New Books in Environmental Studies
Episodes
Andrew Ofstehage, "Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado" (Cornell UP, 2025)
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational ...
What is environmental authoritarianism and why we should be mindful of its allure
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The argument that authoritarian governments are better at dealing with the climate emergency is gaining ground, fuelled by the idea that undemocratic ...
Michael Buser, "Ecologies of Care in Times of Climate Change: Water Security in the Global Context" (Policy Press, 2024)
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ecologies of Care in Times of Climate Change: Water Security in the Global Context (Policy Press, 2024) investigates and analyses places in Europe, ...
Pollyanna Rhee, "Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism...
Maron E. Greenleaf, "Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon" (Duke UP, 2024)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the li...
Ken Conca, "After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City" (Oxford UP, 2024)
11 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One small town, two "thousand-year floods" in the span of two years: how does a community become resilient in the face of the ever-increasing risks of...
Daniel MacFarlane, "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)
10 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Join me for a fascinating conversation with one of today’s leading voices in environmental studies, Daniel Macfarlane, as we explore his new book T...
Nancy M. Rourke, "Ecological Moral Character: A Catholic Model" (Georgetown UP, 2024)
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The images we use to think about moral character are powerful. They inform our understanding of the moral virtues and the ways in which moral characte...
Jessica Smith on Engineering and Public Accountability in Energy Industries
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Jessica Smith, Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Department and Dean’s Fellow for Earth ...
Time to Rethink Democracy: Participatory and More-Than-Human Perspectives
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is a special episode that features a conversation between Sonia Bussu and Hans Asenbaum on democracy, capitalism, climate and the practices and p...
Andrea Pappas, "Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740-1770" (Lund Humphries, 2023)
04 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, in Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Env...
Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, "Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America" (Island Press, 2025)
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on or...
Lian Sinclair, "Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations" (Manchester UP, 2024)
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do multinational mining corporations use participation to undermine resistance? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter o...
Chloe Ahmann, "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. ...
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World ...
Ted Levin, "The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World" (Green Writers Press, 2025)
26 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World (Green Writers Press, 2025), a former Bronx Zoo zoologist and award-winning nature write...
Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked...
Saleem H. Ali, "Sustainability: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2024)
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'susta...
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...