New Books in Environmental Studies (Marshall Poe)

Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Land is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millenium (University of Chicago Press), Roberta Millstein aims to set the record straight. Millstein, who is professor emerit of philosophy at the University of California – Davis, offers interpretations of Leopold’s key concepts of the “land community” based in complex webs of causal interactions and “land health” as an ability of the land community to renew itself over time. She provides a comprehensive overview of Leopold’s prescient ideas regarding the expansion of humanity’s scope of moral concern to the land communities to which we belong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

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

In this podcast Laura A. Ogden, cultural anthropologist at Dartmouth College, introduces her beautifully crafted book Loss and Wonder at the World's End (Duke University Press, 2021). In Loss and Wonder at the World's End, Ogden brings together animals, people, and things—from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and birdsong—to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Repeated algal blooms have closed fisheries in the archipelago. Glaciers are in retreat. Extractive industries such as commercial forestry, natural gas production, and salmon farming along with the introduction of nonnative species are rapidly transforming assemblages of life. Ogden archives forms of loss—including territory, language, sovereignty, and life itself—as well as forms of wonder, or moments when life continues to flourish even in the ruins of these devastations. Her account draws on long-term ethnographic research with settler and Indigenous communities; archival photographs; explorer journals; and experiments in natural history and performance studies. Loss and Wonder at the World's End frames environmental change as imperialism's shadow, a darkness cast over the earth in the wake of other losses. Elize Mazadiego is an art historian in Modern and Contemporary art (PhD, University of California San Diego), with a specialism in Latin American art. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam and author of the book Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968 (Brill, 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

In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction (Norton, 2021), acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale. She describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as lesser-known figures in conservation history; she reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund; she explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros; and she confronts the darker side of conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species—including our own Jenny Splitter is an independent journalist covering food, farming, science, and climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library, 2022) looks at threats to forest life across the globe. Dr. John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value. The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – through Refuge, Sacredness, Horror and Hope – making fascinating links between emotion and genre. For Henry David Thoreau, the woods are places beyond civilisation; for Ursula LeGuin and C S Lewis, they are loaded with otherworldly potential; and for those fleeing captivity, they can provide a welcome sanctuary. Woods can strike fear, they can inspire wonder, they can be lovely, dark and deep. With full-colour illustration throughout, this book branches out into the British Library to find both the haunting and the hopeful in an unparalleled collection of books, manuscripts and photography. It tells a global story of how we understand trees, and its beautifully illustrated pages present a moving argument for conservation and renewal. 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

John and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo's book shows how residents of the region live with and through the "nuclear ghost" that resides with them. The trio discuss ways that residents acclimatize themselves to the presence of radiation, efforts to live their lives in ways not only shaped by catastrophe and irradiation, and the Geiger counter as a critical object. Ryo relates the astonishing--but when you stop to think unsurprising—fact that "once you have [a Geiger counter] you actually want to see higher scores." Mentioned in this episode: Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic Tarkovksy, Stalker (the film) Stalker (the video game) Haruki Murakami 1Q84 Pat Barker The Ghost Road Read the episode 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

Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus. Vaccines are bad for you. These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed--they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we convince such people otherwise? How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don't believe in facts? In How to Talk to a Science Denier (MIT Press, 2021), Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers, and argues that it's important to do so. Science denial can kill. Drawing on his own experience--including a visit to a Flat Earth convention--as well as academic research, McIntyre outlines the common themes of science denialism, present in misinformation campaigns ranging from tobacco companies' denial in the 1950s that smoking causes lung cancer to today's anti-vaxxers. He describes attempts to use his persuasive powers as a philosopher to convert Flat Earthers; surprising discussions with coal miners; and conversations with a scientist friend about genetically modified organisms in food. McIntyre offers tools and techniques for communicating the truth and values of science, emphasizing that the most important way to reach science deniers is to talk to them calmly and respectfully--to put ourselves out there, and meet them face to face. 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 galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism." Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.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

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

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

In Indic religious traditions, a number of rituals and myths exist in which the environment is revered. Despite this nature worship in India, its natural resources are under heavy pressure with its growing economy and exploding population. This has led several scholars to raise questions about religious communities’ role in environmentalism. Does nature worship inspire Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way? Pankaj Jain's Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability (Routledge, 2011) explores the above questions with three communities, the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi, and the Bhil communities. Presenting the texts of Bishnois, their environmental history, and their contemporary activism; investigating the Swadhyaya movement from an ecological perspective; and exploring the Bhil communities and their Sacred Groves, this book applies a non-Western hermeneutical model to interpret the religious traditions of Indic communities. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. 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 Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth's climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty.  Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. Jeremy Brecher goes beyond the national headlines and introduces readers to the community, municipal, county, state, tribal, and industry efforts advancing the Green New Deal across the United States. Brecher illustrates how such programs from below do the valuable work of building constituencies and providing proofs of concept for new ideas and initiatives. Block by block, these activities have come together to form a Green New Deal built on a strong foundation of small-scale movements and grassroots energy. A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic 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

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs.  Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines four cases that illuminate why perpetrators have destroyed populations using displacement policies: Germany’s genocide of the Herero (1904–1908); Ottoman genocides of Christian minorities (1914–1925); expulsions of Germans from East/Central Europe (1943–1952); and climate violence (twenty-first century). Because displacement has been typically framed as a secondary aspect of mass atrocities, existing scholarship overlooks how perpetrators use it as a means of executing destruction rather than a vehicle for moving people to a specific location to commit atrocities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

Stabilizing the world's climates means cutting carbon dioxide pollution. There's no way around it. But what if that's not enough? What if it's too difficult to accomplish in the time allotted or, worse, what if it's so late in the game that even cutting carbon emissions to zero, tomorrow, wouldn't do? Enter solar geoengineering. The principle is simple: attempt to cool Earth by reflecting more sunlight back into space. The primary mechanism, shooting particles into the upper atmosphere, implies more pollution, not less. If that doesn't sound scary, it should. There are lots of risks, unknowns, and unknowables. In Geoengineering: The Gamble (Polity, 2021), climate economist Gernot Wagner provides a balanced take on the possible benefits and all-too-real risks, especially the so-called "moral hazard" that researching or even just discussing (solar) geoengineering would undermine the push to cut carbon emissions in the first place. Despite those risks, he argues, solar geoengineering may only be a matter of time. Not if, but when. As the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program, Wagner explores scenarios of a geoengineered future, offering an inside-view of the research already under way and the actions the world must take to guide it in a productive direction. 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

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

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

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

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

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

Indonesian citizens, and those of neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, have long suffered recurring haze pollution caused by peatland fires in Indonesia. To avoid these forest fires, and reduce the environmental harm and negative health impacts that transboundary haze gives rise to, Indonesia needs to restore its degraded peatlands. President Joko Widodo started this task in 2016 when he established the Peatland Restoration Agency, tasked with rehabilitating 2 million hectares of degraded peatland. What has this ad hoc body achieved since then, and where will it go from here? In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Rini Astuti to discuss why peatland fires are a particularly acute issue in Southeast Asia, and how Indonesia can play a crucial role in effectively mitigating transboundary haze in the region. About Rini Astuti: Dr Rini Astuti is a Research Fellow at Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Rini is also the Global Public Voices Fellow for the Mario Einaudi Center on International Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on environmental governance and climate change in the Southeast Asia region (Indonesia in particular). She previous worked at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, where she was part of the multidisciplinary team researching forest & peatland fire and transboundary haze in Southeast Asia. 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

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

Today I talked to Michael Hannah about his book Extinctions: Living and Dying in the Margin of Error (Cambridge UP, 2021). Are we now entering a mass extinction event? What can mass extinctions in Earth's history tell us about the Anthropocene? What do mass extinction events look like and how does life on Earth recover from them? The fossil record reveals periods when biodiversity exploded, and short intervals when much of life was wiped out in mass extinction events. In comparison with these ancient events, today's biotic crisis hasn't (yet) reached the level of extinction to be called a mass extinction. But we are certainly in crisis, and current parallels with ancient mass extinction events are profound and deeply worrying. Humanity's actions are applying the same sorts of pressures - on similar scales - that in the past pushed the Earth system out of equilibrium and triggered mass extinction events. Analysis of the fossil record suggests that we still have some time to avert this disaster: but we must act now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-literature Reader, soon to be published by Columbia University Press. This anthology brings together translations of nine compelling stories from Taiwan, examining Taiwan’s most vibrant literary genre and its resonance to the theme of HOME. While this podcast series has featured interviews with some of the anthology’s authors, Ian speaks from the perspective as an editor, showing why it is critical to work on translating Taiwanese eco-literature for global readers. On a personal note, Ian also reflects his own sense of belonging, and the evolving sense of HOME, and how Taiwan has played a key role in that journey. 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 Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) that brings together multiple perspectives on Russian and Soviet environmental history. Starting with the story of two dams built 150 years apart, Breyfogle discusses both continuity and change in how Russian and Soviet citizens and its various governments viewed the environment. The focus of the volume is contextualizing and “de-exceptionalizing” Russia and the USSR by placing Russian and Soviet environmental history in a global context as well as demonstrating how the environment can profoundly impact the course of human history.  Listen in as we discuss both the tragedies and triumphs of Russian and Soviet environmental policies, ecology and conservation, such as dam building, collectivization, industrialization, eco-tourism and the rise of the Soviet environmental movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable. In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil. In Sawyer’s analysis, chemistry proves crucial. Analytically, it affords a grammar for appreciating how molecular, technical, and legal agencies catalyzed distinct jurisdictional renderings. Empirically, the chemistry of hydrocarbons (its complexity, unfathomability, and misattribution) significantly shaped competing judicial determinations. Ultimately, chemical, scientific, contractual, and litigating techniques precipitated this legal saga’s metamorphic transformation, transmuting a contamination claim into an environmental liability, then a racketeering scheme, and then a breach of treaty. Holding the paradoxes of complicity in suspension, Dr. Sawyer deftly demonstrates how crude matters, technoscience, and liberal legality configure how risk and reward, deprivation and disavowal, suffering and surfeit become legally and unevenly distributed. 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

A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surface have led to predictions that the region could provide a third of global demand. But who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?  A work of stunning analysis and reporting, Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future (The New Press, 2024) shows that the questions raised by Lithium Valley lie at the heart of the “green transition.” Weaving together movement politics, federal policy, and autoworker struggles, noted experts Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor stress that getting the lithium out from under the earth is just a first step: the real question is whether the region and the nation will get out from under the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and racial injustice that have been as much a part of the landscape as the Salton Sea itself. What happens in Lithium Valley, the authors argue, will not stay there. This tiny patch of California is a microcosm of the broad climate challenges we face; understanding Lithium Valley today is the key to grasping the future of our economy and our planet. 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 Boyd is a humorist and long-time veteran of creative campaigns for social change. He led the decade-long satirical media campaign “Billionaires for Bush,” and is co-founder of both Agit-Pop Communications, an award-winning creative agency and the netroots powerhouse The Other 98%, which specializes in winning the battle of the ‘story’ through meme warfare with some of the Internet’s most viral original political content. For the last many years, he has been grappling with the issue of Climate Change, co-creating the Climate Ribbon grief-storytelling ritual and leading the Climate Clock project, which melds art, science, tech and grassroots organizing I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor (New Society, 2023) is Andrew’s third. And it provides an intellectual journey through both essays & interviews, which at once shows Andrew’s passion and his quest to understand the paradoxes of the existential climate crisis. About the book: WITH GLOBAL WARMING projected to rocket past the 1.5°C limit, lifelong activist Andrew Boyd is thrown into a crisis of hope, and off on a quest to learn how to live with the "impossible news" of our climate doom. He searches out eight leading climate thinkers -- from collapse-psychologist Jamey Hecht to grassroots strategist adrienne maree brown, eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, and Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer -- asking them: "Is it really the end of the world? and if so, now what?" With gallows humor and a broken heart, Boyd steers readers through their climate angst as he walks his own. From storm-battered coastlines to pipeline blockades and "hopelessness workshops," he maps out our existential options, and tackles some familiar dilemmas: "Should I bring kids into such a world?" "Can I lose hope when others can't afford to?" and "Why the fuck am I recycling?" He finds answers that will surprise, inspire, and maybe even make you laugh in this insightful and irreverent guide for achieving a "better catastrophe." 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 weather governs our lives. It fills gaps in conversations, determines our dress, and influences our architecture. No matter how much our lives may have moved indoors, no matter how much we may rely on technology, we still monitor the weather. Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Mississippi, 2023) draws from folkloric, literary, and scientific theory to offer up new ways of thinking about this most ancient of phenomena. Weatherlore is a concept that describes the folk beliefs and traditions about the weather that are passed down casually among groups of people. Weatherlore can be predictive, such as the belief that more black than brown fuzz on a woolly bear caterpillar signals a harsh winter. It can be the familiar commentary that eases daily social interactions, such as asking, "Is it hot (or cold) enough for you?" Other times, it is simply ubiquitous: "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change." From detailing personal experiences at picnics and suburban lawns to critically analyzing storm stories, novels, and flood legends, contributors offer engaging multidisciplinary perspectives on weatherlore. As we move further into the twenty-first century, an increasing awareness of climate change and its impacts on daily life calls for a folkloristic reckoning with the weather and a rising need to examine vernacular understandings of weather and climate. Weatherlore helps us understand and shape global political conversations about climate change and biopolitics at the same time that it influences individual, group, and regional lives and identities. We use weather, and thus its folklore, to make meaning of ourselves, our groups, and, quite literally, our 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

Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates the social life of Black Power politics across the African diaspora from the 1950s through the 1980s. Told through Bermudian activist and engineer Pauulu Kamarakafego’s life, Swan takes readers on a journey through Black radical diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, western, eastern, and southern Africa, and Oceania. A global history of Pan-African organizing, Swan examines various dimensions of Black radicalism, and importantly demonstrates the centrality of environmental activism to Black Power and anticolonial politics. As Swan reconstructs this complex web of global Black radicalism, he also uncovers the ways that Black activists and organizations pivoted in response to international networks of Western surveillance and subterfuge. Readers come to appreciate how Black radicalism shaped anticolonial independence struggles in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, for instance, while evaluating how those struggles in turn, reformulated global Black Power. Scholars seeking to understand the enduring and far-reaching entailments of Black radical politics should study this path-breaking book on Black internationalism. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the "affective infrastructures" emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire--crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era's immense environmental struggles.  Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century (U Minnesota Press, 2022) reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements 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

Journalist John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for over forty years. In this interview with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel, Markoff talks about his long career, how he became a “tech journalist” long before that term even existed, and how he came to write his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Markoff and Vinsel also talk about how Brand’s life is interwoven with the history of Silicon Valley and the technology its companies have made. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), Toshihiro Higuchi presents a history of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, by which the then-nuclear powers, US, USSR, and UK, agreed to cease, among other things, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, largely moving such tests underground (the Chinese and French continued atmospheric tests in subsequent decades). Higuchi examines the development of knowledge about nuclear fallout, the dissemination and often suppression (mostly by governments of the nuclear powers) of that knowledge during the eighteen years book-ended by the 1945 Trinity Test and the signing of the 1963 Treaty. Political Fallout also considers the legacy of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which reduced fallout but was followed by an accelerated arms race and buildup of nuclear arsenals. 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 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

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery. In Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and centre. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-colour journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation. 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

What does the Bible say about ecology? As people face huge ecological challenges-including growing hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and plastic pollution-the groundbreaking Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee's Eco Bible (Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, 2020) dives into this question. Drawing on 3,500 years of religious ethics, it shows how the Bible itself and its great scholars embrace care for God's creation as a fundamental and living message. Eco Bible both informs the reader and inspires spiritual commitment and action to protect all of God's creation. This 'earth Bible' is a great read for those interested in Jewish and Christian social issues. It also represents an important contribution to eco theology, and to the spiritual ecology movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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 rdenning13@gmail.com 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

Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is lactose-intolerant? Why are gigantic new dairy farms permitted to deplete the sparse water resources of desert ecosystems? Why do thousands of U.S. dairy farmers every year give up after struggling to recoup production costs against plummeting wholesale prices? Exploring these questions and many more, Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood (Columbia UP, 2023) is an unflinching and meticulous critique of the glorification of fluid milk and its alleged universal benefits. Anne Mendelson's groundbreaking book chronicles the story of milk from the Stone Age peoples who first domesticated cows, goats, and sheep to today's troubled dairy industry. Spoiled shows that drinking fresh milk was rare until Western scientific experts who were unaware of genetic differences in the ability to digest lactose deemed it superior to traditional fermented dairy products. Their flawed beliefs fueled the growth of a massive and environmentally devastating industry that turned milk into a cheap, ubiquitous commodity. Mendelson's wide-ranging account also examines the consequences of homogenization and refrigeration technologies, the toll that modern farming takes on dairy cows, and changing perceptions of raw milk since the advent of pasteurization. Unraveling the myths and misconceptions that prop up the dairy industry, Spoiled calls for more sustainable, healthful futures in our relationship with milk and the animals that provide it. Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

Today I talked to Robert Kirk, the publisher of Princeton University Press's "Pedia" book series. Encyclopedic in nature and miniature in form, these books explore the wonders of the natural world, from A to Z. These brief compendiums cover wide ground in thoughtful, witty, and endlessly fascinating entries on the science, natural history, and culture of their subjects. Books in the series include: Insectpedia, Dinopedia, Geopedia, Treepedia, Birdpedia, Florapedia and Fungipedia. More titles are forthcoming! Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.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

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

The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination.  In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. Henry examines cultural representations that imagine a just transition, a concept rooted in the U.S. labor and environmental justice movements to describe an alternative economic paradigm predicated on sustainability, economic and social equity, and climate resilience. Focused on regions of water insecurity, from central Arizona to central Appalachia, Henry explores how writers, artists, and activists have creatively responded to intensifying water crises in the United States and argues that narrative and storytelling are critical to environmental and social justice advocacy. By drawing on a wide and comprehensive range of narrative texts, historical documentation, policy papers, and literary and cultural scholarship, Henry presents a timely project that examines the social movement, just transition, and the logic of the Green New Deal, in addition to contemporary visions of environmental justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between empires and the creatures they govern. What is the relationship between the subjugation of human communities and that of animals? How did various interactions with animals enable articulations of power between diverse peoples? This book is one of the first to tackle these questions in the context of a Southeast Asian colonial city. Drawing from rich, archival material and with an attentiveness to visual sources, this study analyses the varied and messy positioning of animals in a city – as sources of protein, vectors of disease, cherished pets and impressed labor. The book’s deliberate focus on everyday animals such as dogs and horses – common in growing cities worldwide at the time – connects the history of colonial Singapore to a broader urban history, addressing what modernity means in terms of human-animal relationships. In our conversation, we discuss more-than-human-imperialism, the question of animal agency, the performative aspects of animal welfare and a few exciting, related reading recommendations by the author. Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on 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

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

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 almaazmi@princeton.edu 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

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

How does the Bible instruct humans to interact with the Earth? Over the last few decades, white conservative evangelical Christians have increasingly taken positions against environmental protections. To understand why, Meghan Cochran talks with Neall W. Pogue about his book The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022) in which he examines how the religious right became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation.  Until the 1990s, theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies of Christian environmental stewardship were uncontroversial. However, when some in the evangelical community began to lean towards environmental activism in response to human caused climate change, their effort was overwhelmed by some conservative leaders who stressed a position against environmentalism. They ridiculed conservation efforts, embraced conspiracy theories, and refuted the expanding scientific literature. Pogue explains how different ideas of nature helped to construct a conservative evangelical political movement that rejected long-standing beliefs regarding Christian environmental stewardship. Suggested readings:  The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change by Robin Globus Veldman (University of California Press, 2019) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press, 2016) Meghan Cochran studies belief and action as a technologist working in customer experience and as a student of religion, business, and literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso Books, 2020), Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual, and Robert Pollin, the renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change—and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Green New Deal. Together, Chomsky and Pollin show how the forecasts for a hotter planet strain the imagination: vast stretches of the Earth will become uninhabitable, plagued by extreme weather, drought, rising seas, and crop failure. Arguing against the misplaced fear of economic disaster and unemployment arising from the transition to a green economy, they show how this bogus concern encourages climate denialism. Humanity must stop burning fossil fuels within the next thirty years and do so in a way that improves living standards and opportunities for working people. This is the goal of the Green New Deal and, as the authors make clear, it is entirely feasible. Climate change is an emergency that cannot be ignored. This book shows how it can be overcome both politically and economically. Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His books include Greening the Global Economy (2015), Back to Full Employment (2012), and A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (2008). 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 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

What is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question within a framework of gravity and geologic deep-time, Lindsay Starkey demonstrates in her monograph, Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe Through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) how thinkers from antiquity to the sixteen-century held their own beliefs explaining the complex relation between dry land and water. After providing a detailed intellectual genealogy connecting the Early Modern Period with antiquity based on the transmission of knowledge through bookish methods, Starkey provides an extensively researched analysis explaining how and why perspectives and concerns about water began shifting in the sixteenth century due to sea voyages that revised medieval speculation about geographic composition of land-mass and oceans in the southern hemisphere. As we join the bookish lineage with Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond please enjoy the episode not just for the incredible insight into the past, but to use as an opportunity to reconsider our current water crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide. US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes everyday items like wheat bread, peanuts, and chicken nuggets, and shows the part they played in the making of America. What did the British colonists think about the corn they observed Indigenous people growing? How are oranges connected to Roosevelt's New Deal? And what can green bean casserole tell us about gender roles in the mid-20th century? Weaving food into colonialism, globalization, racism, economic depression, environmental change and more, Anna Zeide shows how America has evolved through the food it eats. Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and the founding director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, USA. She has previously written Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (2018), which won a 2019 James Beard Media Award, and co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (2021). 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

On September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction throughout its many neighborhoods. For the whiter, wealthier, parts of the city, the flood was an inconvenient detriment to business. For the Latinx West Side, it was a devastating tragedy.  In West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Miller (Maverick Books, 2021), Pomona College professor Char Miller explains why this flood happened, what made it so devastating, and how it galvanized a community activist movement that remade San Antonio politics. Miller uses never-before analyzed sources to explain how flood control and urban redevelopment left the city's most vulnerable population behind in the disaster's aftermath, and how this blatant environmental racism formed the nuclear of several generations of environmental activist organizations. By taking the story of 1921 into the twenty-first century, Miller argues that a story that could be told as simple tragedy in fact represents the best in the human spirit, as people band together to aid one another and seize power for themselves. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. 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 pace, intensity, and scale at which humans have altered our planet in recent decades is unprecedented. We have dramatically transformed landscapes and waterways through agriculture, logging, mining, and fire suppression, with drastic impacts on public health and human well-being. What can we do to counteract and even reverse the worst of these effects? Restore damaged ecosystems. Karen Holl's Primer of Ecological Restoration (Island Press, 2020) is a succinct introduction to the theory and practice of ecological restoration as a strategy to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems. In twelve brief chapters, the book introduces readers to the basics of restoration project planning, monitoring, and adaptive management. It explains abiotic factors such as landforms, soil, and hydrology that are the building blocks to successfully recovering microorganism, plant, and animal communities. Additional chapters cover topics such as invasive species and legal and financial considerations. Each chapter concludes with recommended reading and reference lists, and the book can be paired with online resources for teaching. Perfect for introductory classes in ecological restoration or for practitioners seeking constructive guidance for real-world projects, Primer of Ecological Restoration offers accessible, practical information on recent trends in the field. Karen D. Holl is a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught ecological restoration for over 20 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

We know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms and supply psychological benefits to humans as well, improving our moods and beautifying the landscape around us. But plants don't just passively provide. They also take action. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They "know" what and who they are, and they use this knowledge to make a way in the world. Plants experience a kind of sensation that does not require eyes or ears. They distinguish kin, friend, and foe, and they are able to respond to ecological competition despite lacking the capacity of fight-or-flight. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors that allow them to maximize their chances of survival in a dynamic and sometimes unfriendly environment. Lessons from Plants (Harvard UP, 2021) enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery's meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do? Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.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

How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford University Press 2019) explores these battles in the most sensitive geographic spaces of the Federal Republic. Join us for a conversation with Astrid M. Eckert illuminating how the border reflected Cold War debates back to society in ways that continue to shape German history. In a fascinating exploration of economic dislocation, border tourism, and the first environmental history of the wall, Eckert shows how borders become actors in their own right. Astrid M. Eckert is an Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta where she teaches 19th- and 20th-century German and European history. Her research has contributed to the Historical Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office, while her book on The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War received the Waldo Gifford Leland Award. You can listen to an interview with Eckert about The Struggle for the Files here. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler's Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. 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 Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the works of individuals who are creating a new and vibrant wave of environmental justice scholarship. methodology, and activism. The 18 essays in this collection explore a wide range of controversies and debates, from the U.S. and other societies. An important theme throughout the book is how vulnerable and marginalized populations—the incarcerated, undocumented workers, rural populations, racial and ethnic minorities—bear a disproportionate share of environmental risks. Each reading concludes with a suggested assignment that helps student explore the topic independently and deepen their understanding of the issues raised. Stentor Danielson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Slippery Rock 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

Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.” Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this groundbreaking work moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place crooked cats at the center of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists.  Nayanika Mathur's book Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores in vivid detail the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer startling new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. Through creative ethnographic storytelling, Crooked Cats illuminates the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement. Weaving together “beastly tales” spun from encounters with big cats, Mathur deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and conceptualization of the climate crisis. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.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

Today I talked to Sequoia Nagamatsu about his novel How High We Go in the Dark (William Morrow, 2022). In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects--a pig--develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet. From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.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

In From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Marco Grasso examines the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry's obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of climate ethics and policy. Grasso argues that by indiscriminately flooding the global economy with fossil fuels—while convincing the public that halting climate change is a matter of consumer choice, that fossil fuels are synonymous with energy, and that a decarbonized world would take civilization back to the Stone Age—Big Oil is morally responsible for the climate crisis. He explains that it has managed to avoid being held financially accountable for past harm and that its duty of reparation has never been theoretically developed or justified. With this book, he fills those gaps. After making the moral case for climate reparations and their implementation, Grasso develops Big Oil's duty of decarbonization, which entails its transformation into Big Green by phasing out carbon emissions from its processes and, especially, its products. 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

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 darts@citedmedia.ca 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

Hardly a day goes by without news of the extinction or endangerment of yet another animal species, followed by urgent but largely unheeded calls for action. An eloquent denunciation of the failures of Canada's government and society to protect wildlife from human exploitation, Max Foran's The Subjugation of Canadian Wildlife: Failures of Principle and Policy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018) argues that a root cause of wildlife depletions and habitat loss is the culturally ingrained beliefs that underpin management practices and policies. Tracing the evolution of the highly contestable assumptions that define the human–wildlife relationship, Foran stresses the price wild animals pay for human self-interest. Using several examples of government oversight at the federal, provincial, and territorial levels, from the Species at Risk Act to the Biodiversity Strategy, Protected Areas Network, and provincial management plans, this volume shows that wildlife policies are as much – or more – about human needs, priorities, and profit as they are about preservation. Challenging established concepts including ecological integrity, adaptive management, sport hunting as conservation, and the flawed belief that wildlife is a renewable resource, the author compels us to recognize animals as sentient individuals and as integral components of complex ecological systems. Kyle Johannsen is an academic philosopher who does research in animal and environmental ethics, and in political philosophy. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). You can follow him on Twitter @KyleJohannsen2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, in Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design. Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Dr. Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams—have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons. 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. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your 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

Migration and architecture have emerged as a new topic of research at a global level. Migrant worker dormitories in Singapore, for example, are sites where structural inequities in architecture and legal regulations have had a significant impact on the living conditions of migrant workers, and they hit the headlines in 2020 as sites for the rapid spread of COVID. Dr Jennifer Ferng joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to talk about the relationship between architecture and labour, arguing that climate change, capital, and power intersect with the forced displacement of migrants to reinforce existing inequalities of ethnicity, class, and citizenship in Singapore. About Jennifer Ferng: Dr Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Academic Director at the University of Sydney. Her research addresses asylum seekers and refugees, forced displacement, and migration in the built environment of the Asia-Pacific region. Most recently, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at University College London in 2021. 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

In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and rebranding of all DC Comics--transformed the character from a joke to an important figure of ecological justice. In this series, Aquaman becomes an accessible figure for charting environmental violences endemic to global capitalism and for developing a progressive and popular ecological imagination. Poll argues that The New 52 Aquaman should be read as an allegory that responds to the crises of the Anthropocene, in which the oceans have become a site of warfare and mass death. Poll contends that the series, which works to bridge the terrestrial and watery worlds, can be understood as a form of comics activism by visualizing and verbalizing how the oceans are both beyond the projects of the "human" and "humanism," and simultaneously, all-too-human geographies that are inextricable from the violent structures of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The New 52 Aquaman, Poll demonstrates, proves an important form of ocean literacy in particular and ecological literacy more generally. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it. Chris Courtney’s The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. 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 is professor of history at the University of Idaho and a leading environmental historian. His new book, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), builds on his recent biography of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to describe what happened when a major copper corporation set out its plans to establish a massive mine in Washington state. With the Wilderness Act (1964) unable to protect this area of outstanding beauty, conservationists set out to apply moral rather than legal strategies of resistance. This excellent new book shows how ordinary citizens banded together to achieve what the law could not – and how market forces ultimately worked to save Miners Ridge. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet and may even bring about the extinction of our species. Yet behind these anxieties lies an older, much deeper fear about the power that climate exerts over us. The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2024) traces the history of this idea and its pervasive influence over how we interpret world events and make sense of the human condition, from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to the afflictions of the modern psyche. Taking readers from the time of Hippocrates to the unfolding crisis of global warming today, David Livingstone reveals how climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control and race relations; been used to explain industrial development, market performance, and economic breakdown; and served as a bellwether for national character and cultural collapse. He examines how climate has been put forward as an explanation for warfare and civil conflict, and how it has been identified as a critical factor in bodily disorders and acute psychosis. A panoramic work of scholarship, The Empire of Climate maps the tangled histories of an idea that has haunted our collective imagination for centuries, shedding critical light on the notion that everything from the wealth of nations to the human mind itself is subject to climate’s imperial rule. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. 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’s recently published Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human (Indiana University Press, 2019) studies a complex of issues surrounding on-location films made in Italy and the way their production leaves lasting, material traces on the environment. The films span a number of regions and ecospheres within Italy: the Adriatic, site of the petrochemical wastelands in Antonioni’s Red Desert; the Neapolitan hinterland’s toxic waste dump in Garrone’s Gommora; the plight of an outlander goatherd in the Italian alps in Diritti’s The Wind Blows Round; the Calabrian mountains in Frammartino’s Le quattro volte; and the volcanoes of the Aeolian Islands in Taviani’s Fughe e approdi/Return to the Aeolian Islands. Past explores pressing environmental questions as well as the partnerships and collaborations of film crews, local protagonists (including human and non-human animals), and the environment as she works to bring the “matter” of cinema, its material side, into the production of its meaning. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian 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 is one of the most hotly contested environmental topics of our day. To answer criticisms and synthesize available information, scientists have been driven to devise increasingly complex models of the climate system. John D. Aber's Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change (Yale UP, 2023) conveys that the basics of climate and climate change have been known for decades, and that relatively simple descriptions can capture the major features of the climate system and help the general public understand what controls climate and weather, and how both might be changing. Renowned environmental scientist and educator John D. Aber distills what he has learned from a long fascination with weather and climate, the process of science, and the telling of the story of science. This is not a book about policies and politics. Instead, it explores how weather happens, how it relates to climate, and how science has been used to answer major questions about the Earth as a system and inform policies that have reversed environmental degradation. By providing a guided tour of the science of weather, this thoughtful survey will contribute clarity and rationality to the public understanding of climate change. Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies that may allow for a world designed by humans. He walks us through the advent of nano-scale technologies to the possibilities of deliberate marco-level ecosystem and atmospheric management. What’s more, we’re not only faced with a plethora of possibility, but journey through historical and ongoing debates regarding the ethics of it all. In fact, The Synthetic Age, is part history of emerging technologies, part mini-biography of all the key persons involved, and part window into the continued ethical debate among enthusiasts and precautionary voices. By the end, the reader is well informed on what lies ahead and is left with a charge – become engaged. After all, as Dr. Preston offers, the thing that should scare us the most about the Synthetic Age, is not the technologies themselves, but prospect of these world-shaping decisions not being made democratically. The questions that arise are too important to be left to the engineers. Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO working for decades in Mynamar. OISCA is intriguing in its own right, with roots in a postwar new religion (Ananaikyō) and connections both to right-wing politics in Japan, and with commitments both to a kind of new Shinto-derived global environmentalism and also to a Japanist/culturalist social reform agenda. Becoming One is especially significant as an object of study given not just the NGO’s unusual pedigree, but also the historical relationship between modern Japan and Burma-Myanmar and the ways in which OISCA forces us to reexamine the politics of international aid and development. Watanabe’s book is attuned to the “muddy” (dorokusai) processes of making people (hitozukuri) and constructing a shared sense of home (furusato) that animate the everyday workings of OISCA, as well as the tensions that these goals create on the ground in the training camps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic’s materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic’s saturation. 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

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

Our hosts, Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, sat down with Dominic Boyer to talk about his new book, No More Fossils, which appeared just last year (2023) from the University of Minnesota's "Forerunners" series. We talked at length about his book, its gestation in basic questions about how to divest from fossil energy and fossil culture, and the grounds for optimism about our future. In a wide ranging discussion, we also talked about utopia, our investment in memoir and place-based writing, the importance of affect and anxiety in thinking about climate, and the fiction, scholarship, and activism that gives us inspiration.  Some show notes: we talked about other work by Dominic (including his books Hyposubjects and Energopolitics); other works on energy and ecocriticism (including Patricia Jaeger's column "Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources"; Cara New Dagget's The Birth of Energy; Allen MacDuffie's Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination; and Heidi Scott's Fuel: An Ecocritical History; and Barbara Leckie's Climate Change: Interrupted); talked about matriarchal collectives and the show Station Eleven; and fiction including Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; and William Morris's News from Nowhere; and finally, Osaka University's "Fragmentary Institute of Comparative Timelines," and Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass's book, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. It was awesome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Would a claim that human possession and property rights as merely temporary seem outlandish to a 21st-century thinker? How would this idea be received in Early Modern England? In today's NBN podcast, Dr. Erin Drew addresses this question in our discussion about her new book: The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2021). Using an environmental lens to analyze popular theology, moral philosophy, law, Drew also uses the poetry of John Evelyn, Anne Finch, John Philips, John Dyer, and James Grainger to deconstruct usufruct's legacy as a moral relationship between humans and their environments in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth England. During this period, "usufruct" appears as a common point of reference and comparison across philosophical, devotional, legal, and literary discussions of the ethical parameters of possessions, use, and power. Care for trees, for example, and ecologically represent literal connections among other beings and across generations if landlords acted as responsible stewards. By laying out the structure and implications of usufruct as an environmental ethic and its role in English discourse, Dr. Drew brings to light a subversive threat to an eighteenth-century English culture that proves surprisingly conservationist while drawing attention to parallels with contemporary environmental thought and assumption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

How does corporate misinformation and partisan skepticism effect what we know about climate change? Lawrence Torcello is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Philosophy. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, democratic theory, and climate justice.  The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (Michigan State UP, 2022) reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence. Avery Weinman earned her Bachelor’s in History from UCSC and her Master’s in History from UCLA. Her work has been published in American Jewish History and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She is a naturalist, an environmentalist, and a birder. 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 dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour On February 23, 2016, Shawna Lynn Jones stepped into the brush to fight a wildfire that had consumed ten acres of terrain on a steep ridge in Malibu. Jones carried fifty pounds of equipment and a chainsaw to help contain the blaze. As she fired up her saw, the earth gave way under her feet and a rock fell from above and struck her head, knocking her unconscious. A helicopter descended to airlift her out. As it took off, she was handcuffed to the gurney. She was neither a desperate Malibu resident nor a professional firefighter. She was a female inmate firefighter, briefly trained and equipped, and paid one dollar an hour to fight fires while working off her sentence. As California has endured unprecedented wildfires over the past decade, the state has come to rely heavily on its prison population, with imprisoned firefighters making up at least 40 percent of Cal Fire’s on-the-ground fire crews. Of those imprisoned workers, 250 are women.  In Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Line of California's Wildfires (MCD, 2021), Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine to follow Jones and her fellow female inmate firefighters before, during, and—if they’re lucky—after incarceration. Lowe takes us into their lives, into the prisons and the women’s decisions to join the controversial program, into the fire camps where they live and train, and onto the front lines, where their brave work is unquestionably heroic—if often thankless. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (U Chicago Press, 2022), Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today. Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of "native" and "invasive" species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated--or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone--the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Rachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation’s economic output. Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses. Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the outdoor gear and apparel industry and an outdoor enthusiast. She is assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, a history tour guide, and a curator of museum exhibits. She lives in Denver, CO. 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

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

The news concerning climate change isn’t good. The warming of our planet now threatens to trap millions of people in extreme poverty while destabilizing the global order in ways that exacerbate existing global inequalities. Mitigation and adaptation strategies, even if adhered to, may not be sufficient. The situation seems hopeless. However, in Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (Oxford UP, 2022), Darrel Moellendorf argues that there not only is reason to hope that we might successfully address the climate crisis, but also reason to mobilize hope – to act now in ways that can forge the kind of global solidarity necessary to meet the challenge of climate change. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt 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

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

Our current food system has decimated rural communities and confined the choices of urban consumers. Even while America continues to ramp up farm production to astounding levels, net farm income is now lower than at the onset of the Great Depression, and one out of every eight Americans faces hunger. But a healthier and more equitable food system is possible. In Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021), Ken Meter shows how grassroots food and farming leaders across the U.S. are tackling these challenges by constructing civic networks. Overturning extractive economic structures, these inspired leaders are engaging low-income residents, farmers, and local organizations in their quest to build stronger communities.. Ken Meter is one of the most experienced food system analysts in the U.S., holding over 50 years of experience in community capacity building. Meter is co–author of a toolkit for measuring economic impacts of local food development and co-editor of Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons from Global Practice. He has taught at the University of Minnesota and the Harvard Kennedy School. 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

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

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

Can spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lies at the heart of the research project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise” that we focus on in this episode. Also known as TRANSSUSTAIN, the project builds on the observation that scholars, activists, and even politicians in many Asian countries have found inspiration in traditional knowledge and in the premodern texts and practices of, for instance, Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian traditions to envision more ecologically sustainable futures. Exploring the mobilization and recalibration of such traditional Asian religio-philosophical ideas in response to the global environmental crisis, the project seeks to assess the potential of Asian environmental movements for helping us build sustainable global futures. Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo. Amita Baviskar is professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Lu Chen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In today's NBN Environmental Studies interview, dancer, performer, and literary scholar Dr. Taylor Eggan joins us to speak about his new book Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and Settler Colonial Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2022). A text best described as an intellectual bestiary using environmental philosophy, literary theory, settler colonial studies, decolonial theory, and speculative realism, Unsettling Nature addresses logics embedded with ecological homecoming narratives rooted in idealistic notions of getting back to nature. By applying the impressive catalog of critical theory combined with an array of unique literary artifacts, Eggan transports the reader from the American West to Southern Africa, exploring the complex dynamics of colonial homemaking throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Structured around six chapters and two excursus, Unsettling Nature identifies the root of logics of elimination and erasure within the coloniality of nature, informing contemporary ecological homecoming narratives. Concluding the text by evoking exo-phenomenology, Eggan illustrates how unsettling settler legacies can be performed through "sustained practices of reciprocity and acts of solidarity" to recognize and resolve the uncanny anxieties of alienation and belonging embedded in Western approaches to homemaking and 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

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

Palila v Hawaii. New Zealand’s Te Urewera Act. Sierra Club v Disney. These legal phrases hardly sound like the makings of a revolution, but beyond the headlines portending environmental catastrophes, a movement of immense import has been building ― in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities across the globe. Cultures and laws are transforming to provide a powerful new approach to protecting the planet and the species with whom we share it. Lawyers from California to New York are fighting to gain legal rights for chimpanzees and killer whales, and lawmakers are ending the era of keeping these intelligent animals in captivity. In Hawaii and India, judges have recognized that endangered species ― from birds to lions ― have the legal right to exist. Around the world, more and more laws are being passed recognizing that ecosystems ― rivers, forests, mountains, and more ― have legally enforceable rights. And if nature has rights, then humans have responsibilities. In The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World (ECW Press, 2017), noted environmental lawyer David Boyd tells this remarkable story, which is, at its heart, one of humans as a species finally growing up. Read this book and your world view will be altered forever. David R. Boyd is an environmental lawyer, professor, and advocate for recognition of the right to live in a healthy environment. Boyd is the award-winning author of eight books, including The Optimistic Environmentalist, and co-chaired Vancouver’s Greenest City initiative with Mayor Gregor Robertson. He lives on Pender Island, B.C. For more information, visit DavidRichardBoyd.com. 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

Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they're thriving, these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean's surface burst with color and life. They sustain bountiful ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. Corals themselves are evolutionary marvels that build elaborate limestone formations from their collective skeletons, broker symbiotic relationships with algae, and manufacture their own fluorescent sunblock. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, damage by humans, and a devastating pandemic. Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. Alarmed by their peril, she traveled the world to discover how to prevent their loss. She met scientists and activists operating in emergency mode, doing everything they can think of to prevent coral reefs from disappearing forever. She was so amazed by the ingenuity of these last-ditch efforts that she joined in rescue missions, unexpected partnerships, and risky experiments, and helped rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties. Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs (Riverhead Books, 2022) is an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories. 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

Ian M. Miller’s book Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020) offers a transformation of our understanding of China’s early modern environmental history. Using a wide range of archival materials, including tax, deed, and timber market records, Miller presents a picture of China’s forestry regime, something that, while not centralized—as in European states—was highly effective. Though China never adopted a forest bureau system, Miller shows how China managed, through fiscal policies alone, to engender a remarkably productive commerce in timber and other forest products. Revising the narrative of deforestation, this history of China’s distinct form of forest oversight is sure to be a must-read for anyone interested in the history of China, or environmental history more broadly. Though this is a sweeping book—beginning in China’s early empires and stretching through the Song, Yuan, and Ming to end in the nineteenth century—it is also filled with a number of much more local case studies. With chapters on forest deeds, fleet construction, and the logging of the last old-growth forests for palace construction, this book not only tells a story that will have wide impacts for the field, but manages to create an intimate look at what China’s forest management system looked like to those trying to operate and profit from it. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Southern California. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. 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

Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwork quilt of forested swamps, sandy plains, and blackwater streams that spreads across the Coastal Plain between the Fall Line and the Atlantic Ocean. In these backwaters, Lumbees and other American Indians have adapted to a radically transformed world while maintaining vibrant cultures and powerful connections to land and water. This reality is paralleled in Indigenous communities worldwide as Indigenous people continue to assert their rights to self-determination by resisting legacies of colonialism and the continued transformation of their homelands through pollution, unsustainable development, and climate change.  In On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2024), environmental scientist Ryan Emanuel, a member of the Lumbee tribe, shares stories from North Carolina about Indigenous survival and resilience in the face of radical environmental changes. Addressing issues from the loss of wetlands to the arrival of gas pipelines, these stories connect the dots between historic patterns of Indigenous oppression and present-day efforts to promote environmental justice and Indigenous rights on the swamp. Emanuel's scientific insight and deeply personal connections to his home blend together in a book that is both a heartfelt and an analytical call to acknowledge and protect sacred places. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this episode of International Horizons, Professor Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and Professor in the School of International Service at American University, discusses with RBI Director John Torpey her approach to dealing with the climate crisis. Fisher explains how the climate crisis is really a social crisis for which collective action seems impossible. Fisher further explains the actions of the players involved in resisting the problem of climate change and their interests in doing so. Finally, she explains how important it is to approach change through strong communities and the solid infrastructures that support them. Fisher is the author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia UP, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies