New Books in Environmental Studies

Jennifer Clapp, "Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters" (MIT Press, 2025)

19 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although...

María de Los Ángeles Picone, "Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina" (UNC Press, 2025)

16 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and...

Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monumen...

Ståle Holgersen, "Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World" (Verso, 2024)

09 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves b...

Duncan Watson, "Everyone's Trash: One Man Against 1.6 Billion Pounds" (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2024)

08 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Each day, every single person in the United States, all 324 million, discards about five pounds of waste. Be it a bottle that gets placed in a recycli...

Tuomas Tammisto, "Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier" (Helsinki UP, 2024)

05 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampe...

Anna Farro Henderson, "Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

01 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments...

Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)

30 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U...

Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)

29 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did the...

Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and...

V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)

24 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as ...

Royce Kurmelovs, "Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil" (U Queensland Press, 2024)

23 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A riveting expose of the global oil industry' s multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australia...

Book Chat: "A Taiwanese Eco-Literature Reader" with Ian Rowen

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-lit...

Genevieve Guenther, "The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It" (Oxford UP, 2024)

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of o...

Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)

19 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be a...

Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at S...

Sally Coulthard, "A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects" (HarperCollins UK, 2024)

17 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For most of human history, we were rural folk. Our daily lives were bound up with working the land, living within the rhythm of the seasons. We poured...

Joseph A. Seeley, "Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria" (Cornell UP, 2024)

16 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime bo...

Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

15 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthe...

Jade S. Sasser, "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question" (U California Press, 2024)

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rap...

Leigh Ann Henion, "Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark" (Algonquin, 2024)

11 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented...

On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)

10 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What...

Nir Arielli, "The Dead Sea: A 10,000 Year History" (Yale UP, 2025)

07 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly t...

Gary Griggs, "California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State" (U California Press, 2024)

07 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns ...

Andrew Boyd, "I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor" (New Society, 2023)

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew Boyd is a humorist and long-time veteran of creative campaigns for social change. He led the decade-long satirical media campaign “Billionair...

David N. Livingstone, "The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2024)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet an...

Marcia Bjornerud, "Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks" (Flatiron Books, 2024)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Marcia Bjornerud about Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (Flatiron Books, 2024). Rocks are the record of ...

Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen...

Omar Dahbour, "Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis" (Routledge, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Part of what makes the challenges that collectively are called the “environmental crisis” so difficult is that the vocabulary we deploy in thinkin...

Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abund...

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, "Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene" (Routledge, 2024)

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2024) presents an innovative and imaginative rea...

Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores

27 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how th...

Ethan Tapper, "How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World" (Broadleaf Books, 2024)

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For more than a decade, Ethan Tapper has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the worlds of forestry, conservation, and ecosystem st...

Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And alth...

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to...

Debra J. Davidson, "Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency" (Routledge, 2024)

11 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Eme...

Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of...

"Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations" (Fernwood Publishing, 2024)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social ...

William A. Selby, "The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next" (Heyday Books, 2024)

03 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Often stereotyped as the land of unflaggingly perfect weather, California has a world-renowned reputation for sunny blue skies and infinitely even-kee...

Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" (Yale UP, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world....

Helen Louise Cowie, "Animals in World History" (Routledge, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Animals in World History (Routledge, 2024) by Dr. Helen Cowie provides a concise synthesis of human-animal relations over time, charting shifting att...

Peter Hill, "River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways" (Columbia UP, 2024)

29 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Peter Hill has been working as a resource manager with a specialty in stream restoration for over two decades, first for Washington DC and then as a c...

Dario Fazzi, "Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement" (Columbia UP, 2023)

26 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. government, military, and industry once saw ocean incineration as the safest and most efficient way to dispose of hazardous chemical waste. B...

Melanie Dennis Unrau, "The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

19 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industri...

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomad...

James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the Ame...

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. ...

The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century

15 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of e...

David Strayer, "Beyond the Sea: The Hidden Life in Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

12 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Beyond the Sea: The Hidden Life in Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024) is an exciting foray into Earth's inland waters, the remarka...

Willingness for climate action in South Korea and Finland: A cross-cultural comparison

12 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Climate change is among the most significant challenges facing modern society, and it impacts everyone across the world. How do people in different so...

Negative Life

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay talk about negative life, which names the misalignment of individual and species survival, as a condition of...

Brandon Keim, "Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World" (Norton, 2024)

01 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does the science of animal intelligence mean for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us? Honeybees deliberate democraticall...

Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to lan...

Veronica Strang, "Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis" (Reaktion, 2023)

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Jana Byars talks to Veronica Strang about her new book Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis (Reaktion, 2023). Looking to t...

Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College....

Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly c...

Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To most of us, weeds can seem nothing more than intruders in gardens, farms and city streets. But the idea of the weed is a slippery one, constantly c...

Stephanie Rutherford, "Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A wolf’s howl is felt in the body. Frightening and compelling, incomprehensible or entirely knowable, it is a sound that may be heard as threat or i...

Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024)

17 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of plan...

Joanna Allan, "Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara" (WVU Press, 2024)

17 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices s...

Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

14 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to anot...

Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program ...

Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and...

Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

06 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of C...

J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occu...

Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert

27 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons Fr...

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

26 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing th...

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

23 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024), Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay enact a dialogue between cinema, philo...

An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

21 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussin...

Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)

08 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 201...

Adam Hanieh, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market" (Verso, 2024)

02 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Oil is everywhere. It’s in our cars, it’s in the fertilizer used to grow our food, and it’s in the plastics used to produce and transport our co...

Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning, "Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

01 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"Climate change is the biggest crisis of humankind. We can’t watch other people drive our future right against the wall.” This is a quote by Luisa...

Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024)

29 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the d...

Larisa Jasarević, "Beekeeping in the End Times" (Indiana UP, 2024)

26 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the ange...

Omer Aijazi, "Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

25 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed co...

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and c...

Anna Lora-Wainwright, "Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China" (MIT Press, 2021)

20 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and...

Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These...

Lightning Birds

14 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today we present the first episode of Jacob Smith’s new eco-critical audiobook, Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves. In this audio-only...

Roberta L. Millstein, "The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Lan...

Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024)

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwor...

Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, "Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future" (The New Press, 2024)

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions...

Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives

06 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, ...

Jonathan Maskit, "Bicycle" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle prom...

Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinati...

Forest Listening Rooms

23 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What would happen if you took red state rural voters on a walk into the woods with left-wing environmental activists and experimental music fans? Our ...

Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, a...

Andrea E. Pia, "Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

20 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On the podcast today, I am joined by anthropologist Andrea Pia (London School of Economics and Political Science) to talk about his new book, Cutting...

Azra Hromadžić, "Riverine Citizenship: A Bosnian City in Love with the River" (CEU Press, 2024)

18 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér sat down with Azra Hromadžić (Syracuse University) to talk about her new book with CE...

John Schofield, "Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

15 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for ...

Thomas White, "China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier" (U Washington Press, 2024)

14 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have target...

Faizah Zakaria, "The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia" (U Washington Press, 2023)

04 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Recurring tropes about fragmented communities living on frontier forestlands living in Southeast Asia are that they are either guardians of flora and ...

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, "Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility" (U Washington Press, 2024)

27 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expan...

Hope Bohanec, "The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs" (Lantern Publishing, 2023)

26 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As consumers become increasingly aware of the animal agriculture industry’s cruelty and environmental devastation, clever industry marketers are ada...

Damaging Rationality: Exxon-Funded Legal Research and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

25 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This is part #3 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast mini-series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the la...

Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019)

23 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without ...

Justine Bendel, "Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals" (Edward Elgar, 2023)

18 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises h...

Matthew Archer, "Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability" (NYU Press, 2024)

16 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly e...

12 Angry Alaskans: Re-Examining the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Case

16 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This is part #2 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Last episode, th...

Andrew R. Basso, "Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

13 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of fo...