New Books In Environmental Studies

La Batea is an unconventional book. A collaboration between anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and her photographer brother Stephen, it combines text and images to paint a picture of the lives of small-scale miners in Colombia in a unique and powerful way. Moreover, the book is physically designed to pull the reader into the topic. Cardboard covers, a specially-chosen paper, and carefully designed chosen fonts provide a unique experience which is topped off by the small piece of gold embedded in the cover. In this episode of the podcast, Alex Golub talks with Stephen and Elizabeth Ferry about the design, photography, and text of this book. They also talk about the Kickstarter they ran to create the book, and their decision to produce both Spanish and English language versions that were affordable for local communities. Other questions include: What is it like to write a book with your sibling? How elemental a human experience is mining? La Batea is available in English from Red Hook Publications and in Spanish fr

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts. The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019) is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urban

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 chang

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. Almost 70 million people depend either directly or indirectly on the Mekong for their livelihoods. It is the world’s largest inland freshwater fishery. It’s also a place of great ecological and human diversity. Until recently, the Mekong was one of the world’s least tamed rivers, but that has rapidly changed. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong (Zed Book, 2019), Bryan Eyler documents the huge disruption, both to the Mekong’s ecosystem and to the lives of the people who depend on it, caused by rampant dam construction, tourism development, pollution, not to mention climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline. Debjani Bhat

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 p

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community. You too are not who you are by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance, received from thousands of individuals as pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. As situations shift, so does your community’s capacity for learning, especially social learning, which allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes alone could adapt. Becoming Wild brings readers close to the lives of

What would actually make America great? More people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Portfolio) is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Matthew Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must. Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion American

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 re

Over the past ten years, Chantal Bilodeau has made a name for herself a playwright singularly dedicated to writing plays about the issue of climate change. These are not dry docu-dramas, but deeply human depictions of life in the far north, where climate change is a daily reality. Forward (Tanlonbooks 2018) is the latest work in her Artic Cycle, and it follows the story of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen in two temporalities: a story moving forward through Nansen’s life, and a counter-narrative moving backwards from the present until Nansen’s time. This play both depicts the life of this larger-than-life figure and explores the ripple effects of his story through 120 years of Norwegian history. This play will be of interest to anyone looking for emotional, human-scale approaches to the overwhelming reality of climate change. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Jeff Schauer explains how this global attention to African wildlife evolved from late nineteenth century to the present. By tracing a complex web of ideas, organizations and practices that developed in East and Central Africa during the era of British colonialism; Schauer shows that the history of modern conservationist movements is entangled with the development of administrative systems, increased militarization and violence, nationalist and anti-nationalist agendas and the evolution of science. In other words, “wildlife is never neutral.” The book makes a compelling argument for a more critical and deliberate engagement with ideas about wildlife and conservation. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual

Saint Lucia’s rural landscape is more forested today than at any time in at least seventy-five years (probably much longer). This change is profoundly significant given widespread efforts to achieve sustainable development on small-island states like Saint Lucia. Yet, this seemingly good-news story runs contrary to most conventional narratives about the worsening state of the environment in the Caribbean and elsewhere. How did this remarkable change come about? What role did government, the private sector and other actors play in this? What are the links between this environmental change and wider changes in the Saint Lucian economy, politics and society? Is there more to this story than meets the eye? These questions are explored in this interdisciplinary study of changing human-environment relations since the Second World War. Brad Walter's book The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies (UWI Press, 2019) is based on the results of a long-term, field-based

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 ad

Should climate change policy be subject to a cost-benefit analysis leading to a variety of policy choices? Or is it so critical that the only "proper" path is immediate and extreme carbon reduction, regardless of the costs and the impact of those measures on the welfare of the population? Bjorn Lomborg's new and controversial work, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (Basic Books, 2020) leans strongly in the direction of the former. Conducting that analysis, he comes to some shocking conclusions, notably that the "optimal" mix of global warming and economic activity sees a 6 degree or so increase in global temperatures by the end of the century. Yes, shocking. Other than some low-hanging fruit in carbon reduction through a global carbon tax, he argues that the economic math of more severe carbon reduction is challenging. Instead, Lomborg advocates more investment in poverty reduction that allows people at risk of suffering from climate change t

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops, trees and shrubs, as well as weeds. Following their example, and drawing on the expertise of émigré Russian-Jewish scientists, the US Department of Agriculture introduced more plants, agricultural sciences, especially soil science; and methods of planting trees to shelter the land from the wind. By the 1930s, many of the grain varieties in the Great Plains had been imported from the steppes. The fertile soil was classified using the Russian term 'chernozem'. The US Forest Service was planting shelterbelts using techniques pioneered in the steppes. And, tumbling across the plains was an invasive weed from the steppes: tumbleweed. Based on archival research in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, this book explores the unexpected Russian roots of Great Plains agriculture. David Moon is a history profes

Despite being a minor contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, like many other small island nations, The Bahamas’s ecology and society are especially vulnerable to current and expected changes to the oceans and the climate. Spectacular coral reefs, low-lying islands, and a social life oriented towards the sea makes The Bahamas a posterchild of the existential dangers of global warming. At the same time, The Bahamas’s economy, firmly founded on tourism, also heavily depends upon airline and cruise line fossil fuel consumption. Wading into this nexus, Amelia Moore casts an ethnographic eye towards the scientists, conservationists, educators, politicians, fisherpeople, and tourism boosters who attempt to understand and react to an age of ecological volatility. In contrast to assumptions of scientific objectivity and independence, Moore finds that science, politics, and business are deeply entangled in ways that are not apolitical and which require scrutiny to make adaptations to climate change more democr

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working-class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.” Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (St. Martin's Press, 2020) is an personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks, Whose lives are

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from env

So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a professor of psychology at King’s College London, lucidly explains how science works, and exposes the systemic issues that prevent the scientific enterprise from living up to its truth-seeking ideals. While the scientific method will always be our best way of knowing about the world, the current system of funding and publishing incentivizes bad behavior on the part of scientists. As a result, many widely accepted and highly influential theories and claims—priming, sleep and nutrition, genes and the microbiome, and a host of drugs, allergies, and therapies—are based on unreliable, exaggerated and even fraudulent papers. Bad incentives in science have influenced everything from austerity economics to the anti-vaccination movement, and occasionally count the cost of them in human lives. Stuart Ritchie has been at the vanguard

The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is turning twenty-five. One of the first academic journals focused on the study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it has been one of a few journals that led the field in new directions. So it seemed appropriate to mark the moment by talking with Richard Breitman, its long-time editor. Breitman is professor emeritus at American University and the author of several books on German history and the Holocaust. We talk in the interview about the origins of the Journal, about what it means to be the editor of an academic journal, and about how the field of Holocaust studies has evolved over the years. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices