New Books In Environmental Studies

One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus―and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded―is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will have to adjust. His well-research and multi-faceted book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (Columbia UP, 2023) is a tour de force that is engaging, informative and a book that is hard to put down. Topics range from the potential loss of the Joshua Tree to the dangers our coral reefs face. Learning from “Lucy,” our three million year old ancestor who can be found in the Hall of Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, is a lesson Verchick tells us, can open new windows into “a saga of resilience and adaptation.” He also illustrates how intersectionality can help