New Books In Environmental Studies

In Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Anthony Lioi examines literature, film, television, and comics through an ecocritical study of nerd culture. Lioi explores Star Trek, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Green Lantern, and X-Men, among others to trace the history of nerd culture and how it intersects with ecocritical themes. Lioi’s work seeks to define and situate the nerd in the current landscape of popular culture and the refuge of science fiction for nerds. Through an ecocritical and postmodern lens, Lioi notes the importance of popular cultural texts in creating nerd alliances and the importance of the stories of nerd culture to embody planetary defenders. Well-researched and strongly theoretically-based, Nerd Ecology is a new take on examining the world of the nerd and popular culture as ethical and moral spaces to examine ecology. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western