New Books In 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 zoomorph

Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be out of date. Rivers have impulses that defy many of the basic human assumptions underpinning otherwise sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city expression of climate change.  In Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Stephanie Kane shows how geoscience, engineering, and law converge to affect flood control in Winnipeg. She questions technicalities produced and maintained in tandem with settler folkways at the expense of the plural legal cultures of Indigenous nations. The dynamics of this experimental ethnography feel familiar yet strange: here, many of the starring actors are not human. Ice and water - materializing as bodies, elements, and digital signa

Human-caused climate change is real and growing in impact. Yet many Americans see climate change as a belief that they can opt out of. Two belief structures are to blame: American Protestantism and postmodernism. Guests: Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology and psychology at Stanford University and author of When God Talks Back. Gary Aylesworth, professor emeritus of philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and author of Post-Truth. 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 Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (U California Press, 2022), historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity. Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou

Many of us have likely seen photos of the Aral Sea, and the rusted Soviet-era ships, sitting in the desert with no water in sight. The Aral Sea is now just 10% of its former volume, shrinking down from what was once the fourth-largest body of inland water in the world, after what writer Jeff Fernside calls “one of the worst human-caused environmental catastrophes.” Jeff traveled to the region as a Peace Corps volunteer. Afterward, he turned his experiences into an essay collection, Ships in the Desert (Santa Fe Writers Project: 2022), where Jeff writes about the families he met, his thoughts on missionaries, and his visit to the Aral Sea, where he saw “a fleet of rusting Soviet fishing ships, hammer and sickle still clearly discernible on many, sitting bolt upright in desert sands as if plowing through ocean waves.” Jeff Fearnside is the author of the short-story collection Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: 2006), which won the 2005 SFWP Awards Progr

What is the difference between global warming and climate change? This episode explores: What led Dr. Wu into STEM, and to the study of climate change. Why the term global warming is misleading, and potentially confusing. Why weather around the world is getting more extreme. What she foresees for the future, and what we can do to change that. Why human choices matter on much a larger scale than most people realize. A discussion of the article “Looking Back on America’s Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal”. Today’s article is: Looking Back on America's Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal by Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, which provides an overview of the record-breaking heat and historic floods of 2022. Dr. Wu discusses how the new abnormal is increasingly seen as the new weather pattern, why it’s dangerous to normalize this, and what we can do change it. “Welcome to the New Abnormal” was published in The Conversation on September 21, 2022. Our

Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and MacArthur “genius prize” winner, talks about her book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Waste examines the brutal realities of rural sanitation issues, particularly the lack of septic tanks, and how they affect poor, often black, people. Flowers also reflects on growing up in Lowndes County, Alabama and how her family, the Civil Rights Movement, and her faith life led her to be the leader she is today. 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 collection of 42 essays meditating on both California’s natural gifts and its natural disasters, Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril (Chin Music, 2022) urges readers to consider their role in the environment, no matter where they live. Char Miller’s approach to his topic is intimate and immediate but also incorporates his perspective as a historian. He weaves the present dilemma of Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite into a reflection on the injustices wreaked upon Indigenous peoples, and a discussion of the Weeks Act of 1911 (read the essay “Upper Reaches” if you’re wondering what that is) into a tale of two environmental historians’ conferences. Organized into six sections, the book is like a meander through a broad topography, including urban areas, total wilderness, and the uneasy liminal spaces between. Throughout, Miller acknowledges his own, and our collective, role in arriving at this perilous place – and manages to strike a balance between hope and concern. His disarmingly brief es

For most of human history, the Mediterranean was home to a significant number of pastoralists, who herded livestock along seasonal migratory routes. Today, traces of this pastoralist presence have all but disappeared. Dr. Andrea Duffy's book Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the 19th-Century Mediterranean World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) seeks to answer the question - what caused the decline and retreat of Mediterranean pastoralism? Dr. Duffy explores the development of a French environmental policy which was centered around forestry and afforestation, and led to the targeting and demonization of pastoralists not only in France but throughout the Mediterranean world. In this episode, Dr. Duffy joins me to talk about pastoralism in 19th-century France, Algeria, and Anatolia, nomadism vs. transhumance, environmentalism past and present, and the legacies of pastoralism around the Mediterranean today.  Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more ab

In his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Dr. Gandy’s long-standing fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Dr. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether “urban political ecology,” broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences, and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. In this episode, Tay

Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems (Routledge, 2022) can be read as a systemic long-term counter-intervention strategy against any form of impending pandemics in the post-COVID era and beyond. It argues that anti-nature and capitalistic knowledge systems have contributed to the evolution and growth of COVID-19 across the globe and emphasises the merits of reinstating nature-based and environment-friendly pedagogical and curricular infrastructures in mainstream educational institutions. The volume also explores possible ways of weaving ecology and the environment as a habitual practice of teaching and learning in an intersectional manner with Science and Technology Studies. With detailed case studies of the green schools in Bhutan and similar practices in India, Kenya, and New Zealand, the book argues for different forms of eco-friendly education systems and the possibilities of expanding these local practices to a global stage. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researche

There is a complex relationship between climate change and food systems. Food supply chains – in particular food transportation – result in global greenhouse gas emissions, and these emissions are known to be a driving force underlying climate change. But it also works the other way. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Arunima Malik discusses the wide-ranging impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on global regional food systems and supply chains, identifying potential cascading repercussions including job and income loss as well as a loss in nutrient availability and diet quality. About Arunima Malik: Dr Arunima Malik is an academic in the Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) group at the School of Physics, and in the Discipline of Accounting, Business School of the University of Sydney. Her research focusses on big-data modelling to quantify sustainability impacts at local, national and global scales. Arunima’s research is interdisciplinary, and focuses on the appraisal of socia

In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural beauty, ecological importance, as well as being home and birthplace of the Gwich'in people. It's also thought to contain massive fossil fuel wealth, making it a site of fifty years and more political contestation.  In the award-winning book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, An Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press: 2021), Finis Dunaway explains how Indigenous people teamed up with the activist, photographer, and jazz drummer Lenny Kohm to build a grassroots movement to protect this sacred place from extractive industry. Using a humble photo slide show, Kohm and other activists, both Native people from the region and outsiders, marshaled the power of everyday people to convince critical and powerful actors that this was a place that deserved federal protection. While this fight is

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal f

What worlds take root in war? In A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (U California Press, 2022), anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as

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

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life. Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain (U Arizona Press, 2022) foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts a

Sritama Chatterjee talks about a model of literary criticism that she developed in the process of writing her new essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh. It is a form of materialist understanding for texts, places, and geographies together, taking into account particular signifiers of a place and looking at correspondent literary responses. Sritama is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World, in the Literature program at the Dietrich School of Arts and sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation project titled, “Ordinary Environments and Aesthetics in Contemporary Indian Ocean Archipelagic Writing” has been awarded an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from her graduate school for outstanding research and scholarly excellence. Her work on the Indian Ocean archipelagos also takes the shape of a collaborative public-facing, community project Delta Lives, which platforms communities in Sundarbans telling their stories. As part of her commitment to rethinking environmental humanities pe

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order (Manchester UP, 2022) examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers - the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world. Sample takeaways: China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time. Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operatio