, and soil pollution. The institutional problems in the Chinese system highlighted by this book go far beyond the environmental sphere. This makes the book an excellent way to learn about the challenges China’s leaders face in any domain of policy implementation, whether it be pushing forward domestic economic reforms on their own initiative or implementing international agreements around trade and climate change.

Yanzhong Huang is a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, where he directs the school’s Center for Global Health Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

Recommendation from Professor Huang: The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID, by Lawrence Wright.

Recommendation from Peter Lorentzen: Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell’s Invisible China on the failure of China’s educational system to serve the majority of its population.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tyson Yunkaporta, "Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World" (HarperOne, 2021)

30 juni 2021 | 62 min

Although it is not described as such anywhere in the book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne, 2021) is indeed a systems-thinking book—one that offers a much-needed fresh perspective. Tyson Yunkaporta stands on the shoulders of who we should consider the original systems thinkers: Indigenous elders—the keepers & teachers of ancient knowledge—to show us that by “emphasizing community and connection over individualism and fragmentation—and by cultivating respect for the land—we can address the urgent challenges we face”.

Readers of systems literature will notice familiar themes such as non-linearity, complexity, cause-and-effect and the role of the observer in a system. Each chapter of this paradigm-shifting book starts with some yarning and 'sand talk'— invoking an Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. The table of contents is a beautiful compilation of Yunkaporta’s sand talk carving illustrations.

Tyson Yunkaporta offers that there is much to be learned from Indigenous 'knowledge systems', but expressses worry about borrowed ideas getting "tangled and twisted in marketplace of civilization"—and suggests that "symbiotic dances" must instead occur between Indigenous and non-Indigenous systems. The result of such an "interaction of multitude of agents in a sustainable system of emergent entities" could be positive and productive. Tyson Yunkaporta is an arts critic, and researcher—and a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. This is his first book.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Kevin is interested in complexity and paradox, and the power of systems thinking to help us understand and tackle the big messes humanity created and is now dealing with. Kevin has been an NBN host since July 2020.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Building Bridges Across the Seas: A Discussion of Australia-Indonesia Cooperation for the Preservation of Underwater Cultural Heritage

24 juni 2021 | 18 min

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, its waters home to hundreds, if not thousands, of shipwrecks. As maritime neighbours with both a common boundary and a shared history, protecting and preserving this maritime heritage is an important element of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In recent years, government agencies from both countries have cooperated to manage the wreck of HMAS Perth (I), an Australian warship sunk off the coast of Java in World War II. However, efforts to engage the next generation have been limited.

For this special episode, Dr Natali Pearson jumps on the other side of the mic and chats with Dr Thushara Dibley about her recent work building links between Indonesia and Australia to increase cooperation for the preservation of underwater cultural heritage. She notably discusses her recent initiative coordinating a capacity-building course in Indonesian maritime archaeology with funding from the Australia Indonesia Institute. Delivered through online learning modules and field site visits, the course brought together students from across the archipelago to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of managing and interpreting underwater cultural heritage in an Indonesian context, and paved the way for future cooperation across the seas to preserve the nation’s wealth of maritime histories.

About Dr Natali Pearson:

Natali is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney, where she is affiliated with the School of Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Natali is co-editor of Perspectives on the Past at New Mandala and a regular contributor to The Conversation and Inside Indonesia. Natali holds a PhD in Museum Studies (2019, USYD). Her new book, Belitung; The Afterlives of a Shipwreck, will be published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2022. You can follow Natali on Twitter @sea_greeny.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ecological Civilization: Chinese Dream or Global Strategy?

18 juni 2021 | 25 min

Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr, "A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

16 juni 2021 | 51 min

Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, "Wildness: Relations of People and Place" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

16 juni 2021 | 54 min

Katrinell M. Davis, "Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery" (UNC Press, 2021)

9 juni 2021 | 32 min

Ryanne Pilgeram, "Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West" (U Washington Press, 2021)

9 juni 2021 | 47 min

Joel Alden Schlosser, "Herodotus in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

27 maj 2021 | 53 min

Political Theorist Joel Alden Schlosser has turned his attention to Herodotus, an historian and political thinker from classical Greece, to learn how we might better think about and consider solutions to significant contemporary problems, especially those that contribute to global climate change. Schlosser explains that we are currently living in a new geologic and climatic age, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the current period where humans have had a direct effect on the geology and climate of the earth and the surrounding atmosphere. In finding ourselves in this new and potentially catastrophic period, we need to consider how to stop or solve this ongoing and evolving environmental crisis. Schlosser encourages us to turn out attention to Herodotus and his Histories, and he argues that these works, which dive into thinking about community and collective engagement, may provide guidance for contemporary politics and society. This is a fascinating structuring of reading Herodotus as an historian, examining his thinking and his critiques of Athens, of Persia, and of the political life and decisions that have been made by those in positions of power, and also in reading for guidance, to compel contemporary thinking in unanticipated ways. Schlosser centers his explication of Herodotus on the discussion of the nomoi, the informal cultures and traditions that make up our understanding of the fabric of political life, as well as the laws written by legislatures and that are more concrete. These nomoi are created by humans, to manage life. The nomoi contribute to the flourishing of society and should be designed to shift and adapt with time and circumstances. If the nomoi are not changed, they can become sclerotic, or corrupt and destructive of both humans and non-humans. This emphasis on fluidity is quite important to how we may want to craft our thinking in ways like Herodotus’s thinking.

Herodotus, as Schlosser notes, is a storyteller, and in the way that he tells stories, instead of writing factual histories like Thucydides, or making logical arguments like so many philosophers, Herodotus is able to engage in complexities of examples and of thinking. This mode of storytelling comes from older Greek traditions of the oral tales like those that Homer sang, or that the playwrights of Athens produced to communicate comedy and tragedy. This approach allows Herodotus to integrate not just the human experience, but also the experience of the non-human, all of the systems of energy that also exist and are natural, like the weather, the geography of a place, animals and other wildlife, diseases and illnesses. This weaving together of the human and the natural and non-human lays out a complexity of thinking and understanding that Schlosser suggests can be quite important for us to learn as we face complex natural, human, and non-human systems of energy that we need to repair or work collaboratively with in order to try to solve some of the more significant problems of the Anthropocene.

Herodotus in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an elegant argument that makes the case for Herodotus’s continued import, not just in the stories he tells, but in the way he grasps the world around him and how he discusses that world, of different systems of energy, and the complexities of these different entities. Herodotus, and Schlosser, compel us to broaden our ways of thinking and how we think, what we consider, and why.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Caterina Scaramelli, "How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey" (Stanford UP, 2021)

24 maj 2021 | 54 min

William D. Nordhaus, "The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World" (Princeton UP, 2021)

24 maj 2021 | 28 min

Deborah R. Coen, "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

21 maj 2021 | 51 min

David R. Boyd, "The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World" (ECW Press, 2017)

18 maj 2021 | 58 min

Climate Denialism and Propaganda with Catriona McKinnon

18 maj 2021 | 34 min

David Hardin, "Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint" (Belt, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 49 min

Michelle Nijhuis, "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction" (Norton, 2021)

12 maj 2021 | 68 min

Bret Gustafson, "Bolivia in the Age of Gas" (Duke UP, 2020)

3 maj 2021 | 52 min

Candace Fujikane, "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartography in Hawai'i" (Duke UP, 2021)

21 april 2021 | 64 min

Allison Cobb, "Plastic: An Autobiography" (Nightboat Books, 2021)

20 april 2021 | 60 min

R. Armstrong and R. Hughes "The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design" (Routledge, 2020)

19 april 2021 | 76 min

James Beattie, "Gardens at the Frontier: New Methodological Perspectives on Garden History and Designed Landscapes" (Routledge, 2019)

16 april 2021 | 32 min

Gardens at the Frontier: New Methodological Perspectives on Garden History and Designed Landscapes (Routledge, 2019) addresses broad issues of interest to architectural historians, environmental historians, garden writers, geographers, and other scholars. It uses different disciplinary perspectives to explore garden history’s thematic, geographical, and methodological frontiers through a focus on gardens as sites of cultural contact. The contributors address the extent to which gardens inhibit or further cultural contact; the cultural translation of garden concepts, practices and plants from one place to another; the role of non-written sources in cultural transfer; and which disciplines study gardens and designed landscapes, and how and why their approaches vary.

Chapters cover a range of designed landscapes and locations, periods and approaches: medieval Japanese roji (tea gardens); a seventeenth-century garden of southern China; post-war Australian ‘natural gardens’; iconic twentieth-century American modernist gardens; ‘international’ willow-pattern design; geology and designed landscapes; gnomes; and landscape authorship of a public garden. Each chapter examines transfers of cultural ideas and their physical denouement. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Timothy Beatley, "The Bird-Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats" (Island Press, 2020)

5 april 2021 | 56 min

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for over twenty-five years. His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with a special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He has published extensively in these areas, including the following books: Ethical Land Use; Habitat Conservation Planning: Endangered Species and Urban Growth; Natural Hazard Mitigation; and An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management.

In recent years much of his research and writing has been focused on the subject of sustainable communities and creative strategies by which cities and towns can reduce their ecological footprints, while at the same time becoming more livable and equitable places. His books that explore these issues include Biophilic Cities, Resilient Cities, and Blue Urbanism (Island Press).

In The Bird-Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats (Island Press, 2020), Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of approaches: public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, including: advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes.

Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lucas Bessire, "Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 april 2021 | 48 min

Katherine E. Standefer, "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life" (Little, Brown Spark, 2020)

30 mars 2021 | 40 min

Juno Salazar Parreñas, "Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation" (Duke University Press, 2018)

15 mars 2021 | 47 min

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflection on the work of care that draws on queer theory and feminist conceptions of welfare. By centralizing such rehabilitation efforts, the book reveals the contradictions inherent in such a system. The practice of rehabilitation, it shows, is underpinned by violence. Parreñas demonstrates the colonial origins of such an approach to conservation biology and how care within enclosures traps both humans and endangered primates alike. As such, we should urgently question how we could divest ourselves from the need for security that is dependent on cruelty and seek instead a decolonial era of co-existence which welcomes and finds joy in our moments of brief, mutual vulnerability.

In this conversation, we discuss models of orangutan care, coerced copulations, the concept of “arrested autonomy” and how we as a species could love better.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests centre on human-animal relations and the institution of environmental justice. This book received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize, biennially awarded by the Association for Feminist Anthropology for a first book as well as honourable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Prize, the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

For more on orangutans in Borneo, check out the following:

SSEAC Interview with conservation scholar Dr. June Rubis here.

NBN Interview with historian Prof. Robert Cribb here.

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or Twitter @laurelinarien.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kara M. Schlichting, "New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

9 mars 2021 | 50 min

Providing a fresh perspective is one of the biggest challenges for historians of New York City. Kara Murphy Schlichting, however, has managed to do just that in her recent book, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book shifts our gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City.

Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another. Residents of the Bronx in the nineteenth century organized groups like the Department of Street Improvements to ensure that their vision of urban expansion was realized, including implementing the grid-system to attract public and private investors from the urban core. Individuals along the East Bronx waterfront in the early-twentieth century similarly redefined the area according to their own wants and needs, converting temporary summer camp colonies into permanent bungalow communities outside, yet within reach, of Manhattan. By the 1930s, Robert Moses’ powerful State Parks Department, bolstered by New Deal and World’s Fair preparation funds, filled the natural marshlands of Flushing Meadows, connected Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx by constructing the Triborough Bridge, and lined area with new ‘modern’ recreational facilities. While differing in size and scope, each aforementioned case contributed to New York City’s conceptual and physical transition into a truly regional city.

Garrett Gutierrez is a Ph.D. Candidate of United States History at New York University. His research interests include urban/suburban history, race & ethnicity, informal economy, and youth subcultures.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Pey-Yi Chu, "The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

9 mars 2021 | 53 min

Tom Philpott, "Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

4 mars 2021 | 59 min

James Skillen, "This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West" (Oxford UP, 2020)

23 februari 2021 | 67 min

Decolonising Conservation Practices and Research: Seeing the Orangutan in Borneo with Dr June Rubis

18 februari 2021 | 25 min

Around the world, orangutans are widely recognised as an iconic species for environmental and wildlife conservation efforts. The rainforest in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is one of last remaining habitats of the nearly extinct Bornean orangutan. While conservation efforts have made the region a top priority for protecting orangutans, these efforts often sideline the indigenous peoples who live along the great apes.

Dr June Rubis speaks with Dr Natali Pearson about her lifelong work in orangutan conservation, and reflects on mainstream conservation narratives, politics, and power relations around orangutan conservation in Sarawak and elsewhere in Borneo. In describing the more-than-human relations that link the indigenous Iban people and endangered orangutans, Dr Rubis encourages us to rethink our relationship to the environment, and to learn from indigenous knowledge to decolonise conservation and land management practices.

June Rubis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Indigenous Environmental Studies of the Sydney Environmental Institute at the University of Sydney. She researches Indigenous conservation and land management practices from a decolonial perspective, with a particular focus on Malaysian Borneo. Her recent project has focused on the human-environment and human-animal relationships within the multi-scalar forces of conservation in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. She is a former conservation biologist, with twelve years of conservation fieldwork and Indigenous rights issues in Borneo (both Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo), and was born and raised in Sarawak. She is currently the co-chair of "Documenting Territories of Life" programme with the ICCA (Indigenous Communities Conserved Areas) consortium.

You can follow June on Twitter @JuneRubis.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anthony Warner, "Ending Hunger: The Quest to Feed the World without Destroying It" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)

9 februari 2021 | 39 min

Wade Davis, "Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia" (Knopf, 2020)

8 februari 2021 | 57 min

Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. In his new book Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia (Knopf, 2020), the bestselling author tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild.

Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life. At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace. Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country's most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.

Akash Ondaatje is a historical researcher focusing on the interconnected lives of humans and animals. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820. Contact: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ray Ison and Ed Straw, "The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency" (Routledge, 2020)

8 februari 2021 | 68 min

Emmanuel Kreike, "Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature" (Princeton UP, 2021)

25 januari 2021 | 82 min

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.

In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth-century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Dr. Emmanuel Kreike is a professor of history at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in African history from Yale University (1996) and a Dr. of Science (PhD) in Tropical Forestry from the School of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University (2006), the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of war/violence, population displacement, environment, and society.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

David Sepkoski, "Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

22 januari 2021 | 48 min

Ian M. Miller, "Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2020)

21 januari 2021 | 70 min

Chris Hamby, "Soul Full of Coal Dust: The True Story of an Epic Battle for Justice" (Little Brown, 2020)

14 januari 2021 | 36 min

Sharika D. Crawford, "The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making" (UNC Press, 2020)

12 januari 2021 | 68 min

Jemma Deer, "Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

8 januari 2021 | 44 min

Daniel A. Barber, "Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning" (Princeton UP, 2020)

6 januari 2021 | 62 min

Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design.

Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning (Princeton UP, 2020) provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Daniel A. Barber is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jonathan C. Slaght, "Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl" (FSG, 2020)

24 december 2020 | 38 min

The Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest living species of owl, with larger females of the species weighing as much as ten pounds. It lives in the Russian Far East and Northern Japan. It is also endangered: global populations are estimated to be around 1500 owls in total.

The story of one conservationist’s efforts to save these owls is told in Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2020), the first book by Jonathan Slaght. The book traces Jonathan’s many trips to the territory of Primorye in the Russian Far East, as part of his research into where the fish owls live and hunt. In the dead of the Russian winter, Jonathan and his Russian compatriots survey the forests, listen for fish owl duets, investigate nests and capture owls in an attempt to learn more about these creatures.

Jonathan Slaght is the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he manages research projects on endangered species and coordinates avian conservation activities along the East Asia–Australasian Flyway from the Arctic to the tropics. You can follow him on Twitter at @JonathanSlaght.

Owls of the Eastern Ice has won widespread acclaim, including being longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

In this interview, Joanthan and I discuss his research project, and how he turned it into a book. We also delve a little deeper into the ways we think about conservation, and what else needs to be done.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018)

18 december 2020 | 46 min

John Soluri and Claudia Leal, "A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America" (Berghahn, 2018)

17 december 2020 | 65 min

Louise M. Pryke, "Turtle" (Reaction Books, 2020)

16 december 2020 | 47 min

Nora Bateson. "Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns" (Triarchy Press, 2016)

16 december 2020 | 62 min

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

15 december 2020 | 31 min

Alex Alvarez, "Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)

15 december 2020 | 55 min

Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)

11 december 2020 | 59 min

Beating Plastic Pollution in Timor-Leste with Professor Thomas Maschmeyer

10 december 2020 | 17 min

As environmental emergencies go, the explosion of plastic waste is right up there. With global plastic production exceeding 300 million tonnes each year, the world has generally looked at it as an unsightly menace to be removed, but Professor Thomas Maschmeyer has gone beyond that idea. His work challenges our perceptions of waste, by turning plastic into an asset that people actively seek out to recycle because it can make them money. What he created might just clean up the planet and lift people out of poverty.

Professor Thomas Maschmeyer speaks to Dr Thushara Dibley about his ground-breaking work developing catalytic technology that can recycle any kind of plastic and turn it into a valuable resource, and how he is helping Timor-Leste become the world's first plastics-neutral country.

Professor Thomas Maschmeyer is Founding and Executive Chairman of Gelion Technologies (2015), Co-Founder of Licella Holdings (2007) and inventor of its Cat-HTRTM technology. He is also the Principle Technology Consultant for Cat-HTR licensee’s Mura Technologies and RenewELP. In 2001 he was one of the founding Professors of Avantium, a Dutch High-tech company. Most recently he was awarded Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation (2020) – Australia’s top prize in the field.

He concurrently holds the position of Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, where he established and leads the Laboratory of Advanced Catalysis for Sustainability and served as Founding Director of the $150m University of Sydney Nano Institute (2015–2018). In 2011 he was elected youngest Foreign Member of the Academia Europea as well as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) and, in 2014, of the Royal Society of NSW. In 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universities of Ca’Foscari Venice and Trieste in recognition of his scientific and societal contributions in chemistry.

He has authored 330+ publications, been cited 13,000+ times, including 24 patents. He serves on the editorial/advisory boards of ten international journals and received many awards, including the Le Févre Prize of the Australian Academy of Sciences (2007), the RACI Applied Research Award (2011), the RACI Weickhardt Medal for Economic Contributions (2012), the RACI R. K. Murphy Medal for Industrial Chemistry (2018) the Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science (2018), the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies’ Contribution to Economic Development Award (2019).

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Quito J. Swan, "Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice" (UP of Florida, 2020)

4 december 2020 | 98 min

Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020)

3 december 2020 | 60 min

Even before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975, Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time, unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, in Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically (Liveright, 2020), Singer brings together the most consequential essays of his career to make this devastating case against our failure to confront what we are doing to animals, to public health, and to our planet.

From his 1973 manifesto for animal liberation to his personal account of becoming a vegetarian in “The Oxford Vegetarians” and to investigating the impact of meat on global warming, Singer traces the historical arc of the animal rights, vegetarian, and vegan movements from their embryonic days to today, when climate change and global pandemics threaten the very existence of humans and animals alike. In his introduction and in “The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19,” cowritten with Paola Cavalieri, Singer excoriates the appalling health hazards of Chinese wet markets—where thousands of animals endure almost endless brutality and suffering—but also reminds westerners that they cannot blame China alone without also acknowledging the perils of our own factory farms, where unimaginably overcrowded sheds create the ideal environment for viruses to mutate and multiply.

Spanning more than five decades of writing on the systemic mistreatment of animals, Why Vegan? features a topical new introduction, along with nine other essays.

Written in Singer’s pellucid prose, Why Vegan? asserts that human tyranny over animals is a wrong comparable to racism and sexism. The book ultimately becomes an urgent call to reframe our lives in order to redeem ourselves and alter the calamitous trajectory of our imperiled planet.

One of the great moral philosophers of the modern age, Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. The best-selling author of Animal Liberation and The Ethics of What We Eat, among other works, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Melbourne, Australia.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rosemary-Claire Collard, "Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade" (Duke UP, 2020)

27 november 2020 | 86 min

Ray Ison, "Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World" (Springer, 2017)

25 november 2020 | 66 min

Amalia Leguizamón, "Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina" (Duke UP, 2020)

24 november 2020 | 62 min

Jim Mason, "An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature" (Latern Books, 2002)

24 november 2020 | 88 min

Michael Mascarenhas, "Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More" (Sage, 2020)

23 november 2020 | 42 min

Graciela Chichilnisky, "Reversing Climate Change: How Carbon Removals Can Resolve Climate Change and Fix the Economy" (World Scientific, 2020)

17 november 2020 | 52 min

Douglas Kelbaugh, "The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands and Overpopulation" (Routledge, 2019)

16 november 2020 | 42 min

Cities are one of the most significant contributors to global climate change. The rapid speed at which urban centers use large amounts of resources adds to the global crisis and can lead to extreme local heat. The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands and Overpopulation (Routledge, 2019) addresses how urban design, planning and policies can counter the threats of climate change, urban heat islands and overpopulation, helping cities take full advantage of their inherent advantages and new technologies to catalyze social, cultural and physical solutions to combat the epic, unprecedented challenges humanity faces.

The book fills a conspicuous void in the international dialogue on climate change and heat islands by examining both the environmental benefits in developed countries and the population benefit in developing countries. Urban heat islands can be addressed in incremental, manageable steps, such as planting trees and painting roofs white, which provide a more concrete and proactive sense of progress for policymakers and practitioners. This book is invaluable to anyone searching for a better understanding of the impact of resilient cities in the monumental and urgent fight against climate change, and provides the tools to do so.

For a 20% discount on the book, go here and enter "SOC19" at checkout.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

James Staples, "Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India" (U Washington Press, 2020)

9 november 2020 | 66 min

Thomas Fleischman, "Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall" (U Washington Press, 2020)

3 november 2020 | 58 min

S. Myers and H. Frumkin, "Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves" (Island Press, 2020)

30 oktober 2020 | 45 min

Micha Rahder, "An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation" (Duke UP, 2020)

30 oktober 2020 | 58 min

Michael Stamm, "Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

29 oktober 2020 | 68 min

Peter J. Thuesen, "Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather" (Oxford UP, 2020)

27 oktober 2020 | 51 min

Precariously Positioned: How Africa Must Balance Development with a Climate-Friendly Outlook

26 oktober 2020 | 29 min

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)

20 oktober 2020 | 66 min

Kristina M. Lyons, "Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics" (Duke UP, 2020)

19 oktober 2020 | 42 min

Kristin J. Jacobson, "The American Adrenaline Narrative" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

8 oktober 2020 | 58 min

Kristin J. Jacobson In her new book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780820356990" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The American Adrenaline Narrative</em></a> (University of Georgia Press), Kristin Jacobson considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability.

To explore these themes, Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary American environmental movement. The forty-plus years since that day also mark the rise in the popularity and marketing of many things as "extreme," including sports, jobs, travel, beverages, gum, makeovers, laundry detergent, and even the environmental movement itself.

Jacobson maps the American eco-imagination via adrenaline narratives, surveying a range of popular and lesser-known primary texts by American authors, including best-sellers such as Jon Krakauer's <em>Into Thin Air</em> and Aron Ralston's <em>Between a Rock and a Hard Place</em>. She also covers lesser-known novels as well as stories found in all types of media ranging from magazines, feature-length and short films, television shows, amateur videos, social media posts, advertising, and blogs.

Jacobson argues for recognizing adrenaline narratives as a distinctive genre because, unlike traditional nature, travel, and sports writing, adrenaline narratives sustain heightened risk or the element of the "extreme" within a natural setting. Additionally, these narratives provide important insight into the American environmental imagination's connection to masculinity and adventure––knowledge that helps us grasp the current climate crisis and see how narrative understanding provides a needed intervention.

<a href="https://blogs.stockton.edu/kristinjjacobson/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Kristin Jacobson</a> is a professor of American literature, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. She completed her Ph.D. at Penn State, her M.A. at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and her B.A. at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI.

<hr />

<em><a href="https://ulaval.academia.edu/CarrieLynnEvans" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Carrie Lynn Evans</a> is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.</em>

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020)

7 oktober 2020 | 62 min

Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) argues that one of the world's most famous natural attractions is not wholly natural but is an engineered landscape. Though the falls have been altered, it's designers seemingly found a balance between preserving its wonder and utilizing its power, MacFarlane argues.

The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power. By the end of the nineteenth century, the falls had drawn the attention of both Canadian and American industrialist who saw in its majesty a great potential for energy generation. Since the falls is located on the border, it provoked conflict and negotiations between these two countries over how much water could be drawn upon by each. Utilizing the falls for power generation provoked another conflict over the extent to which power generation might hinder the natural beauty of this thriving tourist attraction. These two conflicts—one about power the other about natural appeal— would continue into the twenty-first century.

The book unravels the details of these conflicts while at the same time drawing the readers' attention to the often unseen changes being made in, around, and behind the falls. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are those that explain technocrats' debates over, and explorations into, how water reduction might change the natural look of the falls. Exposing these engineered elements of Niagara encourages readers to reimagine this popular natural attraction, and others like it.

Jason L. Newton is a post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and the environment at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on capitalism and the environment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2000)

30 september 2020 | 41 min

Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019)

30 september 2020 | 69 min

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.

The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019) is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Thom van Dooren is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014) and coeditor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (Columbia, 2017).

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry, "La Batea" (Red Hook, 2017)

30 september 2020 | 63 min

La Batea is an unconventional book. A collaboration between anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and her photographer brother Stephen, it combines text and images to paint a picture of the lives of small-scale miners in Colombia in a unique and powerful way. Moreover, the book is physically designed to pull the reader into the topic. Cardboard covers, a specially-chosen paper, and carefully designed chosen fonts provide a unique experience which is topped off by the small piece of gold embedded in the cover.

In this episode of the podcast, Alex Golub talks with Stephen and Elizabeth Ferry about the design, photography, and text of this book. They also talk about the Kickstarter they ran to create the book, and their decision to produce both Spanish and English language versions that were affordable for local communities. Other questions include: What is it like to write a book with your sibling? How elemental a human experience is mining?

La Batea is available in English from Red Hook Publications and in Spanish from Icono Editorial.

Stephen Ferry is a non-fiction photographer who covers social and political change, human rights, and the environment. His books include I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli, 1999) and Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict (Umbrage/Icono, 2012). He has received grants and fellowships from the National Geographic Expeditions Council, the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation, among others.

Elizabeth Ferry is a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, with interests in value, materiality, mining, and finance, and with fieldwork emphases in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. Her books include Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Minerals, Collecting and Value Across the U.S.-Mexican Border (Indiana University Press, 2013).

Alex Golub is a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He studies gold mining in Papua New Guinea and is the author of the open access article "Mining" in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (Verso Books, 2020)

24 september 2020 | 54 min

Debjani Bhattacharyya, "Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

21 september 2020 | 64 min

Brian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019)

21 september 2020 | 52 min

Sue Stuart-Smith, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020)

18 september 2020 | 69 min

Sue Stuart-Smith, who is a distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener, offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it.

The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020) provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.

Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think.

Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans. Essential and pragmatic, The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives. It is also available as an audio book read by the author.

Sue Stuart-Smith, a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, took her degree in English literature at Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor. She worked in the National Health Service for many years, becoming the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire. She currently teaches at The Tavistock Clinic in London and is consultant to the DocHealth service. She is married to Tom Stuart-Smith, the celebrated garden designer, and, over thirty years together, they have created the wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020)

17 september 2020 | 65 min

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community.

You too are not who you are by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance, received from thousands of individuals as pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. As situations shift, so does your community’s capacity for learning, especially social learning, which allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes alone could adapt.

Becoming Wild brings readers close to the lives of non-human animals to show how other creatures teach and learn. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside portraits of various animals in their free-living communities, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. Readers are taken behind the curtain of life on Earth and asked to reckon with the most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Matthew Yglesias, "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger" (Portfolio, 2020)

8 september 2020 | 62 min

Karen Holl, "Primer of Ecological Restoration" (Island Press, 2020)

8 september 2020 | 51 min

Chantal Bilodeau, "Forward" (Tanlonbooks 2018)

3 september 2020 | 52 min

Brad Walters, "The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies" (UWI Press, 2019)

2 september 2020 | 69 min

Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

2 september 2020 | 51 min

Nathalie Peutz, "Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen" (Stanford UP, 2018)

31 augusti 2020 | 79 min

Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language.

Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press) shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state.

Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution.

Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.

Nathalie Peutz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Bjorn Lomborg, "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" (Basic Books, 2020)

25 augusti 2020 | 54 min

David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

21 augusti 2020 | 57 min

Amelia Moore, "Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas" (U California Press, 2019)

21 augusti 2020 | 44 min

Despite being a minor contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, like many other small island nations, The Bahamas’s ecology and society are especially vulnerable to current and expected changes to the oceans and the climate. Spectacular coral reefs, low-lying islands, and a social life oriented towards the sea makes The Bahamas a posterchild of the existential dangers of global warming. At the same time, The Bahamas’s economy, firmly founded on tourism, also heavily depends upon airline and cruise line fossil fuel consumption.

Wading into this nexus, Amelia Moore casts an ethnographic eye towards the scientists, conservationists, educators, politicians, fisherpeople, and tourism boosters who attempt to understand and react to an age of ecological volatility. In contrast to assumptions of scientific objectivity and independence, Moore finds that science, politics, and business are deeply entangled in ways that are not apolitical and which require scrutiny to make adaptations to climate change more democratic and equitable.

Through prolonged research on the islands and well-paired case studies, Moore illuminates the ways that such adaptations do, can, and might not have to reproduce the inequalities inherited from colonialism and the age of fossil fuels.

Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas (University of California Press) is a stellar example of the significance and role of humanistic – and specifically ethnographic – inquiry regarding how climate change has, is, and will change human and human-nonhuman relations. Well-written and theoretically sophisticated without heavy jargon, Destination Anthropocene is a joy to read and very well suited for use in the classroom.

Amelia Moore is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Coastal Tourism and Recreation in the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kerri Arsenault, "Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains" (Martin's Press, 2020)

20 augusti 2020 | 61 min

Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

11 augusti 2020 | 64 min

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision.

Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world.

Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here.

Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020)

10 augusti 2020 | 78 min

Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM)

7 augusti 2020 | 46 min

J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020)

6 augusti 2020 | 60 min

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world.

To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But in An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact.

As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale.

And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks.

In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Judkin Browning is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Appalachian State University and has written two military histories of the Civil War: Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (2011) and The Seven Days’ Battle: The War Begins Anew (2012).

Timothy Silver is Professor of History at Appalachian State University and the author of Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America and A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800, a foundational work in the field of environmental history.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Daniel P. Aldrich, "Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

5 augusti 2020 | 47 min

Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020)

29 juli 2020 | 64 min

At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and public policy to understand what physically has to happen to solve climate change, and served in the Massachusetts state legislature on a climate-focused platform.

In 2018 he canceled his campaign for re-election so he could work full-time on climate change at the national and global levels. The 100% Solution framework is a product of his political experiences, numerous meetings with technical experts and activists, and intensive research and analysis.

The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change (Melville House) is a highly visual book, with informative and whimsical illustrations drawn by Violet Kitchen, a visual artist, illustrator, and writer based in western Massachusetts. She currently splits her time between being a full-time art student and a part-time hermit, and is available for commissions and freelance work. Violet also got her start at a young age: her instructional manual Drawing Comics Is Easy, Except When It’s Hard, written and drawn at age seven, earned her the title of youngest ever Eisner Award nominee.

In this New Books Network interview, we speak about the political, industrial, and scientific changes that need to occur by 2050 to solve climate change, as well as the importance of focusing on real solutions rather than wallowing in fear.

Solomon Goldstein-Rose was elected to the Massachusetts legislature on a climate change-focused platform at age 22. He previously interned in the Obama White House and in Congress, and ran a statewide carbon pricing campaign. He lives in Amherst, MA. For more see: SolomonGR.com

Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

JoAnna Poblete, "Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa" (U Hawai’i Press, 2020)

28 juli 2020 | 67 min

Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020)

22 juli 2020 | 50 min

R. Sroufe and S. Melnyk, "Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value" (Business Expert Press, 2017)

17 juli 2020 | 51 min

Thaisa Way, "River Cities, City Rivers" (Dumbarton Oaks, 2018)

16 juli 2020 | 58 min

Kregg Hetherington, "The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops" (Duke UP, 2020)

14 juli 2020 | 63 min

Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020)

13 juli 2020 | 62 min

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not?

In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differences in climate policy-making . Mildenberger concludes that despite variation in policy preferences and governmental systems, business and labor interests have infiltrated the policy-making process to prevent governments from combating climate change with legislation.

Mildenberger argues that carbon polluters capture governments through “double representation” because carbon polluters are represented regardless of what political coalition holds power. On the left, polluters are represented by labor unions who fear that increased regulations mean a decrease in jobs. On the right, polluters are represented by corporations who associate increased regulations with decreasing profits. Mildenberger asserts that the versatility of double representation makes it the most important factor in climate policy conflict across advanced economies. To support his theory, Mildenberger uses case studies of Australia, Norway, and the United States. Looking at these countries, Mildenberger describes two methods through which business and labor interests affect climate policy. One, where business or labor interests are part of a larger political coalition and use their position to participate in the writing of legislation. This results in weaker legislation. Alternatively, if business and labor interests are shut out of the political process, Mildenberger details how they mobilize the public against legislation making it less politically beneficial to take action.

Mildenberger’s comparative analysis of carbon polluters and their influence on climate policy sheds new light on policy discrepancies around the world. Additionally, Mildenberger offers a guide for future policy makers to combat the double representation of carbon polluters.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Robert Sroufe, "Integrated Management: How Sustainability Creates Value for Any Business" (Emerald, 2018)

10 juli 2020 | 51 min

Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018)

7 juli 2020 | 84 min

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals.

Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of twentieth-century encounters—in North America, Europe, and Africa—between animals and human researchers working in a variety of fields, work we now recognize as belonging to the disciplines of evolutionary biology, anthropology, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and ethnomusicology.

Carefully attending to the value that was assigned to animal life in the lab and in the field, Mundy relates the story of how lives that were figured as non-human or less-than-human shape the received accounts of human and animal behavior in these disciplines. Crucially, the moral calculus that this research enacted has had lasting consequences for how all kinds of critical differences are figured in the contemporary postmodern humanities, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Not only a collection of diverse and deeply-researched vignettes into the ethics of research into animal musicality during the long twentieth century, Mundy’s book culminates in a powerful and timely call for a reappraisal of the “human” at the heart of humanities and the human sciences at large.

In this episode, we discuss the book and how it sketches the ambit of a notional field of the “animanities”: a new scholarly formation that problematises the long-standing reduction of life to a mere term in the exchange of animal vitality for human knowledge.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020)

30 juni 2020 | 60 min

Thomas C. Rust, "Watching over Yellowstone: The US Army's Experience in America's First National Park, 1886–1918" (UP of Kansas, 2020)

25 juni 2020 | 65 min

When, in 1883, Congress charged the US Army with managing Yellowstone National Park, soldiers encountered a new sort of hostility: work they were untrained for, in a daunting physical and social environment where they weren’t particularly welcome. When they departed in 1918, America had a new sort of serviceman: the National Park Service Ranger. From the creation of Yellowstone National Park to the conclusion of the army’s superintendence, Watching over Yellowstone tells the boots-on-the-ground story of the US troops charged with imposing order on man and nature in America’s first national park.

Yellowstone National Park had been created only fourteen years before Captain Moses Harris arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs with his company, Troop M of the First United States Cavalry, in August of 1886. And in those years, the underfunded, poorly supervised park had been visited freely by over-eager tourists, vandals, and poachers.

In Watching over Yellowstone: The US Army's Experience in America's First National Park, 1886–1918 (University Press of Kansas, 2020), Thomas C. Rust describes the task confronting Congress, military superintendents, and the common soldiers as the ever-increasing number of tourists, commercial interests, and politics stained the unruly park. At a time when the army was already undergoing a great transformation, the common soldiers were now struggling with unusual duties in unfamiliar terrain, often in unaccustomed proximity to the social elite who dominated the tourist class—fertile if uncertain ground for both the failures and the successes that eventually shaped the National Park Service’s ranger corps. What this meant for the average soldier emerges from the materials Rust consults: orders, circulars, inspection reports, court-martial cases, civilian accounts, and evidence from excavated soldier stations in the park. A nuanced social history from a rare ground-level perspective, his book captures an extraordinary moment in the story of America’s military and its national parks.

Rob Denning is Associate Dean for Liberal Arts at Southern New Hampshire University’s Global Campus. He received his Ph.D from The Ohio State University, where he researched environmental policymaking in California during Ronald Reagan’s terms as governor. Rob hosts Working Historians, a podcast about the various career opportunities open to students with history degrees. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DrRobHistory.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019)

24 juni 2020 | 31 min

Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017)

23 juni 2020 | 47 min

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

2 juni 2020 | 121 min

Jane Hutton, "Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements" (Routledge, 2020)

1 juni 2020 | 43 min

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present" (UNC Press, 2020)

28 maj 2020 | 62 min

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country.

The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiessen argues, such a vision of development was appealing to a broad range of actors: both the left(ish) Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, in power from 1952-1964, as well as the (often) right wing military governments that succeeded it, were deeply concerned with developing Bolivia through colonization of of the lowlands. Starting in the 1970s, however, as the state started to pull back from the day to day operations of such projects, it opened up space for NGOs and what Nobbs-Thiessen calls, "faith-based development practitioners," many of whom were connected to settler projects. Nobbs-Thiessen shows how each of these different communities came together after World War II, and each, for a time, came to play an important role in the development of Santa Cruz and the lowlands as a regional powerhouse in Bolivia and the Amazon region.

By situating Andean migrants and development practitioners alongside other subnational migratory communities, Nobbs-Thiessen offers an exciting contribution to Latin American Studies, Migration History, and Environmental History. Nobbs-Thiessen’s wide-ranging work is attuned to the dynamics of both settler colonialism and internal colonialism as forms of migration, and contributes to a body of literature that refuses to provincialize Bolivian history. Several chapters would work well as standalone, teachable articles: The book begins with a chapter exploring the imagined frontier, through pamphlets and films and ends with the growth of the Mennonite-dominated soy industry in the transborder Amazonian region some have called the United Republic of Soybeans. Nobbs-Thiessen’s Landscape of Migration offers important background for both the devastating wildfires of 2019 and the Santa Cruz-led uprising that overthrew president Evo Morales in the months that followed.

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg.

Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Adam M. Sowards, "An Open Pit Visible from the Moon" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)

21 maj 2020 | 34 min

Johan Elverskog, "The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia" (U Penn Press, 2020)

21 maj 2020 | 89 min

Toshihiro Higuchi, "Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis" (Stanford UP, 2020)

20 maj 2020 | 66 min

Betsy Gaines Quammen, "American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West" (Torrey House, 2020)

18 maj 2020 | 50 min

A. M. Barton and W. S. Keeton, "Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests" (Island Press, 2018)

14 maj 2020 | 70 min

Old-growth forests captivate and inspire us. Walking through them can transport us to a time before human domination of the natural world. This is especially the case with old-growth forests in the eastern part of the United States, a region with a long history of profound human disturbances of ecological regimes. Beyond their role as inspiration, old growth serves important ecological functions regionally and globally. These forests also provide several practical services to humans. How do scientists define old-growth forests? How can non-experts identify old forests and understand their importance locally and globally? These are some of the topics covered in Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests (Island Press, 2018) an anthology edited by Andrew Barton and William Keeton.

Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests (Island Press, 2018) is a perfect book for readers who want to learn the fundamentals of forest ecology and old growth in the east. Over thirty experts contributed to the book, writing chapters which range from the basics like defining and identifying old growth to more specialized subjects like the biological interactions below the forest floor. A large range of eastern forest types are covered, extending south from the boreal forest in central Canada to the bottomland hardwood forests and pine savannas of the American south. Those interested in human interactions with the forest through time will learn about Native American and Euro-American forestry. There are also chapters covering threats to old growth posed by invasive organisms.

This is not exclusively a book about regional environments as the latter chapters of Ecology and Recovery explain how old growth can help mitigate ecological problems in the United States and globally. There are chapters on the services that old growth provides, from improving stream quality to storing carbon. The authors also explain how old growth can be conserved and how forests can be managed to promote old-growth structures and features. The range of topics covered in the book is impressive and its relevance in a time of unprecedented ecological change should be clear.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Buildings" (Island Press, 2019)

12 maj 2020 | 57 min

Christian Wright, "Carbon County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West" (U Utah Press, 2020)

6 maj 2020 | 58 min

Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities" (Island Press, 2020)

29 april 2020 | 57 min

Chris Courtney, "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

28 april 2020 | 61 min

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

28 april 2020 | 60 min

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

A. B. Chastain and T. W. Lorek, "Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

23 april 2020 | 49 min

Emerging out of a 2016 conference, Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek have brought together Environmental History, Latin American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in a single volume that reshapes scholarly understandings of Latin America’s Long Cold War. Rather than emphasize diplomatic, social or cultural histories of conflict, this volume emphasizes the roles of “experts” who cast themselves as apolitical technocrats just working on the ground. Chastain and Lorek’s book argues that experts and the networks in which they traveled significantly shaped geopolitical agendas, local cultures, and were in fact central to the history of the Cold War.

The essays in Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) focus on Chile, Mexico, Cuba, and Peru, in order to explore how knowledge circulated regionally as well as locally and globally. Essay topics vary from the space race to the Green Revolution, and from the Santiago Metro to Ubre Blanca, Cuba’s most famous dairy cow. By focusing on itineraries rather than exchanges or knowledge transfers, the contributors emphasize the movement of technology, knowledge, and practice within the global south, and particularly decenter the United States from the Cold War narrative. With summative essays from such luminaries as Gil Joseph on Latin America’s Long Cold War, and Edin Medina and Mark Carey combining STS and Environmental Studies, this work will be of great use to graduate students, teachers, and scholars in all three fields. Other contributors include: Tore Olsson, Mary Roldán, Reinaldo Funes-Monzote, Steven Palmer, Thomas Rath, Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Hugo Palmarola, Mark Healey, Fernando Purcell, Emily Wakild, and Javiera Barandiarán.

Andra Chastain is an assistant professor of Latin American and world history at Washington State University Vancouver. Timothy Lorek is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jacob Blanc, "Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil" (Duke UP, 2019)

22 april 2020 | 51 min

Jacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) tells the story of the the Itaipu dam, a massive hydroelectric complex built on the Brazil-Paraguay border in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is structurally and conceptually ambitious, but so readable that it will fit well in both graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms. Blanc uses this story of a single megaproject to open up new questions about dictatorship, democracy, and the environment in Brazil through the analytic of rural visibility. Since Itaipu was the largest dam in the world and a physical embodiment of the military’s geopolitical ambitions, rural protests against the dam became a referendum on a dictatorship itself in ways that made rural Brazilians important political actors.

But, as Blanc argues, the dam project not only displaced forty thousand rural inhabitants, it made those inhabitants invisible as members of the national community. Blanc follows the stories of those displaced by this project, asking what the land meant to those who lived on it and ultimately lost it, even as the experience of mobilizing against dictatorship created new social movements that are crucial to understanding Brazil to this day. One of the most important contributions of the book is Blanc’s attention to the differing experiences of landed farmers, landless workers, and indigenous communities who all lived in the shadow of Itaipu. By privileging these stories, Blanc traces a long history of violence and repression in the countryside that the dictatorship heightened, but did not create itself. Before the Flood will be of interest to scholars of the environment, Latin America, and social movements globally.

Jacob Blanc is Lecturer in Latin American History at the University of Edinburgh and co-editor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands Between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, published in 2018 by the University of Arizona Press.

Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Union College, in Schenectady, NY.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren, "Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes" (Routledge, 2020)

21 april 2020 | 58 min

Jodi Hilty, "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation" (Island Press, 2019)

20 april 2020 | 55 min

Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020)

17 april 2020 | 52 min

Wenfei Tong's Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship and nest-building to protecting eggs and raising chicks. It delves into the reasons why some species, such as the wattled jacana, rely on males to do all the childcare, while others, such as cuckoos and honeyguides, dump their eggs in the nests of others to raise. For some birds, reciprocal promiscuity pays off: both male and female dunnocks will rear the most chicks by mating with as many partners as possible. For others, long-term monogamy is the only way to ensure their offspring survive.

The book explores the wide variety of ways birds make sure they find a mate in the first place, including how many male birds employ elaborate tactics to show how sexy they are. Gathering in leks to display to females, they dance, pose, or parade to sell their suitability as a mate. Other birds attract a partner with their building skills: female bowerbirds rate brains above beauty, so males construct elaborate bowers with twig avenues and cleared courtyards to impress them.

Looking at the differing levels of parenting skills across species around the world, we see why a tenth of bird species, including the fairy-wrens of Australia, have helpers at the nest who forgo their own reproduction to assist the breeding pair; how brood parasites and their hosts have engaged in evolutionary arms races; and how monogamous pairs share—or relinquish—their responsibilities.

Illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs, Bird Love is a celebration of the global diversity of avian reproductive strategies.

Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can find his personal website here, or on twitter here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

16 april 2020 | 57 min

Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015)

16 april 2020 | 50 min

K. Aronoff, et al., "A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal" (Verso, 2019)

14 april 2020 | 105 min

In early 2019, freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposed a bold new piece of legislation, now very well known as the Green New Deal. Intended as a means of combating climate change, it stunned a number of people due to its enormous ambition, including massive overhauls of our energy systems, as well as providing housing and healthcare for everyone. Naturally a piece of legislation this large raised a number of questions, which is what my guests today are here to discuss. I recently had the pleasure of talking with Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos, the authors of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso, 2019). The book is short and accessible, written for everyone interested in understanding this vital piece of legislation, so if you are like me and you don’t understand the fine details of climate economics, you can still pick this up and gain a sense of what is to be done. The book also features a short forward by Naomi Klein, who has been tracking the relationship between economic and climate politics for some time.

Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a Contributing Writer at the Intercept. She is the co-editor of We Own the Future and author of The New Denialism. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, In These Times, and Dissent

Alyssa Battistoni (@alybatt) is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and an editor at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared the Guardian, n+1, The Nation, Jacobin, In These Times, Dissent, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Daniel Aldana Cohen (@aldatweets) is an assistant professor of sociolgy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Nature, The Nation, Jacobin, Public Books, Dissent, and NACLA.

Thea Riofrancos (@triofrancos) is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, and is the author of Resource Radicals. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, n+1, Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dissent, and In These Times. She serves on the steering committee of DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

30 mars 2020 | 53 min

Joseph E. Taylor III, "Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast" (Oregon State UP, 2019)

26 mars 2020 | 51 min

George Perkins Marsh Prize winning environmental historian and geographer Joseph E. Taylor III's new book, Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Oregon State University Press, 2019), takes an innovative approach to the history of fisheries and work in the Pacific Northwest. Focusing on the Nestucca river valley, Taylor shows how nature, culture, markets, and technology affected the "callings," or identities, of residents from pre-colonial times to the very recent past.

The first chapter gives readers a sense of the Nestucca Native Americans who developed ceremonies that centered on the region's abundant diadromous salmon populations. After this chapter, the book leaps to the second half of the nineteenth century when settler-colonists exterminated and removed Indians and began farming. Taylor shifts attention away from itinerate wage workers as the primary source of labor in the Pacific Northwest and centers his analysis instead on the families who took to the ocean as one of a number of economic survival strategies. After 1927, fishing in Nestucca slowly transformed from a subsistence activity to a form of recreation for tourists. The tourist were incursions in Nestucca but also a source of revenue for locals.

Using oral histories as evidence, Taylor spends a lot of time describing the minutia of fishing work; its physicality, technological stagnation, and its dangers. These details expose workers' connections to the landscape, connections which shaped their identities. The short book is a vital addition to environmental studies because of the way that Taylor seamlessly integrates environmental history into the history of one community. His method shows how and why environmental factors should be a part of all historical narratives.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sara Hughes, "Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto" (Cornell UP, 2019)

25 mars 2020 | 53 min

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2020)

9 mars 2020 | 81 min

Jerome Whitington, "Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower" (Cornell UP, 2018)

6 mars 2020 | 42 min

Steven Higashide, "Better Buses, Better Cities : How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit" (Island Press, 2019)

2 mars 2020 | 49 min

Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town" (UNC Press, 2016)

28 februari 2020 | 33 min

Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston--from Monsanto's founders, to white and African American activists, to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

25 februari 2020 | 42 min

Stephanie Kaza, "Green Buddhism: Practice and Compassionate Action in Uncertain Times" (Shambhala, 2019)

20 februari 2020 | 66 min

Robert Frank, "Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work" (Princeton UP, 2020)

17 februari 2020 | 29 min

Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street―our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier cars, and engaging in a host of other activities that threaten the planet―mainly because that's what friends and neighbors do.

In the wake of the hottest years on record, only robust measures to curb greenhouse gases promise relief from more frequent and intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and famines. In Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work (Princeton UP, 2020), Robert H. Frank describes how the strongest predictor of our willingness to support climate-friendly policies, install solar panels, or buy an electric car is the number of people we know who have already done so. In the face of stakes that could not be higher, the book explains how we could redirect trillions of dollars annually in support of carbon-free energy sources, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone.

Most of us would agree that we need to take responsibility for our own choices, but with more supportive social environments, each of us is more likely to make choices that benefit everyone. Under the Influence shows how.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019)

7 februari 2020 | 45 min

Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019)

5 februari 2020 | 43 min

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

30 januari 2020 | 40 min

Salvador Salinas, "Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920-1940" (U Arizona Press, 2018)

29 januari 2020 | 44 min

Leah Stokes, "Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy" (Oxford UP, 2020)

28 januari 2020 | 47 min

Anna M. Gade, “Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations” (Columbia UP, 2019)

24 januari 2020 | 56 min

Astrid M. Eckert, "West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands" (Oxford UP, 2019)

22 januari 2020 | 63 min

J. L. Anderson, "Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

21 januari 2020 | 59 min

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with J. L. Anderson about the 2019 book Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America published by West Virginia University Press. Anderson provides a history of pigs in America from the first arrival on the continent in the Columbian Exchange to the modern agribusiness of pork production, describing how we have “remade” the animal through breeding, feeding, medicating, legislating, and housing hogs. Despite the contemporary association between pork and the American South, Anderson describes how the centers of pork production and consumption have moved throughout American history in response to market changes, technological innovations, and transportation networks. The diet and housing of pigs has also evolved over time from seasonal free-range foraging in wooded areas (or even urban streets) to living in climate-controlled concrete pens and a non-seasonal diet. Similarly, Anderson describes how the place of pork in the hierarchy of edible meats changes over time. Colonial Americans largely adopted the English meat hierarchy of beef, mutton, and pork, with pork reserved for the working class and enslaved people. Though pork has replaced mutton in popularity, pork has always maintained its reputation as working people’s food. The later chapters of Capitalist Pigs argue that 20th-century Americans’ fear of fat resulted in a dramatic change in the body shape and biological make-up of the modern hog to invent a leaner “white meat.” Ironically, while the industry provided what it thought the market wanted, consumers didn’t change their pork eating habits that much, as the leaner pork was generally a much less desirable product. Trimming the fat from pork has led to the unexpected desirability of fattier cuts like bacon and pork belly in fine dining and the resurgence in “heritage breeds” of pigs with higher fat content. Anderson concludes by discouraging historians from interpreting the story of hogs in America as a success story of “transcending limits” in science, agriculture, and economics. “In short,” Anderson writes, “the success of pigs, pork, producers, and processors is not the whole story.”

Joe Anderson is Associate Dean of Research, Scholarship and Community Engagement and history professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Dr. Anderson teaches a variety of courses from food and diet to the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Joe’s professional experience as a museum educator and administrator has led to a continuing interest in public history, and his recent projects have focused on the history of rural America, particularly as it relates to technology and the environment in the midcontinent. Joe is the past president of the Agricultural History Society and a member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Josh Reno, "Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness" (U California Press, 2019)

17 januari 2020 | 77 min

Alice Hill, "Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption" (Oxford UP, 2019)

10 januari 2020 | 44 min

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further warming may prove to be staggering.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption (Oxford University Press, 2019), edited by Alice C. Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, this pragmatic guide focuses on solutions-some gradual and some more revolutionary-currently being deployed around the globe. Each chapter presents a thematic lesson for decision-makers and engaged citizens to consider, outlining replicable successes and identifying provocative recommendations to strengthen climate resilience.

Between animated discussions of ideas as wide-ranging as managed retreat from coastal hot-zones to biological approaches for resurgent climate-related disease threats, Hill and Martinez-Diaz draw on their personal experiences as senior officials in the Obama Administration to tell behind-the-scenes stories of what it really takes to advance progress on these issues. The narrative is dotted with tales of on-the-ground citizenry, from small-town mayors and bankers to generals and engineers, who are chipping away at financial disincentives and bureaucratic hurdles to prepare for life on a warmer planet. For readers exhausted by today's paralyzing debates on yearly "fluke" storms or the existence of climate change, Building a Resilient Tomorrow offers better ways to manage the risks in a warming planet, even as we work to limit global temperature rise.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

8 januari 2020 | 45 min

C. J. Alvarez, "Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide" (U Texas Press, 2019)

3 januari 2020 | 61 min

Recent debates over the building of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico divide have raised logistical and ethical issues, leaving the historical record of border building uninvoked. A recent book, written by UT Austin professor Dr. C.J. Alvarez, offers an over one-hundred-year history that extends to before the building of a border wall in 1990. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide (UT Press, 2019) recounts the history of how both US and Mexican government agencies surveyed, organized, and operationalized land and water from 1848 until 2009. By centering the relationship between government agencies and border policing, Alvarez clearly shows how construction and manipulation of the border space’s natural features maintained the political and geographical form of the nation-state, how it reproduced the notion of the border space as something needing to be controlled and dominated, and how it transformed the border space into one of economic possibility and growth.

The history of construction and hydraulic engineering on the divide is largely about the opposing forces of border building to keep certain people and things out, and border building to let certain things in. Alvarez lays bare this tension between tactical infrastructure and trade infrastructure both as forces that have organized border life. During the 1960s and 70s, “the ports of entry began to embody the ever-deepening contradictions embedded in policies designed to accelerate sanctioned economic exchange on the one hand while seeking to decelerate black market commerce on the other,” Alvarez writes (143). By the turn of the 21st century, Alvarez argues, most of the police construction on the border was designed to manage the negative effects of previous building projects and policies. In regards to the completion of the 2009 border fence, Alvarez writes, “It was overbuilding designed to compensate for an unsustainable immigration system, unsustainable ‘drug wars,’ and an unsustainable politics of scapegoating noncitizens. Far more successful at achieving its stated goals, however, was the infrastructure of cross-border commerce” (222).

Dr. Alvarez utilizes extensive government records from the binational agency International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC)/ Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas (CILA), records from Army Corps of Engineers, the INS, and the prodigious W.D. Smithers photograph collection from the Harry Ransom Center. The number of photographs included in the manuscript shows the vastness of the US-Mexico divide's natural landscape, shows how agencies attempted to make sense of such vastness, and shows what they constructed. Border Land, Border Water is a must-read for historians of the US-Mexico divide, environmental historians, and anyone interested in better understanding from a historical perspective current calls construction on the border.

Dr. Alvarez, “Chihuahuan Desert History” School for Advanced Research Colloquium Talk

Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

E. Wakild and M. K. Berry, "A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2018)

31 december 2019 | 53 min

Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America" (Princeton UP, 2019)

30 december 2019 | 31 min

M. Schneider-Mayerson and B. R. Bellamy, "An Ecotopian Lexicon" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

27 december 2019 | 46 min

Jim Rossi, "Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper" (2019)

24 december 2019 | 38 min

Darius Sollohub, "Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession" (U Texas Press, 2019)

24 december 2019 | 52 min

Hunter Vaughan, "Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies" (Columbia UP, 2019)

11 december 2019 | 64 min

Michael R. Boswell, "Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities" (Island Press, 2019)

6 december 2019 | 50 min

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

3 december 2019 | 58 min

Sarah Marie Wiebe, "Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley" (UBC Press, 2016)

29 november 2019 | 45 min

Kate O'Neill, "Waste" (Polity, 2019)

26 november 2019 | 45 min

Helen Rozwadowski, "Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans" (Reaktion Books, 2018)

15 november 2019 | 33 min

Penelope Plaza Azuaje, “Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate" (Routledge, 2018)

15 november 2019 | 35 min

Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas" (U Washington Press, 2019)

12 november 2019 | 101 min

Michael E. Mann, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars : Dispatches from the Front Lines" (2012)

11 november 2019 | 41 min

Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019)

4 november 2019 | 43 min

In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate change also requires that we rethink the concept of energy itself. Although a seemingly self-evident and natural scientific object, the idea of energy that informed the development of fossil fueled capitalism is a surprisingly modern invention. In the 19th century, as tinkerers sought to explain mystical steam power, they rehashed this ancient word to conceptualize limitless potential and ceaseless expansion. Daggett demonstrates that not only did this new abstraction explain and empower novel technologies and fields of physics, but also became an ideological fulcrum with which to describe and proscribe the emerging societies of industrial capitalism. The harnessing of energy and maximizing its efficiency became not only the principles of mechanical engineering, but also of workplace organization and worker discipline. At home, energy served as a measure of virtue, self-control, and good citizenship; and abroad agents of empire used it to inculcate colonized peoples with those values and habits of supposed modernity. The historical knotting together of virtue, labor, and fossil fuel power – argues Daggett – means that reimagining the role of energy in society requires a fuller transformation of the politics of work.

Cara New Daggett is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Elena Past, "Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human" (Indiana UP, 2019)

4 november 2019 | 65 min

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

3 november 2019 | 39 min

David Biggs, "Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam" (U Washington Press, 2018)

31 oktober 2019 | 73 min

By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University of California, Riverside, specializes in Vietnamese environmental history. In Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes of Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2018) he examines the impacts of warfare in the region around Hue in central Vietnam. Using cutting edge methodology drawn from GIS (graphic information system), aerial photography, and more traditional archival documents, Biggs finds legacies of war in the soil, water, and rain forests.

Starting with 14th-century battles between the Cham states and the invading Viet and continuing through the Ming Dynasty’s occupation in the early 1400s, the Tayson Rebellion (1771-1802) and the French colonial occupation from the 1880s to 1954, Biggs argues for an important pre-history of wars prior to the American War of the 1960s to January, 1973. The book ends with the American military machines “creative destruction” and a discussion of the toxic war remnants that pollute former battlefields and military bases. Linking environmental history to social, military, and political history, Footprints of War excavates the layers of history that make up the landscape of central Vietnam. Our conversation about the book reveals his deep understanding of Vietnamese culture and his original conceptualization of the meaning of war in the country.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, he can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

24 oktober 2019 | 33 min

Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019)

24 oktober 2019 | 46 min

With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowing with the forms of modernity that now threaten to destroy them. Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke UP, 2019) traces the work and lives of two iconic coral photographers of the interwar period – Frank Hurley and J.E. Williamson – who introduced Western audiences to (respectively) the Great Barrier Reef off Australia and the reefs off the Bahamas. Both self-fashioned men of science and entertainers with an eye for spectacle, Hurley and Williamson not only brought the “flowers of the sea” into consumer life, but also tethered them to the tropical exoticism that underpinned colonialism, racism, and the domination of nature. For audiences in Australia, Europe, and the US, their photographs primed postwar consumption of tropical nature through tourism and entertainment. By unweaving how these images were produced, Elias illustrates that how we know the sea is deeply entwined with the values, ethics, and logics of human politics.

Ann Elias is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Contemporary Global Art at the University of Sydney.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrew C. Baker, "Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

18 oktober 2019 | 56 min

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

18 oktober 2019 | 37 min

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

15 oktober 2019 | 35 min

While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmopolitan position is in truth a provincial one limited to privileged circles in the Global North. In Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019), she instead elucidates how among post-colonial peoples of the Pacific and Caribbean, who are among the first to suffer the uncompromising rise of sea levels, global warming is not so much a rupture of stability as an impending cataclysm that follows a long history of others. With an eclectic array of allegorical artworks -- including sculptures by Dominican artist Tony Capellán, novels by Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber, and poems from Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Kamau Brathwaite -- DeLoughrey traces how island artists make sense of anthropogenic climate change while continuing to critique the legacies of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism. DeLoughrey also highlights subjectivities of relatedness with the earth and its non-human beings that may provide antidotes to the extractive logics that have clogged the skies with CO2. Stressing the ways that global warming and empire are mutually constitutive, DeLoughrey confirms the critical importance of allegorical art and literature from the Global South in interpreting our unfolding crisis.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

David D. Vail, "Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945" (U Alabama Press, 2019)

15 oktober 2019 | 39 min

Michitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018)

11 oktober 2019 | 83 min

Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019)

10 oktober 2019 | 52 min

Stephen Hamnett, "Planning Singapore: The Experimental City" (Routledge, 2019)

7 oktober 2019 | 54 min

Don Kulick, "A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea" (Algonquin Books, 2019)

7 oktober 2019 | 55 min

Nancy Langston, "Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World" (Yale UP, 2017)

1 oktober 2019 | 60 min

When people today visit or imagine Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, they often perceive a cold, remote, and pristine body of water, relatively untouched by industrialization. Yet, Lake Superior has experienced substantial environmental change—including today’s impressive but incomplete ecological recovery—in its existence, especially over the last 150 years. So argues the renowned environmental historian Nancy Langston in her latest book, Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale University Press, 2019). An interdisciplinary scholar to her core, Langston ushers her training in science and history to tell a story of industrial development, ecological change, toxic pollution, and environmental injustice—and yet also one of ecological and human resilience. Much like the topic of her study, Langston moves fluidly across various political jurisdictions, from states and provinces, to national governments and international agreements, to First Nations and tribal territories. In so doing, she gives voice to a host of actors, including indigenous peoples (past and present), corporate executives and technicians in the pulp and paper and mining industries, government regulators and engineers, environmentalists, scientists, environmental justice activists, politicians, union workers, and many others. Sustaining Lake Superior illustrates the promises and limitations of ecological and human resilience, the inseparability of the local from the global, and the ongoing relevance of history for responding some of the most urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice.

Nancy Langston is Distinguished Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University.

Joshua Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. His research focuses on the intertwined histories of conservation, industry, and the state in the twentieth-century United States. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Timothy LeCain, "The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

30 september 2019 | 67 min

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017) presents a path-breaking approach to the study of the environment and history. In it LeCain argues that humans are inseparable from the material world around them. Living and non-living "things" not only deserve their own histories, according to LeCain, but the history of humans cannot be told without recognition of the autonomy of material things. LeCain’s neo-materialist agenda merges S.T.S. and environmental history, and calls for scholars to consider writing histories of the world in toto.

More than just explaining his approach, LeCain employs it in three case studies, one on longhorn cattle in the American west, another on Japanese silkworms, and finally a history of the copper atom. Viewing the material world as inseparable from humans leads LeCain to challenge the idea of the Anthropocene, suggesting that the term gives humans too much credit. People, according to LeCain can do little without the material things that surround them. Current climatic changes were not solely caused by "anthropo," or humans, but the cause lies with humans working with material things like carbon. Moreover humans cannot solve the problem of climate change without utilizing the unique material properties of the living and non-living world in which they are completely and perpetually embedded within. The Matter of History is an important work for the present moment and is sure to shape future discourse on humans and the environment.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950," is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment and tweets @Jason_L_Newton.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Dolly Kikon, "Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India" (U Washington Press, 2019)

25 september 2019 | 57 min

Kenneth Olwig, "The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice" (Routledge, 2019)

13 september 2019 | 65 min

Joy McCann, "Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean" (U New South Wales Press, 2018)

13 september 2019 | 36 min

Bathsheba Demuth, "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" (W. W. Norton, 2019)

10 september 2019 | 54 min

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years.

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019) breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans―the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia―before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?

Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history.

Bathsheba Demuth is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. As an environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has lived in Arctic communities from Eurasia to Canada. Demuth has a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University, and an M.A. and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Steven Seegel (NBN interviewer) is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, "Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

10 september 2019 | 40 min

This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer about their separate volumes, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In this interview, I talk to both authors together about their experiences with collaborative research and writing, and about the wider significance of their scholarship.

Ecologics and Energopolitics follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Dominic Boyer, "Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

3 september 2019 | 45 min

This is the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Dominic Boyer’s Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) and its partner volume, Ecologics, by Cymene Howe, follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind development in Mexico to think through how the energy and environmental crises of global warming require new approaches to political theory. Following the windmills upstream from farmers’ fields to regional and national capitals and overseas to international investors and green energy corporations, Boyer provides a unique, full picture of the participants, negotiations, and conflicts involved. In doing so, he arrives at a compelling description of how new energic infrastructures are reshaping political experience.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Erik Loomis, "Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

30 augusti 2019 | 41 min

Cymene Howe, "Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019)

27 augusti 2019 | 44 min

This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my interview with Boyer about his volume, Energopolitics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Cymene Howe’s Ecologics and its partner volume, Energopoltics by Dominic Boyer follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Boyer and Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Ecologics, Howe examines the aborted Mareña Renovables wind park to understand the resistance of indigenous residents to renewable energy development and to analyze the consequences of their exclusion from the decisions that impact their lives. Howe further argues that a full accounting for the dynamics of energy development and its consequences cannot be achieved without including the nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and geophysical forces that shape and are shaped by wind power.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael Kodas, "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

23 augusti 2019 | 53 min

Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha, "Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management" (Routledge, 2017)

15 augusti 2019 | 53 min

Juan Javier Rivera Andía, "Non-Humans in Amerindian South America" (Berghahn, 2018)

12 augusti 2019 | 61 min

Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister, "Projective Ecologies" (HGSD, 2014)

9 augusti 2019 | 58 min

Stefan Al, "Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies" (Island Press, 2018)

5 augusti 2019 | 53 min

Sandra L. Albro, "Vacant to Vibrant: Creating Successful Green Infrastructure Networks" (Island Press, 2019)

30 juli 2019 | 45 min

David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018)

26 juli 2019 | 58 min

Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros, "Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)

17 juli 2019 | 39 min

Laura Alice Watt, "The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore" (U California Press, 2016)

16 juli 2019 | 78 min

Chika Watanabe, "Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)

15 juli 2019 | 61 min

Jakobina Arch, "Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan" (U Washington Press, 2018)

11 juli 2019 | 58 min

Douglas Sheflin, "Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

10 juli 2019 | 52 min

Pankaj Sekhsaria, "Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story" (HarperCollins India, 2017)

9 juli 2019 | 59 min

Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

28 juni 2019 | 33 min

David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

24 juni 2019 | 34 min

David Karol, "Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

21 juni 2019 | 35 min

Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019)

24 maj 2019 | 43 min

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a failure. Rather, Günel explores the interconnected social, technical, and political ramifications and adaptations involved in this attempt to design a potential fossil fuel-free future. She shrewdly criticizes the limitations of climate change strategies intended to protect the political economic status quo. Yet also, through deep ethnographic fieldwork with participants, Günel demonstrates the valuable role of anthropological insight in social and technological adaptations to a changing climate.

Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rosalyn LaPier, "Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet" (U Nebraska Press, 2017)

16 maj 2019 | 59 min

James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

24 april 2019 | 69 min

E. MacDonald et al., "Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016)

22 april 2019 | 112 min

Kristin L. Hoganson, "The Heartland: An American History" (Penguin, 2019)

22 april 2019 | 93 min

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)

18 april 2019 | 51 min

Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

4 april 2019 | 48 min

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreens. In his excellent new book The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Robert A. Voeks explains that while rainforests may indeed have much to offer in the way of medically useful compounds, the fanfare for tropical miracle medicines and superfoods has been largely in err, counterproductive, and at times prejudicial.

The jungle medicine narrative – the idea that indigenous shamans of the virgin rainforst hold the antidotes to many of humankind’s most pernicious woes – grew widespread in the 1970s after childhood leukemia was all but cured with the Madagascar periwinkle. But the subsequent efforts of pharmaceutical companies to accelerate innovation through bioprospecting had a much deeper historical precedent. Christopher Columbus earmarked West Indian medicinal plants on his first voyage and European imperialists attempted to more systematically appropriate native medical knowledge though the Enlightenment. By tracing this long colonial history, Voeks emphasizes that the hype of the last 50 years has been mostly just that; rather than reflecting the advancement of science, the jungle medicine narrative derives instead from racial ideologies in which indigenous peoples are associated with wild, virgin nature. It is little surprise, then, that blockbuster drugs have proven allusive. If the profits of appropriating medical knowledge have been overblown, so too, writes Voeks, has been the criticism. Examples of exploitative biopiracy can be found, but these are exceptions in what are mostly more complex and dynamic interactions between researchers and healers.

We have much to gain from abandoning the jungle medicine narrative. Without its simplicities, stereotypes, and essentialisms perhaps we can come to a better appreciation the variety of ways that humans make knowledge about the natural world and without its promises of panaceas perhaps we can better understand how this knowledge has and can yet sustain communities in the face of environmental and political changes.

Robert A. Voeks is Professor of Geography and the Environment at California State University, Fullerton.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

K. Kennen and N. Kirkwood, "Phyto: Principals and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design" (Routledge, 2015)

22 mars 2019 | 53 min

Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019)

21 mars 2019 | 42 min

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

19 mars 2019 | 32 min

Kate Ervine, "Carbon" (Polity, 2018)

12 mars 2019 | 51 min

Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

8 mars 2019 | 48 min

Global Oil and Social Change with Leif Wenar

5 mars 2019 | 29 min

Nicole Walker, "Sustainability, A Love Story" (Ohio State UP, 2018)

22 februari 2019 | 55 min

Nicholas Breyfogle, "Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

15 februari 2019 | 46 min

Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018)

29 januari 2019 | 51 min

Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018)

29 januari 2019 | 74 min

Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment" (Columbia UP, 2018)

24 december 2018 | 65 min

Judd C. Kinzley, "Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

20 december 2018 | 59 min

Hannah Holleman, "Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism" (Yale UP, 2018)

17 december 2018 | 60 min

None of the climate news that we’re getting is good right now, especially now that a number of governments are reversing or failing to meet commitments they made as part of the Paris Climate Accord. One of the challenges facing human societies and the planet is the issue of aridification. As freshwater is depleted and unsustainable agricultural practices place more stress on soil than can be supported, an increasing amount of land is being lost to erosion, a process that will only become worsen as the planet heats up in the coming decades. Despite plentiful information and awareness, most of the solutions that have been offered up have failed to meaningfully stop the damage being done to the planet.

In Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2018), Hannah Holleman looks at the Dust Bowl as one of the first manmade global environmental catastrophes. She begins by noting its manmade dimensions and the underlying forces that helped to create it as well as similar catastrophes across the globe. The underlying forces of imperialism and white supremacy fed the seizure of land from indigenous populations everywhere. White policymakers were aware of the environmental damage that was being wrought, but were unwilling to revise their behavior in a way that would undermine property or profit, which shaped both the New Deal and contemporary responses to climate change such as the Paris Climate Accord. To avoid further catastrophe, people all over the world must seek more radical solutions.

"The Dust Bowl continues to haunt, inspire, and teach us — but as this book shows, we have missed its most profound and far-reaching implications. Unearthing a wealth of new sources, and pulling together disparate analytical threads, Holleman tells a story of global ecological crisis — then and now — rooted in global systems of domination and extraction. A tour de force of engaged scholarship from an exhilarating new voice."—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

6 december 2018 | 64 min

Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018)

3 december 2018 | 56 min

James M. Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg, “The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump” (Harvard UP, 2018)

20 november 2018 | 59 min

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying website for educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state.

James Morton Turner is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. His first book was the award-winning The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Washington Press, 2012). Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. His previous books includes Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013), Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wing, 2005), and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Erin Stewart Mauldin, “Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South” (Oxford UP, 2018)

9 november 2018 | 58 min

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land.

Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kate Parker Horigan, “Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative” (UP of Mississippi, 2018)

9 november 2018 | 54 min

Kate Parker Horigan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University, and a co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore. In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative (University of Mississippi Press, 2018), she explores some of the numerous narratives generated by Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects on residents of New Orleans in 2005.

Her investigation includes personal narratives of those directly affected by the hurricane and which were recorded as part of the “Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston” project (SKRH). In SKRH – which was set up by folklorists Carl Lindahl and Pat Jasper – survivors were given the training and other resources to interview one another about their experience of the events (see this site for more information). Horigan notes that many of the narratives collected by SKRH counter widespread and pernicious claims which circulated via the media and through other channels during and after the disaster, including allegations that victims threatened those involved in the rescue effort.

Horigan also interrogates survivor narratives as they are re-presented within more mainstream works inspired by the event, including Dave Egger’s Zeitoun; A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, a graphic novel by Josh Neufeld; and the documentary film, Trouble the Water. She argues that such re-presentations: “propagate dangerously limited and stereotypical representations, which in turn inform responses to disasters such as Katrina. They also allow audiences to feel sympathy for survivors, without feeling complicit in their conditions of suffering or compelled to act” (5).

Horigan suggests that an alternative and more ethical route in re-presenting narratives is to do so in such a way that the original narrators are able to negotiate the ways in which their stories are reproduced. In other words: When trauma becomes public, as the insatiable appetite for disaster stories demands that it must, the texts that most ethically adapt personal narratives are those that include the survivors’ own crucial engagement with the processes of narrative production” (5). Ultimately, Horigan argues that a “better grasp on the processes of narration and memory is critical for improved disaster response because stories that are widely shared about disaster determine how communities recover” (5).

Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Joanna Davidson, “Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa” (Oxford UP, 2015)

8 november 2018 | 59 min

Connie Chiang, “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration” (Oxford UP, 2018)

31 oktober 2018 | 55 min

Andrew M. Busch, “City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas” (UNC Press, 2017)

16 oktober 2018 | 64 min

Venus Bivar, “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France” (UNC Press, 2018)

16 oktober 2018 | 81 min

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France.

Venus Bivar is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where she pursues research and teaching in three broad fields: European, economic, and environmental history. Her interests include the history of capitalism, agriculture and international trade, and the human history of climate change. Following her book Organic Resistance, she is currently developing two new projects. The first studies the emergence of economic growth as both an economic category of analysis and a political objective, while the second examines the social consequences of port development and urban planning in Marseille.

David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tim Jelfs, “The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism” (West Virginia UP, 2018)

12 oktober 2018 | 64 min

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

5 oktober 2018 | 42 min

Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization” (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

3 oktober 2018 | 52 min

Megan Black, “The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power” (Harvard UP, 2018)

2 oktober 2018 | 72 min

Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of. Of course, Interior played a vital role in American empire, as a vehicle of American territorial expansion and settler colonialism, and later in overseeing overseas territories. Megan Black’s The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2018) looks at the role of Interior in shepherding American empire, namely through the acquisition of mineral resources in overseas territories, and later, globally. In doing so, her book reveals another dimension of American empire.

Black begins with the “closing” of the frontier and the Department of the Interior’s shift from managing biological resources over to mineral resources. The acquisition of territory in Alaska, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and several other Pacific holdings saw Interior work to develop mining operations, as well as articulating the concept of strategically vital minerals. As the United States began to grow closer to war in the late 1930s, this concern over vital minerals extended to other regions, particularly Latin America, as U.S. planners feared that their own stocks could be exhausted; they also argued that capital investment would develop infrastructure in these countries and help them develop. This fed neatly into the Cold War, which saw the U.S. extend its ambitions globally. Subsequent chapters analyze the role of Interior in developing the Continental Shelf and take a role in space, particularly through the Landsat satellite. Black concludes the book by discussing pushback from Native American tribes on mineral and energy rights, and the weakening of Interior under the Reagan Administration.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Joan E. Cashin, “War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

28 september 2018 | 58 min

The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suffering. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws from a dizzying cache of research from nearly four dozen archives to capture the brutality and desperation of the wars that raged beyond the battlefield—over food, timber, shelter, and the control of people themselves. Most of these struggles were not between the armies, but between soldiers and civilians. Despite Lost Cause slurs against Sherman and his ilk, Cashin finds both armies fully capable of emptying the stores, robbing the woodlots, and torching the homes of white noncombatants. To have two massive armies with nearly inexhaustible appetites for resources crisscrossing the South ensured widespread devastation. But the destruction was all the greater because soldiers on both sides paid little attention to military codes regulating pillage and plunder, and their commanders were usually unwilling or unable to reign them in. So, Cashin argues, the war caused starvation, deforestation, the razing of villages, and an underappreciated amount of hostage-taking and abuse of civilians. After the war, there was no reckoning, no recompense for the toll both armies took on white southerners, and the scars were bandaged with myths that deceive us still.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ken Ilguas, “This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back” (Plume, 2018)

25 september 2018 | 50 min

Steven Stoll, “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia” (Hill and Wang, 2017)

19 september 2018 | 46 min

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning, the area between southern Pennsylvania and southern West Virginia––lost their land. Though the book focuses on Appalachia, Stoll presents readers with vivid confrontations between peasant economies and capitalism in the Atlantic World over the last four centuries to support his contentions.

Stoll spends a lot of the book describing a time when people lived in the southern mountains without a dependence on money. That was possible when people could garden and draw from a rich ecological base, like a forest where they could grow rye, for example. (Speaking of rye, the third chapter offers a splendid reinterpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion by renaming it the Rye Rebellion––you’ll have to pick up the book to find out why.) That ecological base, Stoll argues, was compromised with the industrial invasion of the southern mountains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then industrial capitalists “captured” the labor that went into practices like gardening. Stoll describes this process in our interview.

“We think of industrial capitalism as eliminating all of these sources of subsistence, when in fact that is hardly ever true. They capture certain forms of subsistence that they find advantageous to use. Why the garden? If a family living in a coal town produces their own food, they can be paid a lower wage.” He explains that the labor of wives, daughters, young songs, grandparents––people not typically down in the mines––can be captured by industrial capitalism. “That labor, outside of the mine, can subsidize a wage for mining that would not otherwise sustain them.”

Stoll closes the book with a hopeful reminder to readers that the story is far from over, but that people and landscapes cannot continue be regarded as “instruments of wealth,” as has been the case in the southern mountains since the nineteenth century. He ends with this inspiring thought, “Freedom, in order to have any meaning, must include the freedom to live in a village and farm as a household, with all its uncertainty.”

Chelsea Jack is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. She focuses on sociocultural and medical anthropology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017)

18 september 2018 | 39 min

Joy McCann, “Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean” (NewSouth Publishing, 2018)

7 september 2018 | 24 min

Seth Archer, “Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

4 september 2018 | 87 min

G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

29 augusti 2018 | 35 min

Joanna Dyl, “Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake” (U Washington Press, 2017)

27 augusti 2018 | 76 min

Jim Clifford, “West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914” (UBC Press, 2017)

24 augusti 2018 | 77 min

In West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Jim Clifford brings together histories of water and river systems, urban history, environmental history, and labor history. Using archival materials with a particular focus on Ordnance Survey maps and historical GIS (geographical information systems), he explores Greater London’s second important river, the Lea, using it as a lens through which to track industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. He shows how the River Lea made West Ham an attractive area for industrial development, drawing manufacturing and chemical plants to the area. Workers followed, and over the course the second half of the 19th century the area grew rapidly in population, so that West Ham became one of Britain’s largest industrial centers. At the same time, the River Lea and the marshlands through which it flowed were transformed by pollution and development, ultimately generating important political responses by the early 20th century.

Jim Clifford is an Associate Professor of Environmental History at the University of Saskatchewan. His research focuses on the history of Britain and the British world during the long 19th century, with particular focus on the industrialization of Greater London and its relationships to global commodities. In addition to this work, he is developing a broader historical GIS project to track the distant environmental effects of commodity chains, which you can view here.

David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)

23 augusti 2018 | 89 min

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic boxes. She has spent years treating and disentangling why chronic (and particularly auto-inflammatory) conditions seem to be on the rise in kids. She argues that toxicants in our food supply (from pesticides to genetically modified crops) is a major culprit. In What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), Dr. Perro teams up with medical anthropologist Vincanne Adams, PhD, to explore the complex history of the agrochemical industry and the challenges in studying and regulating the human and health impacts of pesticides, herbicides and agricultural biotechnology. Together, they link case studies of Dr. Perro’s patients to the bigger story of how our foods have potentially also become poisons.

Michelle Perro, MD is a pediatrician with over thirty-five years of experience in acute and integrative medicine. Previously, she attended at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, as well as managing her own practice, Down to Earth Pediatrics. She is currently lecturing and consulting as well as working with Gordon Medical Associates, an integrative health center in Northern California.

Vincanne Adams, PhD is professor and vice-chair of Medical Anthropology, in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has published six books on the social dynamics and politics of health and scientific knowledge including, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (2013), and Metrics: What Counts in Global Health (2016). She is currently editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the flagship journal for the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanaGfield.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

William D. Bryan, “The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South” (U Georgia Press, 2018)

23 augusti 2018 | 57 min

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not exhaust its soils, denude its forests, empty its mines, or squander the potential of underappreciated resources. They spoke the language of conservation as enthusiastically as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but the South’s new, “permanent” economy was to be constructed by private interests alone—a pursuit animated in part by the specter of federal intervention if they were to fail. Bryan shows that this concern with permanence helps explain many of the era’s signature developments, such as the widespread adoption of fertilizer, the rapid development of the tourism sector, and the appearance of all manner of “waste” industries, from cottonseed to cement. But this more careful stewardship of resources came at great social and environmental costs. Agriculture remained a low-wage, labor-intensive sector, and new industries were no better. For boosters, this was a feature, not a bug. A permanent economy would maintain not only resource stocks but also white supremacy and the power of elites. And ensuring the persistence of natural resources was no safeguard of environmental quality. Many of the new enterprises that succeeded in sustaining their resource base, like the paper industry, exacted the greatest toll on southern air, waters, and bodies. Bryan has not only given us a more convincing, nuanced, and unified account of the New South, he also offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of a politics of sustainability too narrowly shaped around profits and growth.

William D. Bryan is an environmental historian based in Atlanta.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017)

7 augusti 2018 | 60 min

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries.

Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship.

An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India.

Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico” (U California Press, 2018).

2 augusti 2018 | 57 min

Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

31 juli 2018 | 37 min

Joëlle Gergis, “Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia” (Melbourne UP, 2018)

27 juli 2018 | 16 min

John Mackay, “The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West” (Scribner, 2018)

20 juli 2018 | 64 min

Norah MacKendrick, “Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics” (U California Press, 2018).

19 juli 2018 | 71 min

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics?

In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

16 juli 2018 | 68 min

Darren Speece, “Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics” (U Washington Press, 2017)

12 juli 2018 | 76 min

Keith M. Woodhouse, “The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism” (Columbia UP, 2018)

6 juli 2018 | 68 min

Jeff Koelher, “Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup” (Bloomsbury, 2017)

2 juli 2018 | 47 min

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day.

You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caffea arabica migrated first to the Arabian Peninsula (which accounts for its being incorrectly named arabica instead of ethiopica), then traveled further to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and beyond, is a fascinating tale. This local plant becomes a global necessity; a tropical variety evolves into the cash crop of Central America, a monoculture of short plants crowded into straight rows. But on its home ground, coffee doesn’t play by these rules. Ethiopians consume 50 percent of their production domestically. “Coffee is our bread.” As it was embraced in the West in the early 1600s, it was regularly condemned by religious leaders in every country. Coffee houses brought people of different classes together, creating conversation and the exchange of ideas. This was dangerous. Not in Ethiopia. The coffee-drinking habit defines Ethiopian culture. Everyone drinks it, all day in small clay cups, and always with others, never alone. It is the definition of community. “Coffee is our bread.” By contrast, the North American bond with the morning cup of joe (Chock Full o’Nuts, Maxwell House) is undergoing a evolution into a pricey “boutique drink” (started by Seattle’s Starbucks and Berkeley’s Peet’s). Four or five dollars for a cup of coffee? But coffee is first a plant, so agriculture is destiny. Due to its genetic vulnerability (Koehler reveals a historical lack of coordination in international research among the coffee-growing nations), it could too easily become the Irish potato of the twenty-first century. Coffee leaf rust, caused by a fungus, is one of its greatest threats. This fungus brought the discovery of the variety Robusta (Caffea canephora) by Dutch growers in Java in the late nineteenth century. Robusta is the wunderkind of instant coffee due to its stronger flavor and higher caffeine content compared to Arabica. Robusta’s tropical durability made it the crop of choice in Central America, but coffee leaf rust has followed it there. When a crop fails, the grower is ruined. Sometimes the only option is to migrate elsewhere. The other enemy is climate change. Increase the growing temperatures by two degrees and production is affected. This also hits water availability for crop irrigation. And then there is man. Will UNESCO’s designation of World Heritage Site protect the Kafa Forest from rampant deforestation? And why did the poet Arthur Rimbaud end his days as a coffee planter in Yemen?

Will you now ponder these uncertainties as you sip your doubleshot iced latte macchiato?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018)

29 juni 2018 | 50 min

Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017)

19 juni 2018 | 54 min

Brian James Leech, “The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit” (U Nevada Press, 2018)

15 juni 2018 | 69 min

The plight of today’s coal miners has gained significant attention in recent U.S. politics. As coal mining practices and technologies change in the United States, coal miners face job reductions, but their futures are wrapped up in broader national questions surrounding global trade, the environment, mechanization, and deindustrialization. In his new book, Augustana College professor Brian James Leech examines a previous moment of technological change in American mining history that created social, economic, and environmental disruption. In the early to mid-twentieth century, open-pit mining became more common in hard-rock mining in the western United States. The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2018), examines this transition from underground to open-pit mining in Butte, Montana. Open-pit mining required more space, but fewer, lower-skilled workers. Whole communities were relocated, while new environmental hazards developed. The book explores the social and environmental consequences of the transition as well as discussing how the company and surrounding communities reacted to the changes. Finally, The City That Ate Itself also discusses the closing of the Berkeley pit, the largest open-pit in Butte, and its legacy.

In this episode of the podcast, Leech discusses open-pit mining in Butte within the context of the United States’ long and complicated history with mining. He explains when and why open-pit mining came to Butte and how the local community reacted. In the discussion, he explains how new technology changed mining and miners’ lives. Further, he answers questions about the effects of the very visible industrial mining space expanding in Butte. We also discuss Leech’s use of oral history interviews as sources, nostalgia for earlier mining days, and the relevance of this history to today’s political discussions about industrial mining jobs.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2016)

14 juni 2018 | 68 min

Melanie A. Kiechle, “Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America” (U Washington Press, 2017)

11 juni 2018 | 58 min

Andre Magnan, “When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade” (U British Columbia Press, 2016)

6 juni 2018 | 61 min

In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain. Using the concept of a “food regime” as a theoretical frame, Magnan identifies three broad periods of stability in the relationship between Canadian wheat and British bread: a “UK-centered” food regime from about 1870 to 1914, a “mercantile-industrial” food regime from 1945 to 1972, and a “corporate” or “corporate-environmental” food regime from 1995 to the present. Separating these three periods are two periods of instability, the first including the two World Wars and the second beginning with the simultaneous oil crisis and entry of the Soviet Union into the global wheat trade in the 1970s. Through these phases of relative stability and instability, Magnan traces the institutions that linked the cold, dry Canadian prairies to the cities of Britain, including banks and food processing companies, with particular focus on the Canadian Wheat Board from 1935 until its dissolution in 2012.

André Magnan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina. His research and teaching interests include the sociology of agrifood systems, globalization and development, and sociological theory. Magnan has two principle areas of research. First, he has examined the history and politics of grain marketing on the Canadian prairies, with a focus on the rise and fall of the Canadian Wheat Board, one of Canada’s most important agricultural institutions.

His second area of research focus is the financialization of agrifood systems. Here Dr. Magnan has examined changing patterns of farm structure and ownership in Canada and Australia, documenting how financial investors of different stripes are buying farmland on a large scale. Part of a multi-year study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, this research aims to understand how new patterns of farmland ownership could affect family farmers, rural communities, and the agricultural industry.

David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art & Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ann K. Ferrell, “Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century” (U Press of Kentucky, 2013)

30 maj 2018 | 67 min

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century (University of Kentucky Press, 2013) is the result of multiple research methodologies including extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival investigation, and rhetorical analysis.

The book’s introduction includes a history of tobacco production in the United States along with a summary of changes in attitudes towards the product over time – the most significant shift coming in the wake of the 1964 Surgeon General’s report confirming its detrimental health effects. Thereafter, the book is divided into three parts. Part One offers a detailed description of the work involved in raising the eponymous crop as well as how that process has changed over time. Part Two, titled “The Shifting Meanings of Tobacco,” is based upon Ferrell’s study of the representation of tobacco – or its non-representation – in the Kentucky Department of Agriculture newsletters from the 1940s up until the time of her fieldwork (c. 2007); here Ferrell shows how the state’s response to tobacco’s fluctuating fortunes played out in rhetorical decisions made manifest on the page. For example, recent depictions of tobacco farming suggest it has been relegated to part of Kentucky’s heritage rather than its present, despite the state still being home to thousands of tobacco farms. In the third part of the book, Ferrell combines her ethnographic research with her study of rhetoric to consider what it means to be a tobacco farmer in Kentucky in the 21st century; whereas claiming such an identity in the past might well engender pride and respect, it has become stigmatized and therefore more likely to provoke disdain at best. Partly as a result, recent decades have seen the development of the complex concept of tobacco nostalgia, characteristics of which include mourning the “golden age of the tobacco man”. In addition, Ferrell investigates why “just growing something else” is by no means as simple an endeavor as it sounds.

Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century has been widely-acclaimed. For example, in his review for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Jeffery A. Duvall described Ferrell’s monograph as “an illuminating account of how burley tobacco, once a proud symbol of the economic strength and cultural heritage of the commonwealth, has in recent years been scrubbed from the consciousness and public image of Kentucky, and the impact this has had upon tobacco farmers in the state.” In addition, Burley received the 2014 Wayland D. Hand Award (awarded by the American Folklore Society to the best book to combine historical and folkloristic methods and materials).

Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anna Zeide, “Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry” (U California Press, 2018)

16 april 2018 | 53 min

Steven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

10 april 2018 | 69 min

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature and frequency of material supplies needed to maintain a navy at sea. Unlike the relatively self-sufficient sailing ship, steam-powered vessels had an almost insatiable appetite for coal, requiring resupply much more frequently. Further, not just any coal would do: after extensive tests on the quality of coals from across the globe, engineers found that Welsh steam coal was the essential fuel for Britain’s steam-powered navy, and there were precious few suitable alternatives. These facts, then, shaped the construction and maintenance of a system of fossil-fuel infrastructure that spanned the globe. Gray rounds his analysis out by following coal’s journey from mines, through depots and coaling stations, in lighters, and then into ships holds. He identifies coaling stations as unique imperial spaces, in which naval personnel, administrators, and local inhabitants crossed paths. He considers the innumerable hands and backs that groaned under the weight of tons of black rocks, including indigenous laborers and British sailors. Throughout, he demonstrates conclusively the utter centrality of coal to the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, and hence to the British Empire.

Steven Gray is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Naval History at the University of Portsmouth. He studies imperial, maritime, transnational, global and transoceanic history, with particular interest in the material infrastructures of global networks, and how these facilitated the mobility of goods, people, militaries and empires.

David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art and Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018)

9 april 2018 | 62 min

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018), is a fine-grained examination of the local reaction to the most serious accident in the history of U.S. nuclear energy. It is also a sweeping study of the construction of arguments for and against nuclear energy and atomic weapons from the end of the World War II to the present. Zaretsky follows that debate through a transformative six-year debate in central Pennsylvania, where conservative activists launched protests that drew heavily from the examples of environmentalism, the antiwar movement, second-wave feminism, the black freedom struggle, and black and women’s health activism. Yet rather than pushing them to the left, their fight with pronuclear forces in industry and government made them more conservative. They articulated an ethnonationalist argument about a threatened nation betrayed by its leaders and illustrated it with ecological images of the damaged bodies of mothers, babies, and the unborn. This “biotic nationalism” helped conservatives paint a convincing picture of the America of the 1970s and 1980s and remains potent today, as visible in the “Crippled America” described by Donald Trump.

Natasha Zaretsky is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of American Decline, 1968-1980 (UNC Press, 2007) and co-editor of Major Problems in U.S. History Since 1945 (4th ed., Cengage, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Women’s History, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Debarati Sen, “Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling” (SUNY Press, 2017)

6 april 2018 | 50 min

Chad Montrie, “The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism” (U California Press, 2018)

5 april 2018 | 49 min

Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism.

Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Timothy Neale, “Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia” (U Hawaii Press, 2017)

2 april 2018 | 55 min

Frederick L. Brown, “The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle” (U Washington Press, 2016)

30 mars 2018 | 39 min

Urmi Engineer Willoughby, “Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans” (LSU Press, 2017)

23 mars 2018 | 42 min

A disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017) by historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby. Much more than a history of mosquitoes and scientists, the book attends to ecology, economy, and culture to explore how yellow fever arrived in the Gulf South, why yellow fever epidemics became commonplace in the Crescent City, why they finally abated, and how residents made sense of the disease. Willoughby finds answers in landscapes: the contours of sugarcane plantations, the sprawl of a city brimming with global capital, the severed connections of a military occupation, the new rural railroad network of the postbellum South, the urban zones of public health interventions, and the massive plantations and infrastructure that followed imperial expansion across the hemisphere. Within these places, the notions of racial, ethnic, and geographic otherness permeating theories about susceptibility to yellow fever echoed broader social and political discourse. Both local and transnational, this study presents the spread of yellow fever as an unintended consequence of colonial and imperial development and raises important questions about our approach to controlling epidemic diseases today.

Urmi Engineer Willoughby is an assistant professor of history at Murray State University in western Kentucky. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has held postdoctoral fellowships in world history at Colby College and the University of Pittsburgh. She is the co-author (with Merry Wiesner-Hanks) of A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Peter A. Kopp, “Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley” (U California Press, 2016)

9 mars 2018 | 54 min

Dagomar Degroot, “The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560 -1720” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

14 februari 2018 | 49 min

Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther, “The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters” (Wharton Digital Press, 2017))

7 februari 2018 | 57 min

Andy Bruno, “The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

30 januari 2018 | 58 min

Robert Hunt Ferguson, “Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi” (U of Georgia Press, 2018)

24 januari 2018 | 53 min

In an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subsistence and human dignity. Historian Robert Hunt Ferguson, in Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2018), makes the surprising case that the Depression-era Mississippi Delta provided the necessary conditions for the flowering of such an endeavor. New Deal policies inspired socialist optimism while their racial exclusions left displaced tenant farmers looking for work and attracted to enterprises like Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, which promised to break them from the cycle of debt and offer them equal access to the schooling, medical care, and opportunity enjoyed by the white middle class. These cooperative farms drew inspiration from the transnational communitarian movement and advanced the radical visions of the American Socialist Party and the religious left, including celebrated theological Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as president of their board of trustees. While the experiment struggled with agro-ecological obstacles and internecine power struggles, and ultimately could not withstand the postwar attacks of white supremacist movement, Delta and Providence stand as models of how those trapped within withering hegemonies imagine a most just and free society and set out to do the daily labor of bringing it into being.

Robert Hunt Ferguson is an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his publications include “Mothers Against Jesse in Congress: Grassroots Maternalism and Cultural Politics of the AIDS Crisis in North Carolina” (Journal of Southern History, Feb 2017).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jacob Smith, “Eco-Sonic Media” (University of California Press, 2015)

18 januari 2018 | 37 min

Brian McCammack, “Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago” (Harvard UP, 2017)

11 januari 2018 | 64 min

Christopher Church, “Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean” (U. Nebraska Press, 2017)

18 december 2017 | 39 min

Sam White, “A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America” (Harvard UP, 2017)

15 december 2017 | 54 min

Dan Flores, “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History” (Basic Books, 2016)

8 december 2017 | 57 min

Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016)

28 november 2017 | 56 min

John Ryan Fischer, “Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i” (UNC Press, 2015)

13 november 2017 | 57 min

Climate Change Skepticism with Lawrence Torcello

2 november 2017 | 33 min

Tore C. Olsson, “Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside” (Princeton UP, 2017)

23 oktober 2017 | 55 min

Rebecca Jones, “Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia” (Monash UP, 2017)

6 oktober 2017 | 16 min

Sara Dant, “Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016)

22 september 2017 | 56 min

From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments.

In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016)

5 september 2017 | 27 min

Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany” (U. Michigan Press, 2014)

19 augusti 2017 | 47 min

Alice Weinreb, “Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany” (Oxford UP, 2017)

13 augusti 2017 | 55 min

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study.

The global industrial food system grew out of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. In 1914, that system became a weapon of war. For combatant states, maintaining (and disrupting) food supply chains emerged as a major military-strategic objective. Today, all states are caught up in the global food system, but Germany in the twentieth-century provides a unique place to observe its fascinating and often distressing historical permutations, because the country’s history condenses so many modern forms of state (imperial, fascist, socialist, liberal-democratic), not to mention global crises and political caesurae–the World Wars, the rise of National Socialism and its defeat, the country’s division and reunification.

Professor Weinreb’s ambitious, wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study also offers a wealth of perspectives on such topics as food aid, school lunches, obesity, the condition of hunger, and gendered labor, among many others.

Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century Europe, on the history and politics of food, European environmental history, and on the Holocaust.

Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017)

2 augusti 2017 | 55 min

Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016)

10 juli 2017 | 60 min

Susanna Forrest, “The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)

29 juni 2017 | 49 min

Benjamin Heber Johnson, “Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation” (Yale UP, 2017)

8 juni 2017 | 52 min

Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016)

14 maj 2017 | 55 min

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country who, like her parents, wanted to return to the land. Her subjects are Judy and Larry (her parents), the place they moved to, and the community they helped found.

One of many interesting discoveries in this book is the fact that the back to the land movement took place around the country, within the same demographic, and during the same two-to three-year period in the 1970s.

The causes? One was the growing concern with pollution described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Another, which deserves fuller examination, is the apocalyptic mood stemming from the atomic threat of the 1960s. Baby boomers remember, with no small amount of incredulity, schoolroom bomb practice (“How would going under my desk protect me?”).

The answers that adults had were not reassuring, or they were naive. The younger generation felt imperiled, and adults were responsible. Cities weren’t safe either. By returning to the land, a person could face an uncertain future in a community of like-minded people, in home they had built themselves and that expressed their values.

So move this group did, but not all to become hippies. Some formed communes that rejected middle class baggage (monogamy, capitalism, child rearing). Others had advanced degrees, found professional work, and considered themselves “square.” Live in a rural setting and you adopt rural culture: community barn raising (even if it is a geodesic dome), self-generated work (Christmas trees farms, organic produce), shared resources.

The author shows that the effects of these communities since the 1970s have permeated throughout American culture. A new kind of fresh food market like Whole Foods and community food co-ops got their starts in such settings. So did recycling (a mainstay of farming culture). Whatever the circumstances that brought them into being, the results have reached far beyond their boundaries and continue to expand our lives.

Kate Daloz’s essays have been published in periodicals such as American Scholar. She is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and a consultant at the College Writing Center, Baruch College, CUNY.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jonathan Schlesinger, “A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule” (Stanford UP, 2017)

13 maj 2017 | 67 min

Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

8 maj 2017 | 35 min

Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016)

15 april 2017 | 68 min

Veronica Herrera, “Water and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico” (U. Michigan Press, 2017)

6 mars 2017 | 27 min

Stacy Alaimo, “Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016)

21 februari 2017 | 37 min

John Hadley, “Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals” (Lexington Books, 2015)

9 februari 2017 | 56 min

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal property rights to wildlife. Hadley argues that a guardianship system could effectively protect the rights of wild animals to resources in the territories they inhabit. In turn, the guardians of particular animals or a particular species could challenge land use plans that might threaten the ability of these animals to meet their basic needs.

Though grounded in philosophical theory, Hadley’s focus is pragmatic. He is interested in producing an institutional design that could be effectively incorporated into policy and practice. His proposal also aims to solve some key problems in wildlife conservation. It bridges the seemingly divergent interests of environmentalists focused on the protection of the collective (e.g., ecosystems) and those of animal rights proponents focused on the survival of individuals. Here, common ground is found in habitat protection, a shared value that reconciles the differences between these groups. Hadley’s proposal also ensures animals become vocal stakeholders in land use and conservation initiatives, able to compete with agendas that might be incompatible with animal or habitat protection. It also begins to overcome the anthropocentrism that (perhaps inevitably) pervades conservation practice. By determining animal property rights boundaries on the basis of territorial behavior, Hadley’s proposal privileges animal actions and interactions over human-centric interests. Although their rights would be advocated by a human guardian in a person-centered legal system, if implemented, this theory would ensure the interests of wild animals are taken seriously. This is a book of critical relevance to those interested in issues of human-wildlife conflict, biodiversity protection, and human/nonhuman relationships.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)

4 februari 2017 | 63 min

Anthony Lioi, “Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)

20 januari 2017 | 68 min

Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016)

10 januari 2017 | 35 min

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why?

In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time.

Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Pamela McElwee, “Forest are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam” (U. Washington Press, 2016)

17 december 2016 | 61 min

Jessica van Horssen, “A Town Called Asbestos” (UBC Press, 2016)

12 december 2016 | 40 min

Susan Verde, “The Water Princess” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016)

29 november 2016 | 32 min

Supermodel Georgie Badiel grew up in a small village in Burkina Faso where the closest source of water was many miles from home. After launching her successful modeling career, she began to speak out about the vital importance clean water can have on a community, drawing on her personal experience to educate others. Author Susan Verde and New York Times bestselling illustrator Peter H. Reynolds were inspired by Georgie’s story, and together all three have crafted a poignant picture book called, The Water Princes s (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016). Perfect for classroom teaching and for bedtime reading, The Water Princess illustrates one girl’s dream of helping her community, while educating readers on this important global issue. A percentage of the proceeds are being donated to the Ryan’s Well Foundation and to the Georgie Badiel Foundation. Susan Verde writes children’s books and teaches kid’s yoga and mindfulness. She is also the author of the picture books The Museum, and You and Me, I Am Yoga. Learn more at: http://www.susanverde.com.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Floridas Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Harini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford UP, 2016)

26 september 2016 | 42 min

Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016)

12 september 2016 | 56 min

William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

29 augusti 2016 | 53 min

James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016)

26 augusti 2016 | 64 min

Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015)

17 augusti 2016 | 47 min

Kieko Matteson, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

3 augusti 2016 | 53 min

Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015)

2 augusti 2016 | 62 min

Marta Zaraska, “Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat” (Basic Books, 2016)

5 juli 2016 | 43 min

Sarah Wald, “The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl” (U. of Washington Press, 2016)

28 juni 2016 | 59 min

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl (University of Washington Press, 2016), Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together eco-criticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship.

SARAH D. WALD is assistant professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Oregon.

Lori A. Flores is an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). You can find her at http://www.loriaflores.com, [email protected], or hanging around Brooklyn.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kenna R. Archer, “Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River” (U of New Mexico, 2015)

9 maj 2016 | 53 min

Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015)

18 april 2016 | 70 min

Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate” (Simon and Schuster, 2014)

24 februari 2016 | 3 min

Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014)

21 januari 2016 | 66 min

Peter Thorsheim, “Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

17 december 2015 | 60 min

Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015)

6 december 2015 | 63 min

Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

4 december 2015 | 75 min

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time?

Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores this question by connecting three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the pursuit of economic development and modernization in the Third World. Macekura, who is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, demonstrates how environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempted to promote environmental protection in the post-colonial world, then, after failing to do so, challenged the economic development approaches of the United States, World Bank, and United Nations. The book reveals how environmental activists initially conceived of “sustainable development” as a way to link environmental protection with Third World concerns about equality and justice in the global economy, but how, over time, the phrase’s meaning moved far away from this initial conception.

In addition to exploring the idea of “sustainable development,” Macekura also examines the growth and limits of the environmental movement’s power. He pays close attention to how international political disputes have scuttled major global treaties over issues such as climate change; he also documents the evolution of international development politics and policy since 1945. In sum, Of Limits and Growth offers a new history of sustainability by elucidating the global origins of environmental activism, the ways in which environmental activists challenged development approaches worldwide, and how environmental non-state actors reshaped the United States’ and World Bank’s development policies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital” (Verso, 2015)

3 december 2015 | 52 min

Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

23 september 2015 | 74 min

Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015)

25 augusti 2015 | 70 min

Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014)

14 augusti 2015 | 67 min

Henry Shue, “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection” (Oxford UP, 2014)

21 juli 2015 | 62 min

Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology” (Routledge, 2015)

10 juni 2015 | 52 min

Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015)

19 maj 2015 | 60 min

Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” (

11 maj 2015 | 55 min

Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)

10 maj 2015 | 68 min

Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2014)

26 april 2015 | 61 min

Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)

17 april 2015 | 64 min

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

David A. Pietz, “Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015)

6 april 2015 | 70 min

Carolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014)

17 mars 2015 | 85 min

Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” (

11 mars 2015 | 51 min

Sally Weintrobe, “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Routledge, 2012)

11 februari 2015 | 44 min

Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, Helen Tiffin, “Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014)

15 januari 2015 | 60 min

Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013)

17 oktober 2014 | 43 min

Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013)

16 oktober 2014 | 68 min

William Viney, “Waste: A Philosophy of Things” (Bloomsbury, 2014)

15 oktober 2014 | 39 min

Heather Menzies, “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto” (New Society Publishers, 2014)

6 oktober 2014 | 45 min

Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)

2 oktober 2014 | 76 min

James Nisbet, “Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s” (MIT Press, 2014)

10 september 2014 | 59 min

Silver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea” (Red Deer Press, 2014)

5 augusti 2014 | 52 min

Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish” (University Press of New England, 2013)

17 juni 2014 | 42 min

Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout, olive backs spattered with a constellation of black spots. The fish were gorgeous, and, roasted with oil and garlic, would prove delicious. But, having just read Douglas M. Thompson‘s The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish (University Press of New England, 2013), my enjoyment was just a tad diminished by one piece of knowledge: the fish had been stocked.

Every year, government fisheries agencies around the country pour tens of millions of hatchery-raised trout into America’s rivers and lakes. These stocked fish generate vast revenues in the form of fishing licenses and gear sales, and they provide innumerable anglers pleasure and the occasional meal. But, as Thompson’s book reveals, the widespread dissemination of hatchery fish is doing profound ecological harm. Stocked fish, like rainbow trout, are often non-native species that disrupt ecosystems and crowd out local fish. What’s more, within the artificial, concrete-lined context of the hatchery, fish often acquire evolutionary traits (for example, large size at the expense of swimming ability) that are maladaptive once they’re released into the wild. When unfit hatchery trout mix their genes with wild populations, the result can be ecological chaos — like the titular “golden trout,” a bright orange, hatchery-bred novelty.

Hatcheries, moreover, are merely the tip of the iceberg. In the name of improving conditions for (generally wealthy) anglers, humans have been altering rivers for more than a century. We’ve killed countless herons, cormorants, and other native predators; we’ve filled our waters with all manner of artificial structures to “improve habitat” (in the process permanently changing the contours and the function of our rivers); and our attempts to “restore” rivers to their former conditions are often misguided and ineffective. Part environmental history, part passionate cry for a saner system of river management, Thompson’s book will make any angler (myself included) reconsider their place within aquatic ecosystems.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

4 juni 2014 | 68 min

Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014)

19 april 2014 | 57 min

Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013)

19 mars 2014 | 55 min

John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

26 februari 2014 | 57 min

Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013)

9 februari 2014 | 71 min

John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013)

16 januari 2014 | 46 min

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines” — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions.” Every generation regards its own environment as natural and healthy, failing to recognize that the status quo is but a pale imitation of what previous generations enjoyed. The term was coined by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist, and it’s most often applied to the collapse of global fisheries. Our oceans are plundered, but our lack of historical context prevents us from noticing.

John Waldman is determined to wake us up to what we’ve lost. Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College, is the author of Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations (Lyons Press, 2013), a book that not only elucidates the predicament of plummeting fisheries, but also provides a roadmap for escaping it. Waldman’s focus is diadromous fish — the migratory species, like salmon, sturgeon, eels, and shad, that once ran in great pulses up and down every East Coast river, providing sustenance for ecosystems and human communities. Centuries of dam construction, overfishing, and other deleterious forces have reduced these once-spectacular migrations to just a fraction of their historic abundance; yet thanks to our shifting baselines, we seem scarcely to have noticed, which only makes the problem worse. Waldman calls this phenomenon — in which species disappear from people’s awareness and so lose their advocates — “eco-social anomie.”

Fortunately, the news for migratory fish is not all catastrophic. Waldman documents a number of heartening restoration efforts, especially dam removals, that are helping some species rebound, and proving that diadromous fish still have constituents. While the Atlantic Coast’s fish runs may never return to their former glory, there’s still time to restore their relevance to ecosystems and human lives. “Poor shad!” wrote Henry David Thoreau, to whom Waldman’s book is dedicated. “Where is thy redress?” Running Silver certainly isn’t complete redress for our troubled rivers, but it offers a guide to making amends.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013)

28 december 2013 | 75 min

Brian Allen Drake, “Loving Nature, Fearing the State” (University of Washington Press, 2013)

4 oktober 2013 | 38 min

Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” (Oxford UP, 2013)

11 september 2013 | 56 min

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia.

These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

8 september 2013 | 71 min

Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013)

20 juni 2013 | 34 min

Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011)

15 juni 2012 | 34 min

Jen Huntley, “The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origins of America’s Most Popular National Park” (UP of Kansas, 2011)

20 april 2012 | 69 min

Char Miller, “Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy” (Oregon State UP, 2012)

9 april 2012 | 48 min

From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington, Char Miller takes readers on a wild romp through the contests, debates, and full-out battles that have surrounded American public lands for over a century in Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy (Oregon State University Press, 2012) In a series of nineteen very short vignette essays published by the Oregon State University Press, Miller turns his laser focus on episodes in American land-management policy, some familiar and others formerly lost in institutional obscurity. Each essay brings a fresh perspective to land policy debates, often raising many questions along the way. Taken together as a collection, these vignettes and meditations offer a fascinating series of windows into the long and very contested history of American land-use policy.

Contemporary observers of public lands controversies may harbor nostalgic longings for a past when Americans were in agreement about their lands, but Miller’s book makes clear that such a time never existed. Whether Earth Liberation Front firebombers protesting ski resort development, intermountain ranchers opposing grazing restrictions, or Sierra Club rank-and-file opposing another dam, people from across the political spectrum and land-management agency leaders have engaged in passionate battles over the great American commons–public lands. “We need the edge,” Miller says in this interview, “both left and right–the center needs to know where the edges are in order to understand itself.”

Specifically written to appeal to a broad audience, Miller hopes this work will inspire readers to engage in public lands conversations, for such discourse is the heart of democratic decision-making. With themes ranging from the role of science in land-use power struggles to the relationships between multiple public lands agencies, Public Lands, Public Debates will surely inspire and inform many such conversations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

18 juli 2011 | 64 min

Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010)

23 maj 2011 | 57 min

James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010)

20 oktober 2010 | 63 min

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or maybe the idea was to frighten the rain gods. Who knows? In any case, none of it worked: the massive, loud, and surely expensive operation had, according to most experts, no measurable effect on the weather around the Chinese capital.

You might say you can’t blame them for trying. But according to James Rodger Fleming, you can. In his incisive new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia UP, 2010), Fleming shows that although people have always dreamed of controlling the weather, and many have tried to do so, no one has ever succeeded. The reason is simple: the atmosphere of the Earth is not like your refrigerator or oven. It’s just too big and complex to be man-handled by any known or even realistically imagined technology. But, as Fleming demonstrates, there are always desperate people who refuse to accept this intuitive fact. So we are presented with a gallery of rain-making mountebanks, charlatans, and swindlers ever-ready to part rain-seeking fools and their rain-seeking money. In Fleming’s excellent telling, the story is entertaining though a bit sad. It’s sadder still that the weather-controlling con is still being run by seemingly well-intentioned people who claim they can “fix” global warming by means of some out-sized, outrageous, and out-of-this-world engineering scheme. Fleming, who both knows the science and has looked at the history, is more than dubious. The only way we can “fix” the sky is to leave it alone and hope for the best. It turns out, however, that leaving the sky alone is hard. It’s actually easier to attack it, proclaim victory, and continue as before. Just ask the Chinese.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008)

5 december 2008 | 64 min

New Books in Environmental Studies

Interviews with Environmental Scientists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.

Om podden

Avsnitt

Ethan Tapper, "How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World" (Broadleaf Books, 2024)

Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Debra J. Davidson, "Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency" (Routledge, 2024)

Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)

"Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations" (Fernwood Publishing, 2024)

William A. Selby, "The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next" (Heyday Books, 2024)

Helen Louise Cowie, "Animals in World History" (Routledge, 2024)

Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" (Yale UP, 2024)

Peter Hill, "River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Dario Fazzi, "Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Melanie Dennis Unrau, "The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)

James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century

David Strayer, "Beyond the Sea: The Hidden Life in Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Willingness for climate action in South Korea and Finland: A cross-cultural comparison

Negative Life

Brandon Keim, "Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World" (Norton, 2024)

Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)

Veronica Strang, "Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis" (Reaktion, 2023)

Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)

Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)

Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Stephanie Rutherford, "Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

Joanna Allan, "Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara" (WVU Press, 2024)

Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)

Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)

Adam Hanieh, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market" (Verso, 2024)

Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning, "Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Larisa Jasarević, "Beekeeping in the End Times" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Omer Aijazi, "Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Anna Lora-Wainwright, "Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China" (MIT Press, 2021)

Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Lightning Birds

Roberta L. Millstein, "The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024)

Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, "Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future" (The New Press, 2024)

Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives

Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Jonathan Maskit, "Bicycle" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Forest Listening Rooms

Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Andrea E. Pia, "Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Azra Hromadžić, "Riverine Citizenship: A Bosnian City in Love with the River" (CEU Press, 2024)

John Schofield, "Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thomas White, "China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Faizah Zakaria, "The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia" (U Washington Press, 2023)

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, "Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Hope Bohanec, "The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs" (Lantern Publishing, 2023)

Damaging Rationality: Exxon-Funded Legal Research and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Justine Bendel, "Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals" (Edward Elgar, 2023)

Matthew Archer, "Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability" (NYU Press, 2024)

12 Angry Alaskans: Re-Examining the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Case

Andrew R. Basso, "Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Daniel Kahneman’s Forgotten Legacy: Investigating Exxon-Funded Psychological Research

Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, "Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change" (Oregon State UP, 2021)

Michael J. Sheridan, "Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants" (Routledge, 2023)

Stephen J. Pyne, "Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park" (U Arizona Press, 2023)

Richard D. Oram, "Where Men No More May Reap Or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400-1850" (Birlinn, 2024)

Hannah Freed-Thall, "Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Anaïs Maurer, "The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists" (Duke UP, 2023)

Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)