New Books in Environmental Studies
Episodes
Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
04 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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? St...
Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital” (Verso, 2015)
03 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandin...
Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
23 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 victi...
Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015)
25 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a m...
Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014)
14 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious ...
Henry Shue, “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection” (Oxford UP, 2014)
21 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton Co...
Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology” (Routledge, 2015)
10 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Political ecology is among the most vibrant sub-fields in the discipline of geography. Since the field first developed in the 1980s, political ecologi...
Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015)
19 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 “...
Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” (
11 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 enviro...
Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)
10 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others co...
Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2014)
26 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “S...
Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)
17 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 need...
David A. Pietz, “Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015)
06 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
David A. Pietz‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to dis...
Carolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014)
17 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of Nort...
Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” (
11 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in bio...
Sally Weintrobe, “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Routledge, 2012)
11 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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, qui...
Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, Helen Tiffin, “Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014)
15 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Cribb and his co-authors Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin have together drawn on the resources of history, literature, film, science, and cultura...
Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013)
17 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and hel...
Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013)
16 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcoloni...
William Viney, “Waste: A Philosophy of Things” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
15 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What is waste? William Viney‘s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, includin...
Heather Menzies, “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto” (New Society Publishers, 2014)
06 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 ancestr...
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)
02 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 ...
James Nisbet, “Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s” (MIT Press, 2014)
10 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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, whi...
Silver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea” (Red Deer Press, 2014)
05 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where...
Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish” (University Press of New England, 2013)
17 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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’...
John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
04 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 war...
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014)
19 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013)
19 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jon Mooallem‘s book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals In America (Penguin, 2013)...
John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
26 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 b...
Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013)
09 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a f...
John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013)
16 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting b...
Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013)
28 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do th...
Brian Allen Drake, “Loving Nature, Fearing the State” (University of Washington Press, 2013)
04 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 ideologic...
Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” (Oxford UP, 2013)
11 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a ...
Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
08 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesi...
Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013)
20 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carol...
Jen Huntley, “The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origins of America’s Most Popular National Park” (UP of Kansas, 2011)
20 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
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,” s...
Char Miller, “Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy” (Oregon State UP, 2012)
09 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington...
Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
18 Jul 2011
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collap...
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)
23 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010)
20 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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 cl...
Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008)
05 Dec 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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 ad...