New Books in Environmental Studies Podcast

Climate of Denial: Why Do Americans Doubt Climate Change? from 2023-01-23T09:00

Human-caused climate change is real and growing in impact. Yet many Americans see climate change as a belief that they can opt out of. Two belief structures are to blame: American Protestantism and...

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Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (Verso Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 renown...

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Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape an...

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Debjani Bhattacharyya, "Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 terr...

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Henry Shue, “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton College, Oxford) tackles this essential question ...

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Brian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 mainl...

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Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Political ecology is among the most vibrant sub-fields in the discipline of geography. Since the field first developed in the 1980s, political ecologists have pioneered new approaches to studying r...

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Sue Stuart-Smith, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chi...

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Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half...

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Karen Holl, "Primer of Ecological Restoration" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, mi...

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Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of gr...

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Matthew Yglesias, "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger" (Portfolio, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ou...

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Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Nav...

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Chantal Bilodeau, "Forward" (Tanlonbooks 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Ed...

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Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (Palgr...

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David A. Pietz, “Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David A. Pietz‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to disappear anytime soon. Using a careful history of wat...

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Brad Walters, "The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies" (UWI Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 achiev...

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Carolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration w...

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Nathalie Peutz, "Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, rept...

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Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evoluti...

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Bjorn Lomborg, "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Sally Weintrobe, “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How up to date are you on the projected impact of climate change on human civilization in the next 100 years? Once you look at latest predictions, quickly come back and listen to this interview wit...

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Amelia Moore, "Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 chang...

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Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, Helen Tiffin, “Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Cribb and his co-authors Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin have together drawn on the resources of history, literature, film, science, and cultural theory to write Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultu...

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David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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,...

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Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth...

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Kerri Arsenault, "Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains" (Martin's Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool ...

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Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 urba...

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William Viney, “Waste: A Philosophy of Things” (Bloomsbury, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is waste? William Viney‘s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, including literature, sculpture and architecture. The tex...

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Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 profess...

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Heather Menzies, “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto” (New Society Publishers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Co...

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Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 journal...

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Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers thro...

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J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, en...

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James Nisbet, “Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Lan...

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Daniel P. Aldrich, "Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of T?hoku mad...

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Silver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea” (Red Deer Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014),...

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Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and...

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Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish” (University Press of New England, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d ...

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JoAnna Poblete, "Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa" (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), JoAnna Poblete demonstrates how western-style economics, policy-making, and knowledge building impose...

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John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. T...

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Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilit...

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Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new boo...

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R. Sroufe and S. Melnyk, "Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value" (Business Expert Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Sroufe and Steven Melnyk's Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value (Business Expert Press) provides a multi-perspective approach to sustainability and value chains to allow under...

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Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jon Mooallem‘s book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals In America (Penguin, 2013) is a tour of a few places on the North American ...

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Thaisa Way, "River Cities, City Rivers" (Dumbarton Oaks, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Thaisa Way, editor of River Cities, City Rivers (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2018). Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers ca...

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John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coa...

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Kregg Hetherington, "The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By the time Bolivian President Evo Morales was deposed in December 2019, it had become increasingly clear that Latin America’s Pink Tide – the wave of left-leaning, anti-poverty governments which t...

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Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, drea...

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Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Pre...

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John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines” — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T...

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Robert Sroufe, "Integrated Management: How Sustainability Creates Value for Any Business" (Emerald, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Integration has been a key theme across the general management, organizational behavior, supply chain management, strategy, information systems and the environmental management literature for decad...

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Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? I...

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Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In h...

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Brian Allen Drake, “Loving Nature, Fearing the State” (University of Washington Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, howeve...

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Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), l...

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Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland,...

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Thomas C. Rust, "Watching over Yellowstone: The US Army's Experience in America's First National Park, 1886–1918" (UP of Kansas, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When, in 1883, Congress charged the US Army with managing Yellowstone National Park, soldiers encountered a new sort of hostility: work they were untrained for, in a daunting physical and social en...

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Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of prof...

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Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more? In The Scientific Attitude: Defe...

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Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble i...

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Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the...

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Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californi...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Jen Huntley, “The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origins of America’s Most Popular National Park” (UP of Kansas, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I used to hike in and around Yosemite National Park. To me (and I imagine thousands of other visitors), Yosemite was the embodiment of “nature,” something grand, pristine, and, well “natural.” Of c...

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Jane Hutton, "Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Mate...

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Char Miller, “Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy” (Oregon State UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington, Char Miller takes readers on a wild romp thro...

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Rosemary-Claire Collard, "Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parrots and snakes, wild cats and monkeys---exotic pets can now be found everywhere from skyscraper apartments and fenced suburban backyards to roadside petting zoos. In Animal Traffic: Lively Capi...

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Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan mig...

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Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time...

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Ray Ison, "Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World" (Springer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While various systems theories have received rigorous treatments across the literature of the field, reliable and robust advice for systems practice can be somewhat harder to come by. Ray Ison has ...

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Johan Elverskog, "The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia" (U Penn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Challenging the popular image of Buddhism as a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment, Dr. John Elverskog’s new monograph, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (U...

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Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson ...

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Jim Mason, "An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature" (Latern Books, 2002) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

First published by Simon & Schuster in 1993 and then by Continuum in 1998, Jim Mason’s An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature has become a classic. With a new Lantern edition ex...

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Adam M. Sowards, "An Open Pit Visible from the Moon" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam M. Sowards is professor of history at the University of Idaho and a leading environmental historian. His new book, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protec...

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James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show t...

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Amalia Leguizamón, "Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops. It...

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Toshihiro Higuchi, "Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), Toshihiro Higuchi presents a history of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Tr...

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Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought t...

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Michael Mascarenhas, "Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More" (Sage, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the work...

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Betsy Gaines Quammen, "American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West" (Torrey House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2014, the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy entered the national spotlight after a showdown against federal officials over grazing rights on public lands. Two years later, his sons seized the Malheur ...

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Graciela Chichilnisky, "Reversing Climate Change: How Carbon Removals Can Resolve Climate Change and Fix the Economy" (World Scientific, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky’s new book Reversing Climate Change: How Carbon Removals Can Resolve Climate Change and Fix the Economy is perhaps the single best thing I have read about climate in recen...

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A. M. Barton and W. S. Keeton, "Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests" (Island Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Old-growth forests captivate and inspire us. Walking through them can transport us to a time before human domination of the natural world. This is especially the case with old-growth forests in the...

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Douglas Kelbaugh, "The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands and Overpopulation" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cities are one of the most significant contributors to global climate change. The rapid speed at which urban centers use large amounts of resources adds to the global crisis and can lead to extreme...

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Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Buildings" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition...

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Christian Wright, "Carbon County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West" (U Utah Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the early 1970s, a movement of rank-and-file coal miners rose up in Appalachia to challenge mine bosses and stodgy union officials. They sought greater control over the workplace and a broad...

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Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global...

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Chris Courtney, "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely rem...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Jacob Blanc, "Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) tells the story of the the Itaipu dam, a massive hydroelectric complex built on the B...

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Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren, "Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren's book Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020) situates agriculture as a design practice, using a wide range of international case studies an...

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Jodi Hilty, "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation, 2nd Edition (Island Press, 2019), Dr. Jodi Hilty and her co-authors expand on concepts and practices im...

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Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wenfei Tong's Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship a...

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Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen...

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Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when su...

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K. Aronoff, et al., "A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In early 2019, freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposed a bold new piece of legislation, now very well known as the Green New Deal. Intended as a means of com...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Joseph E. Taylor III, "Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast" (Oregon State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

George Perkins Marsh Prize winning environmental historian and geographer Joseph E. Taylor III's new book, Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Oregon State Univer...

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Sara Hughes, "Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars like Ben Barber have suggested that cities provide the democratic culture to pragmatically problem-solve challenging policy issues – such as climate change. Many North American cities have...

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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) is an ethnography of Palestinian life under occupation that takes waste infrastructures as a starting point fo...

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Jerome Whitington, "Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jerome Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and discourses centered around the development of hy...

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Steven Higashide, "Better Buses, Better Cities : How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Buses can and should be the cornerstone of urban transportation. They offer affordable mobility and can connect citizens with every aspect of their lives. But in the US, they have long been an afte...

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Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses t...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Stephanie Kaza, "Green Buddhism: Practice and Compassionate Action in Uncertain Times" (Shambhala, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephanie Kaza is Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, and has written widely on Buddhism and the environment. She describes herself as a long-time lover of tree...

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Robert Frank, "Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street?our environments a...

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Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between em...

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Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019),Kyle Devine, an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the Univers...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Salvador Salinas, "Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920-1940" (U Arizona Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920-1940 (University of Arizona Press, 2018), Salvador Salinas fills an important gap in the history of the Zapatista Revolution in Morelos - nam...

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Leah Stokes, "Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do even successful clean energy policies fail to create momentum for more renewable energy? In her new book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate...

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Anna M. Gade, “Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations” (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between Islam and the environment has a long and rich history across various Muslim societies. Anna M. Gade, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlines several stra...

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Astrid M. Eckert, "West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, an...

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J. L. Anderson, "Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with J. L. Anderson about the 2019 book Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America published by West Virginia University Press. Anderson provi...

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Josh Reno, "Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose ...

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Alice Hill, "Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow,...

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Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of ...

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Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historica...

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C. J. Alvarez, "Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent debates over the building of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico divide have raised logistical and ethical issues, leaving the historical record of border building uninvoked. A recent book, wri...

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E. Wakild and M. K. Berry, "A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry have written a practical, informative, and inspiring guide to teaching environmental history. It also happens to be fun. A Primer for Teaching Environmental Histo...

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Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that ...

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M. Schneider-Mayerson and B. R. Bellamy, "An Ecotopian Lexicon" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By choice or not, the catastrophes of global warming and mass extinction task young generations with reorienting human relationships with the earth’s systems, resources, and lifeforms. The extracta...

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Jim Rossi, "Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper" (2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After Jim Rossi began writing his M.A. thesis in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the project took an unexpected turn. His research on the solar industry in the Mojave desert brought...

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Darius Sollohub, "Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosiv...

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Hunter Vaughan, "Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2019), Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental...

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Michael R. Boswell, "Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Sarah Marie Wiebe, "Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley" (UBC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully wr...

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Kate O'Neill, "Waste" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are...

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Helen Rozwadowski, "Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans" (Reaktion Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Aver...

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Penelope Plaza Azuaje, “Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do states use cultural policy? In Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate (Routledge, 2018), Penelope Plaza Azuaje, a lectu...

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Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, a...

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Michael E. Mann, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars : Dispatches from the Front Lines" (2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We talk with Michael E. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, about his journey through the climate wars over the past two decades and the rol...

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Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate cha...

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Elena Past, "Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elena Past’s recently published Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human (Indiana University Press, 2019) studies a complex of issues surrounding on-location films made in Italy and the way their produc...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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David Biggs, "Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University o...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility...

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Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valerie Olson talks about why the idea of outer space as a “frontier” is giving way to one that frames it as a cosmic ecosystem. Olson is an associate professor of anthropology at University of Cal...

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Andrew C. Baker, "Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South" (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of metropolitan expansion and suburbanization is often written from the perspective of the city. In Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (University of Georg...

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Elizabeth DeLoughrey, "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmo...

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David D. Vail, "Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945" (U Alabama Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical...

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Michitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. Vann talks about Rubber and the Making of Vietn...

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Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation...

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Don Kulick, "A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea" (Algonquin Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Called "perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature" by the Wall Street Journal, A Death in the Rainfor...

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Stephen Hamnett, "Planning Singapore: The Experimental City" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City(Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen. Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles estab...

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Nancy Langston, "Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World" (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When people today visit or imagine Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, they often perceive a cold, remote, and pristine body of water, relatively untouched by industrialization...

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Timothy LeCain, "The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The ...

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Dolly Kikon, "Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India(University of Washington Press, 2019), anthropologist Dolly Kikon offers a rich account of life in the midst of ...

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Joy McCann, "Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean" (U New South Wales Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joy McCann discusses the great circumpolar ocean that surrounds Antarctica. McCann is the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (University of New South Wales Press, 2018). She is a h...

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Kenneth Olwig, "The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice (Routledge, 2019), Kenneth Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanit...

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Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, "Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer abou...

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Bathsheba Demuth, "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into eco...

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Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Nat...

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Dominic Boyer, "Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologi...

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Erik Loomis, "Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge University Press, 2015), the historian Erik Loomis examines the relationship between workers and their environments in...

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Cymene Howe, "Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my interview with B...

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Michael Kodas, "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burne...

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Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha, "Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book today is Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management (Routledge, 2017) edited by Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha. It's the Winner of the Environmen...

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Juan Javier Rivera Andía, "Non-Humans in Amerindian South America" (Berghahn, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals, and Songs (Berghahn, 2018), eleven researchers bring new ethnographies to bear on anthropological debate...

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Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister, "Projective Ecologies" (HGSD, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister's book Projective Ecologies (Harvard Graduate School of Design 2014) is about how landscape architecture can move forward in the design field beyond garden landsca...

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Stefan Al, "Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies" (Island Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn...

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Sandra L. Albro, "Vacant to Vibrant: Creating Successful Green Infrastructure Networks" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vacant lots, so often seen as neighborhood blight, have the potential to be a key element of community revitalization. As manufacturing cities reinvent themselves after decades of lost jobs and pop...

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David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded ...

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Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros, "Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros tell the story of how a Mexican American community in El Paso have fought back...

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Laura Alice Watt, "The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Wilderness,” “nature,” and their “preservation” are concepts basic to how the National Park Service organizes our relationship to American land. They are also contested concepts, geographer and en...

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Chika Watanabe, "Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO...

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Jakobina Arch, "Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth...

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Douglas Sheflin, "Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “Dust Bowl” remains a mainstay in American history textbooks. When dust storms swept over the southern plains in the 1930s, they upended farming communities and left thousands of migrants in se...

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Pankaj Sekhsaria, "Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story" (HarperCollins India, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most consistent chronicler of contemporary issues in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Pankaj Sekhsaria's writings on the environment, wildlife conservation, development and indigenous co...

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Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with Uni...

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David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but...

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David Karol, "Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political ...

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Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science...

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Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American ...

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Rosalyn LaPier, "Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet" (U Nebraska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet(University of Nebraska Press, 2017), author Rosalyn LaPier, an associate professor in environmental stud...

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James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in ...

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E. MacDonald et al., "Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With its long and well-documented history, Prince Edward Island makes a compelling case study for thousands of years of human interaction with a specific ecosystem. The pastoral landscapes, red san...

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Kristin L. Hoganson, "The Heartland: An American History" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Great West. Middle America. Flyover Country. The expanse of plains, lakes, forests, and farms, between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains has carried many names. Beginning in the twentieth cen...

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Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Manu...

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Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene ...

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Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreen...

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K. Kennen and N. Kirkwood, "Phyto: Principals and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Environmental crises are making headlines in the news everyday. As public awareness increases about brownfields, pollutants, and water quality, Phyto: Principals and Resources for Site Remediation ...

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Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cu...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Kate Ervine, "Carbon" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global...

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Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. Wha...

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Nicole Walker, "Sustainability, A Love Story" (Ohio State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, I’m talking with Nicole Walker, who’s just published a new book about sustainability. In fact, that’s its title: Sustainability, A Love Story (Ohio State University Press, 2018). Now if some...

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Nicholas Breyfogle, "Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History (University o...

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Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vita...

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Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018) is an absorbing look at the multiple and changing ways that waste—of resources, possessions, time, money, etc....

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Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural...

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Judd C. Kinzley, "Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the fir...

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Hannah Holleman, "Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

None of the climate news that we’re getting is good right now, especially now that a number of governments are reversing or failing to meet commitments they made as part of the Paris Climate Accord...

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

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Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global...

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James M. Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg, “The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing o...

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Erin Stewart Mauldin, “Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton S...

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Kate Parker Horigan, “Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative” (UP of Mississippi, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Parker Horigan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University, and a co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore. In Consuming Ka...

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Joanna Davidson, “Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a book about change. The Jola, a people living in Guinea-Bissau, have l...

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Connie Chiang, “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: A...

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Andrew M. Busch, “City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Austin, Texas has a reputation as a vibrant, youthful capital city buoyed economically and culturally by the University of Texas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justi...

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Venus Bivar, “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. T...

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Tim Jelfs, “The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism” (West Virginia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2018), Tim Jelfs argues that debates about the nature of stuff—its moral val...

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Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itsel...

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Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the ...

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Megan Black, “The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of....

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Joan E. Cashin, “War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material cu...

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Ken Ilguas, “This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back” (Plume, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Author, journalist and sometime park ranger Ken Ilgunas has written an argument in favor a “right to roam.” This concept, unfamiliar to most Americans, is one of an ability to traverse public and ...

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Steven Stoll, “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia” (Hill and Wang, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the...

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Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Megan Raby takes us to Caribbean...

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Joy McCann, “Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean” (NewSouth Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), historian Joy McCann explores the history of the vast Southern Ocean, from icy Antarctica to the southern coa...

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Seth Archer, “Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Utah State University Assistant Professor of History Seth Archer trace...

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G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a pain...

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Joanna Dyl, “Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake (University of Washington Press, 2017), Joanna Dyl documents the course and effects of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and ...

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Jim Clifford, “West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914” (UBC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Jim Clifford brings together histori...

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Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic bo...

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William D. Bryan, “The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South” (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reass...

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Sumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “...

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Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico” (U California Press, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how ev...

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Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th...

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Joëlle Gergis, “Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia” (Melbourne UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the University of Mel...

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John Mackay, “The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West” (Scribner, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Mackay’s life began humbly, immigrating as a child from an impoverished Irish household to New York City where he worked selling newspapers in the streets. Within four decades, he was a stakeh...

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Norah MacKendrick, “Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics” (U California Press, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and ...

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Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperat...

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Darren Speece, “Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writ...

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Keith M. Woodhouse, “The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Environmentalists often talk like revolutionaries but agitate like reformers. But however moderate its tactics, environmentalism has led Americans to questions rarely asked: Is economic growth nece...

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Jeff Koelher, “Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup” (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koe...

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Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and G...

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Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France...

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Brian James Leech, “The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit” (U Nevada Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The plight of today’s coal miners has gained significant attention in recent U.S. politics. As coal mining practices and technologies change in the United States, coal miners face job reductions, b...

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Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds bea...

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Melanie A. Kiechle, “Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly rec...

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Andre Magnan, “When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade” (U British Columbia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the c...

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Ann K. Ferrell, “Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century” (U Press of Kentucky, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, B...

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Anna Zeide, “Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered....

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Steven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the shor...

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Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformat...

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Debarati Sen, “Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling” (SUNY Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production i...

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Chad Montrie, “The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University...

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Timothy Neale, “Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia” (U Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Tim Neale examines the controversy over the 2005 Wild Rivers Act in the Cape York P...

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Frederick L. Brown, “The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle” (U Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Not all city dwellers are bipedal, according to Frederick L. Brown, author of The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2016). The history of Seattl...

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Urmi Engineer Willoughby, “Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans” (LSU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017) by his...

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Peter A. Kopp, “Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley” (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Environmental historian Peter A. Kopp‘s book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (University of California Press, 2016) examines the fascinating history of a ver...

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Dagomar Degroot, “The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560 -1720” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians, writes Dagomar Degroot, rarely feature in discussions about global warming. With his new book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-17...

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Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther, “The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters” (Wharton Digital Press, 2017)) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adeq...

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Andy Bruno, “The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from...

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Robert Hunt Ferguson, “Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi” (U of Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subs...

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Jacob Smith, “Eco-Sonic Media” (University of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can we have sound media that is ecologically sound? Can we fine tune our media production and consumption habits to a greener key? How can an environmental perspective on sound media contribute to ...

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Brian McCammack, “Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can we learn about African American life between the world wars if we center our attention on the parks and pleasuring grounds of the urban North? That is what historian Brian McCammack endeav...

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Christopher Church, “Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean” (U. Nebraska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hurricanes, fires, a volcano eruption: disasters are political, as Christopher Church argues. His new book, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (University of Ne...

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Sam White, “A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early Europ...

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Dan Flores, “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural...

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Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of th...

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John Ryan Fischer, “Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Ryan Fischer‘s book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) is a fascinating look at how a common anim...

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Tore C. Olsson, “Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tore C. Olsson‘s Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017) tells a remarkable and under-appreciated story. It’s about how, ...

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Rebecca Jones, “Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia” (Monash UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia (Monash University Publishing, 2017), Rebecca Jones, a senior research fellow at Monash University, explores the natural and cultural dimensio...

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Sara Dant, “Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its envi...

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Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the...

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Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany” (U. Michigan Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new sta...

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Alice Weinreb, “Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consum...

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Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book Th...

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Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cle...

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Susanna Forrest, “The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relatio...

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Benjamin Heber Johnson, “Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields all r...

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Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) ...

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Jonathan Schlesinger, “A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the inven...

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Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural in...

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Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmenta...

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Veronica Herrera, “Water and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico” (U. Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of ...

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Stacy Alaimo, “Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of kno...

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John Hadley, “Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals” (Lexington Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal pr...

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Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured pr...

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Anthony Lioi, “Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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....

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Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has h...

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Pamela McElwee, “Forest are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) begins with two related puzzles: why does Vietnam simultaneously plant and cut trees at unpr...

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S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, and plate tectonics--the old forces of nature--have transformed Earth for millions of years. They are now joined by a new geological force--humans. Our actions have driv...

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Jessica van Horssen, “A Town Called Asbestos” (UBC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned i...

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John Soluri and Claudia Leal, "A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America" (Berghahn, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (Berghahn Books 2018) is a wonderful collection that seeks to provide a general overview of environmental history within Latin America...

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Susan Verde, “The Water Princess” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Supermodel Georgie Badiel grew up in a small village in Burkina Faso where the closest source of water was many miles from home. After launching her successful modeling career, she began to speak o...

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Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are decl...

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Harini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not on...

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Nora Bateson. "Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns" (Triarchy Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“To be a participant in a complex system is to desire to be both lost and found in the interrelationships between people, nature and ideas.” Nora Bateson writes these words in the first chapter of ...

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Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nine...

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Louise M. Pryke, "Turtle" (Reaction Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As ancient creatures that once shared the Earth with dinosaurs, turtles have played a crucial role in maintaining healthy terrestrial and marine ecosystems for more than one hundred million years. ...

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William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the...

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Alex Alvarez, "Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) looks at the human impact of climate change and its potential to provoke some of the most troubling crimes aga...

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James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century. ...

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, ...

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Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoli...

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Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are joined by Dr. Andrea Ballestero, associate Professor of Anthropology and Director Ethnography Studio, at Rice University. We will be talking about her book A Future History of Water, publish...

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Kieko Matteson, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality o...

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Beating Plastic Pollution in Timor-Leste with Professor Thomas Maschmeyer from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As environmental emergencies go, the explosion of plastic waste is right up there. With global plastic production exceeding 300 million tonnes each year, the world has generally looked at it as an ...

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Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: E...

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Quito J. Swan, "Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice" (UP of Florida, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates th...

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Thomas Fleischman, "Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany p...

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Marta Zaraska, “Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here in the U.S. we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, with its parades, fireworks, and, of course, cook-outs. If you’re like me, the smell of a grilling burger can make you salivate from acros...

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Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975, Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time, unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, i...

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S. Myers and H. Frumkin, "Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves (Island Press, 2020), Dr. Samuel Myers and his co-authors illustrate the interconnectedness of human health and the health of our planet....

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Sarah Wald, “The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl” (U. of Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is ...

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Micha Rahder, "An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are joined today by Dr. Micha Rahder, writer, editor, and independent scholar based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We will be talking about her new book, An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love,...

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Kenna R. Archer, “Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River” (U of New Mexico, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River (University of New Mexico, 2015), Kenna R. Archer examines the history of the Brazos river. The river, which runs from easte...

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Michael Stamm, "Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long...

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Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and f...

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Peter J. Thuesen, "Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter J. Thuesen links the “numinous” religious experiences of Americans as they experienced the uniquely destructive weathe...

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Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate” (Simon and Schuster, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change. In her new b...

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Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Bey...

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Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale J...

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Kristina M. Lyons, "Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests a...

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Peter Thorsheim, “Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of to...

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Kristin J. Jacobson, "The American Adrenaline Narrative" (U Georgia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristin J. Jacobson In her new book, The American Adrenaline Narrative (University of Geo...

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Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-No...

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Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy...

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Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth...

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Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environme...

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Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry, "La Batea" (Red Hook, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died al...

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Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2000) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1800, tens of millions of bison roamed the North American Great Plains. By 1900, fewer than 1,000 remained. In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge UP, 20...

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Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University P...

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Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2008-12-05T21:18:19

If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought t...

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Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2008-12-05T21:18:19

If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought t...

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Podcasts by New Books in Environmental Studies

All episodes

Climate of Denial: Why Do Americans Doubt Climate Change? from 2023-01-23T09:00

Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (Verso Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Debjani Bhattacharyya, "Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Henry Shue, “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sue Stuart-Smith, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karen Holl, "Primer of Ecological Restoration" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Yglesias, "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger" (Portfolio, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chantal Bilodeau, "Forward" (Tanlonbooks 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David A. Pietz, “Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brad Walters, "The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies" (UWI Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nathalie Peutz, "Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bjorn Lomborg, "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sally Weintrobe, “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amelia Moore, "Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, Helen Tiffin, “Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kerri Arsenault, "Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains" (Martin's Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William Viney, “Waste: A Philosophy of Things” (Bloomsbury, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heather Menzies, “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto” (New Society Publishers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Nisbet, “Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel P. Aldrich, "Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Silver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea” (Red Deer Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish” (University Press of New England, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

JoAnna Poblete, "Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa" (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

R. Sroufe and S. Melnyk, "Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value" (Business Expert Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thaisa Way, "River Cities, City Rivers" (Dumbarton Oaks, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kregg Hetherington, "The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Sroufe, "Integrated Management: How Sustainability Creates Value for Any Business" (Emerald, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Allen Drake, “Loving Nature, Fearing the State” (University of Washington Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas C. Rust, "Watching over Yellowstone: The US Army's Experience in America's First National Park, 1886–1918" (UP of Kansas, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jen Huntley, “The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origins of America’s Most Popular National Park” (UP of Kansas, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jane Hutton, "Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Char Miller, “Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy” (Oregon State UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rosemary-Claire Collard, "Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ray Ison, "Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World" (Springer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Johan Elverskog, "The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia" (U Penn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jim Mason, "An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature" (Latern Books, 2002) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393