New Books in Environmental Studies
Episodes
David McDermott Hughes, "Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity" (Duke UP, 2017)
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017), David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate c...
Ryan Poll, "Aquaman and the War Against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive ove...
Jan Selby et al., "Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increase...
Martin Puchner, "Literature for a Changing Planet" (Princeton UP, 2022)
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Reading literature in a time of ...
Sustainable Peatland Management and Transboundary Haze in Southeast Asia
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Indonesian citizens, and those of neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, have long suffered recurring haze pollution caused by peatland fires in Indo...
June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship bet...
Thom van Dooren, "A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions" (MIT Press, 2022)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention. And yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a S...
Sarah T. Hines, "Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia" (U California Press, 2021)
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah T. Hines's Water for All Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2021) chronicles how Bolivian...
Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thi...
Andreas Malm, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Verso, 2021)
27 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and p...
Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Caspian Sea region has hitherto largely been investigated from a New Great Game' perspective that depicts the region as a geopolitical battlegro...
John Suval, "Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The squatter—defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"—had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the ...
Julie Sze, "Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger" (U California Press, 2020)
14 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political m...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined b...
Rafico Ruiz, "Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier" (Duke UP, 2021)
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, crea...
Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years...
Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of...
Saheed Aderinto, "Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria" (Ohio UP, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were ...
M. Margaret McKeown, "Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas" (Potomac Books, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-p...
Jennifer Wenzel, "The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature" (Fordham UP, 2019)
07 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennif...
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk...
Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
After the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What ...
NBN Classic: Kate Brown, "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)
25 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. We cannot learn from disasters...
NBN Classic: Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019)
24 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Environmental racism is visibl...
Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017)
23 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to prod...
Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) trace...
Fred Spier, "How the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers" (CRC Press, 2022)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers (CRC Press, 2022) offers a simple and novel theoretical approach to understandi...
Martin Kalb, "Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa" (Berghahn, 2022)
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and sufferi...
Nancy Fraser, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It" (Verso, 2022)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for e...
Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals...
Joshua Duclos, "Wilderness, Morality, and Value" (Lexington Books, 2022)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value (Lexington Books,...
Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021)
19 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Nathanson's book A History of Solar Power Art and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of creative applications of photovoltaic (PV) ...
Philip Lymbery, "Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future" (Bloombury, 2022)
19 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to the Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, the internationally acclaimed author of Farmageddon, goes beh...
Mrill Ingram, "Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth" (Temple UP, 2022)
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How we relate to orphaned space matters. Voids, marginalia, empty spaces—from abandoned gas stations to polluted waterways—are created and maintai...
Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Can spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lie...
Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)
15 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms ...
Jennifer L. Allen, "Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany" (Harvard UP, 2022)
14 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of...
Neoliberalism
06 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Troy Vettese talks with us about neoliberalism. It turns out the neoliberals aren’t actually a secret cabal of dastardly villains, ...
Erin James, "Narrative in the Anthropocene" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State UP, 2022), Erin James poses two complementary questions: What can narrative teach us about our current...
Peter S. Alagona, "The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities" (U California Press, 2022)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities (U California Press, 2022) tells the story of how cities across the United States we...
Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chine...
Josh Milburn, "Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they lov...
Frederico Freitas, "Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
26 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border (Cambridge UP, 2021), Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucia...
Becky O'Connor, "The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment" (Harriman House, 2022)
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As global governments and regulators set an agenda for net zero carbon emissions, the focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria amo...
Mathew Lawrence and Adrienne Buller, "Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis" (Verso, 2022)
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Adrienne Buller (The Value of a Whale) and Mathew Lawrence (Planet on Fire) have penned a radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic...
Temperatures on the Rise: Adapting to Heat Extremes in South Asia
19 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Between March and May of this year, large parts of India and Pakistan were hit by a severe heat wave that claimed at least 90 lives and seriously impa...
The Poison Paradigm: What a Toxic Chemical Tells us about the Politics of Science
19 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are exposed to thousands of toxic chemicals daily. This is no accident; it is by design. They are everywhere – coating our consumer products, in ...
Annah Lake Zhu, "Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China" (Harvard UP, 2022)
18 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Money does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global Chin...
Paolo Squatriti, "Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paolo Squatriti ...
Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Animals are staging a revolution—they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Rev...
Max Foran, "The Subjugation of Canadian Wildlife: Failures of Principle and Policy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Hardly a day goes by without news of the extinction or endangerment of yet another animal species, followed by urgent but largely unheeded calls for a...
The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There is no shortage of words written about climate change and the goal of reaching net zero - but there is a shortage of practical suggestions about ...
Adam Sundberg, "Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
12 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The...
J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, "The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945" (Harvard UP, 2016)
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth centur...
Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question wit...
Environmental Catastrophe
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode John Yargo speaks with Kim about Environmental Catastrophe. In the episode John quotes Hannah Arendt and N.K. Jemisin, discusses a Sha...
Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the ...
Michael J. Hathaway, "What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make" (Princeton UP, 2022)
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael Hathaway pushes today’s mushroom ...
China’s Role in the Future of Green Energy
05 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How green is green energy really? And what role does Asia, more specifically China play in the transition to green energy? On the 7th of July, Interna...
American Chernobyl, Part 2: The Most Poisonous Place in the USA
05 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. In our last episode, you heard about the nuclear plant's largely-forgotten history--how it poisoned the...
America's Chernobyl, Part 1: Living in a Poison Town
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer. Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up ...
Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis, "A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2003 Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two and a half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie. Over...
Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor, "Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity" (Routledge, 2020)
03 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020) brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. Tema Milstein ...
Carl H. Nightingale, "Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and...
Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee, "Eco Bible: An Ecological Commentary on Genesis and Exodus" (ICSD, 2021)
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What does the Bible say about ecology? As people face huge ecological challenges-including growing hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and plastic pollu...
Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Trouble with water – increasingly frequent, extreme floods and droughts – is one of the first obvious signs of climate change. Meanwhile, urban sp...
The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor...
Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nic Maclellan's book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests (ANU Press, 2017) is a history of Britain’s 1950s program to test t...
Rosetta S. Elkin, "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
20 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the la...
Jeannie N. Shinozuka, "Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nurse...
Laura A. Ogden, "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke UP, 2021)
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast Laura A. Ogden, cultural anthropologist at Dartmouth College, introduces her beautifully crafted book Loss and Wonder at the World...
Evan Berry, "Climate Politics and the Power of Religion" (Indiana UP, 2022)
14 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (Indiana University Press, 202...
Nick Higham, "The Mercenary River: Private Greed, Public Good--A History of London's Water" (Headline, 2022)
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn’t always so. For c...
Elena Conis, "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" (Bold Type Books, 2022)
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporati...
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
12 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people fo...
Tony Hall, "Great Trees of Britain and Ireland: Over 70 of the Best Ancient Avenues, Forests and Trees to Visit" (Read Media, 2022)
11 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Boasting Europe's largest number of ancient oaks and yews, Britain and Ireland are home to forests that can be traced back for centuries, feature amaz...
Meng Zhang, "Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market" (U Washington Press, 2021)
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Focusing on timber in Qing China, Dr. Meng Zhang's new book, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (U Washington Press, 2021) t...
Adrienne Buller, "The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism" (Manchester UP, 2022)
05 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to clim...
Max Ajl, "A People's Green New Deal" (Pluto Press, 2021)
05 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword ...
Paul Dobryden, "The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern UP, 2022) traces how the environmental effects of industrialization re...
James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, "Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World" (W. W. Norton, 2021)
30 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In...
Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky, "Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power" (MIT Press, 2022)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emergi...
Victor Seow, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy regimes in Modern East Asia (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an account of the modern “world that carbon mad...
Michael Hannah, "Extinctions: Living and Dying in the Margin of Error" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
28 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Michael Hannah about his book Extinctions: Living and Dying in the Margin of Error (Cambridge UP, 2021). Are we now entering a ma...
Min Hyoung Song, "Climate Lyricism" (Duke UP, 2022)
28 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Climate Lyricism (Duke University Press, 2022), Min Hyoung Song models a climate change-centered reading practice that helps us better understand...
Matthew T. Huber, "Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet" (Verso, 2022)
17 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who...
Juli Berwald, "Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs" (Riverhead Books, 2022)
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they're thriving, these fairy gar...
Ellen Griffith Spears, "Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945" (Routledge, 2019)
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (Routledge, 2019) turns a fresh interpretive lens on the past, drawing on a wide range of n...
Nadia Y. Kim, "Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA" (Stanford UP, 2021)
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Dr. Nadia Kim in Refusing De...
Alison F. Richard, "Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Madagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest island on the planet, it has been home to a spectacular parade of anima...
Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)
13 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer...
Martin Williams, "When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be" (Princeton UP, 2021)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant la...
Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures wil...
Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Marco Grasso examines the responsibility...
Gernot Wagner, "Geoengineering: The Gamble" (Polity, 2021)
07 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Stabilizing the world's climates means cutting carbon dioxide pollution. There's no way around it. But what if that's not enough? What if it's too dif...
Pavla Simková, "Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)
06 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston's "hidden shores." While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers...
Chris Gratien, "The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier" (Stanford UP, 2022)
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I talk to Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, about his new book, The Unsettled Plain: A...
David George Haskell, "Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction" (Viking, 2022)
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect so...
Rob Dunn, "A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species" (Basic Book, 2021)
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A ...
Sarah Mittlefehldt, "Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics" (U Washington Press, 2013)
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society an...