New Books In Environmental Studies

Environmental sustainability policy has failed due to focusing on symptoms rather than the root cause problems. Through significant research and a detailed roadmap for how to achieve sustainability by 2050, Buffington provides a realistic, game changing path forward that is both good for the environment and the economy. Dr. Jack Buffington received a Ph.D. in Supply Chain Management from the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden, and a Post-Doctorate at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and now he is currently the Program Director/Professor for the Supply Chain Management program and the Denver Transportation Institute at the University of Denver. Jack has published over twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and seven books before this one. Jack’s current research efforts are focused on Africa, which he believes is the epicenter of where environmental innovation must be fostered. And he is also Sustainability Director at First Key Consulting, a global brewing consulting firm. Jack is coll

As global change escalates, we are already starting to experience damaging tipping points in the social, ecological and climate systems that we depend upon - and much worse is to come. These shocks tell us we have left it too late for incremental change to save us: we need to change course fast to avoid the worst, yet we are acting far too slowly. Our supposed leaders appear paralysed by the complexity of the situation or, worse still, determined to maintain the status quo. This is leading to increasing despair, especially among young people. At the same time, hopeful signs of change are also growing fast. The climate movement, the spread of electric vehicles, and the rise of renewable energy are all examples of change accelerating in the right direction. They have all passed tipping points where their uptake becomes self-propelling, taking the status quo by surprise - and they are spreading worldwide. To get ourselves out of trouble in time, we need more of these positive tipping points towards global susta

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship

As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (MIT Press, 2024), Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore.Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic new world city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in va

­A Glimpse of Ogoni Women’s Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2025) with Mariam Olugbodi “Ogoni Women’s Activism” is a democratic feminist movement, and a nonviolent struggle against oil spills and environmental destruction in the Niger-Delta Nigeria in the 90s. The Federation of Ogoni Women Activists (FOWA) emerges to charge forward the course of sovereignty for both humans and the Niger-Delta ecosystem. The nonviolent resistance of the Ogoni Women through prayer meetings, fasting, and singing for community mobilisation epitomises a "love in action" (Dube, 2025) strategy to identity negotiation in the face of dehumanisation. The book, Ogoni Women’s Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice, is a voyage into the history of the Ogoni tribes of the Niger-Delta, their lives, their ordeals of racism in their home nation with highlights of experiences of African immigrant women, the racialised refugees abroad, who fled from their home nation to seek sovere

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.KSR, Stan to his friends, brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civi

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA (Syracuse University Press, 2021). This book masterfully bridges the gap between academic research and real-world policy implications. Hear from the author himself as he reflects on the historical roots of disaster policy, the political forces that shape emergency response, and the enduring implications for governance today. Timothy W. Kneeland is a Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at Nazareth University. He writes on American politics and disaster policy, American science, and psychiatry. ABOUT THE BOOK: On Friday, January 28, 1977, it began to snow in Buffalo. The second largest city in New York State, located directly in line with the Great Lakes’ snowbelt, was no stranger to this kind of winter weather. With their city averaging ninety-four inches of snow per year, the citizens of Buffalo knew how to survive a snow

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens have on communities after disasters and the efforts of well-intended individuals envisioning alternative futures in the form of urban farming. Drawing on repeated interviews with residents who began cultivation projects in New Orleans between 2005 and 2015, Kato explains how good intentions and grit were not enough to implement or sustain urban gardeners’ visions for the post-disaster city’s future. Coining the term “prefigurative urbanism,” Kato illustrates how individuals tried to realize alternative ways of living and working in the city through pragmatism and innovation. Gardens of Hope asks key questions about wh

In A Reverence for Rivers: Imagining an Ethic for Running Waters (OSU Press, 2025), Kurt Fausch draws on his experience as a stream ecologist, his interest in Indigenous cultures, and a thoughtful consideration of environmental ethics to explore human values surrounding freshwater ecosystems. Focusing on seven rivers across the globe—from the Salmon River in Oregon to the Sarufutsu River in Japan—he examines the growing ethical dilemmas threatening our rivers, including increasing demands for water, habitat fragmentation, overfishing, and deepening climate change. How do we decide which rivers deserve legal protection? What is our right to water as humans? And how do we foster resilient rivers? Through a combination of scientific expertise and thoughtful observations of the natural world, Fausch translates the science of rivers into accessible language for readers and begins to address these questions. He weaves deep Indigenous histories throughout the book and includes personal visits to tribal lands to ex

The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force--and the science behind it. Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity (Univ of California Press, 2025) is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why. Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revo

It has been 10 years since the Paris Agreements of 2015 and – despite the initial enthusiasm – global investment in fossil fuels has increased and we seem to be on course to overshoot the limit of 1.5 degrees warming. Why is this happening? In this episode Licia Cianetti talks with Wim Carton about his book (co-authored with Andreas Malm) Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso 2024), which provides some of the answers. In this conversation, we bust a few myths: that we are gradually (if slowly) moving in the right direction, that climate denialism is the only obstacle to change, that we are at the cusp of a green capitalist revolution, and that carbon capture technologies will save the day. We also try to imagine a way forward. Wim Carton is a Senior Lecturer at Lund University’s Centre for Sustainability Studies. Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Polit

It has been 10 years since the Paris Agreements of 2015 and – despite the initial enthusiasm – global investment in fossil fuels has increased and we seem to be on course to overshoot the limit of 1.5 degrees warming. Why is this happening? In this episode Licia Cianetti talks with Wim Carton about his book (co-authored with Andreas Malm) Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso 2024), which provides some of the answers. In this conversation, we bust a few myths: that we are gradually (if slowly) moving in the right direction, that climate denialism is the only obstacle to change, that we are at the cusp of a green capitalist revolution, and that carbon capture technologies will save the day. We also try to imagine a way forward. Wim Carton is a Senior Lecturer at Lund University’s Centre for Sustainability Studies. Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Polit

In Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), Emma Marris wrestles with big ethical questions facing the conservation field. Emma takes us through several experiences that informed the book, exposing us to relevant on-the-ground decisions impacting the life or death of animals. When the interests of individual animals conflict with the goals of biodiversity preservation, is it okay to kill? Are any animals truly wild now that humans have directly altered so much of their habitat? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? To start engaging these, and other questions, Emma takes us through a needed crash course in ethics, specifically environmental ethics. Much like her previous work, we are exposed to new ways of thinking about old problems. Listening in will not disappoint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwo

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2025), solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar’s extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradi

What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home. Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region to the religions, languages, and cultural and po

In this episode, host Alex Batesmith sits down with Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Lauren Dempster to discuss their groundbreaking new book, Green Transitional Justice (Routledge, 2025). The conversation explores the urgent need to rethink transitional justice (TJ) in light of the environmental crises facing post-conflict societies. Dr Killean and Dr Dempster begin by explaining what drew them to the intersection of TJ and environmental harm. Their book emerges from a shared concern that traditional TJ mechanisms—designed to address human rights violations in post-conflict settings—have largely ignored the profound and lasting harms inflicted on Nature. They deliberately use the term “harms against Nature” to signal a shift away from anthropocentric language and to foreground the agency and value of the natural world. The book is structured around four major critiques of the TJ field. First, the authors argue that knowledge production in TJ is shaped by Eurocentric and neocolonial perspectives, often marginalisin

This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate change and its implications for voluntary migration, involuntary displacement, and immobility by providing examples from around the world. The chapters use the latest findings from the natural and social sciences to identify key interactions shaping current climate-related migration, displacement, and immobility; predict future changes in those patterns and methods used to model them; summarize key policy and governance instruments available to us to manage the movements of people in a changing climate; and offer directions for future research and opportunities. The book provides insights into how migration responses differ for slow- and rapid-onset climate-related hazards (including sea level rise, drought, flooding, tropical cyclones,

The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austin is an exploration of how the rising power and profits of Wall Street underpin the contemporary increases in and inadequate responses to vector-borne disease. Over the past fifty years, insects have transmitted infectious diseases to humans with greater frequency and in more unexpected places. To examine this phenomenon, Dr. Kaup and Dr. Austin take readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda. Through these case studies, the authors illuminate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book fo

These days it’s harder than ever to watch TV, scroll social media, or even just sit at home looking out of the window without contemplating the question at the heart of philosopher Todd May’s Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times (Crown, 2024). Facing climate destruction and the revived specter of nuclear annihilation even as humans continue to cause untold suffering to our fellow creatures on planet Earth, we are forced each day to contemplate whether the world would be better off in our absence. In this timely, fascinating examination, May, a renowned philosopher and advisor to the acclaimed TV show The Good Place, reasons both for and against the continuation of our species, trying to help us understand how and whether, the positive and negative tallies of the human ledger are comparable, and what conclusions we might draw about ourselves and our future from doing so. He discusses the value that only humans can bring to the world and to one another as well as the goods, l

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, is joined by guest, Johanna Drucker,  an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. In a discussion on Drucker's recent publication, Affluvia: The Toxic Off-Gassing of Affluent Culture (Bridge Books, 2025), they cover topics of invisible labour, globalisation, sustainability and more.  Affluvia, a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture, explores the ecological costs of innocuous-seeming daily routines. Delving deeper into Drucker's own  ten minute morning routine, the book examines the lifecycle of production and consumption, revealing the ways these familiar objects are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts, with each chapter focussing on one part of Drucker's routine. "Ma