New Books In Environmental Studies

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict. In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress. Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Off

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

With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio UP, 2022) in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species

In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU, retraces the history of gold mining and orpaillage along the geological formation known as the West African Birimian Greenstone Belt. D’Avignon proposes the expression “ritual geology” to refer to “a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth”, which has both endured until today among local miners and evolved since its first traces dating back to the 9th century. More than an effort to recover a legacy of knowledge about the subterranean, which has been virtually erased during the colonial period and subsequently criminalized, A Ritual Geology addresses the challenges currently being faced by local communities due to the conquering presence of corporate mining in the region. By situating the present situation within the rich history of this transnational “ritual geology”, d’Avignon’s book does not only provide a new

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 w

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham UP, 2019) argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights

In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally

After the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What to do? The stories captured in this book encompass their answer to that question: the clean-up efforts, the work with governmental and non-governmental aid agencies, and the fraught choices concerning rebuilding. Through a rich and varied set of oral histories that provide perspective on disaster planning, response, and recovery in New Jersey, Abigail Perkiss captures the experience of these individuals caught in between short-term preparedness initiatives that municipal and state governments undertook and the long-term planning decisions that created the conditions for catastrophic property damage. Through these stories, Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore (Cornell UP, 2022) lays bare the ways that climate change and sea level rise are creating critical vulnerabilities in the most densely populated areas in the nation, illuminating the human toll of

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequence

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to expla

How the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers (CRC Press, 2022) offers a simple and novel theoretical approach to understanding the history of the biosphere, including humanity’s place within it. It also helps to clarify what the possibilities and limitations are for future action. This is a subject of wide interest because today we are facing a great many environmental issues, many of which may appear unconnected. Yet all these issues are part of our biosphere. For making plans for the future and addressing our long-term survival and well-being, an integrated knowledge of our biosphere and its history is therefore indispensable. Key Features: Documents what the biosphere is, and what our position as humans within it is today. Describes how the biosphere has become the way it is.  Summarizes the novel simple theoretical model proposed in the book, and thus, how the biosphere functions.  Predicts what the possibilities and limitations are for future human action  Emphasizes how sim

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

German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and suffering of indigenous populations. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort to turn outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Berghahn Books, 2022), Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaiserreich’s everyday violence. Martin Kalb is an Associate Professor of History at Bridgewater College in Virginia. Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing par

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022), leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death. Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism and The Old is

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population. Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the We

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value (Lexington Books, 2022). Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorate some of this suffering, the morality of wilderness preservation is itself in question. Joshua S. Duclos argues that the technological and ethical reality of the Anthropocene warrants a fundamental reassessment of the value of wilderness. After exposing the moral ambiguity of wilderness preservation, he explores the value of wilderness itself by engaging with anthropocentricism and nonanthropocentrism; sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism; and instrumental value and intrinsic value. Duclos argues that the value of wilderness is a narrow form of anthropocentric intrinsic value, one with a religio-spiritual dimens

From the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to the Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, the internationally acclaimed author of Farmageddon, goes behind the scenes of industrial farming and confronts 'Big Agriculture', where mega-farms, chemicals and animal cages are sweeping the countryside and jeopardising the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the nature that we treasure. In his investigations, however, he also finds hope in the pioneers who are battling to bring landscapes back to life, who are rethinking farming methods, rediscovering traditional techniques and developing technologies to feed an ever-expanding global population. Impassioned, balanced and persuasive, Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future (Bloomsbury, 2022) not only demonstrates why future harvests matter more than ever, but reveals how we can restore our planet for a nature-friendly future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military in

Alex Nathanson's book A History of Solar Power Art and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of creative applications of photovoltaic (PV) solar power, including sound art, wearable technology, public art, industrial design, digital media, building integrated design, and many others. The growth in artists and designers incorporating solar power into their work reflects broader social, economic, and political events. As the cost of PV cells has come down, they have become more accessible and have found their way into a growing range of design applications and artistic practices. As climate change continues to transform our environment and becomes a greater public concern, the importance of integrating sustainable energy technologies into our culture grows as well. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, design studies, environmental studies, environmental humanities, and sustainable energy design. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for T

How we relate to orphaned space matters. Voids, marginalia, empty spaces—from abandoned gas stations to polluted waterways—are created and maintained by politics, and often go unquestioned. In Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth (Temple UP, 2022), Mrill Ingram provides a call to action to claim and to cherish these neglected spaces and make them a source of inspiration through art and/or remuneration. Ingram advocates not only for “urban greening” and “green planning,” but also for “radical caring.” These efforts create awareness and understanding of ecological connectivity and environmental justice issues—from the expropriation of land from tribal nations, to how race and class issues contribute to creating orphaned space. Case studies feature artists, scientists, and community collaborations in Chicago, New York, and Fargo, ND, where grounded and practical work of a fundamentally feminist nature challenges us to build networks of connection and care. The work of environmental ar

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 Enviro