New Books In Environmental Studies

In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of med

Why is it so difficult to adopt a more sustainable way of life, even when convinced of the urgency of the environmental crisis? If adopting new behaviors beneficial for the environment is so challenging at the individual level, no wonder it is even harder at the community or governmental levels. Seeing individual and collective behaviors not changing, or not rapidly enough, eventually leads to the belief that nothing can be done and that human beings are just “hard-wired” that way. This is where, quite unexpectedly, neuroscience can help us tackle the multidimensional and unprecedented problem that is the environmental crisis. In Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime argues that by considering the long evolutionary history of the human brain and its reward-system, one can better understand, and therefore grow less frustrated about, why adopting sustainable behaviors can be so challenging. “Our brains are amazin

There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous communities along the way. Old-growth trees are invaluable and irreplaceable for both humans and wildlife, and are the oldest living things on earth. But the morality of tree poaching is not as simple as we might think: stealing trees is a form of deeply rooted protest, and a side effect of environmental preservation and protection that doesn't include communities that have been uprooted or marginalized when park boundaries are drawn. As Bourgon discovers, failing to include working class and rural communities in the

What does the concept of ecological civilisation mean in practice? And how can we understand the relationship between grand visions, legal systems, green politics and development processes on the ground in contemporary China? In this episode we focus on China’s environmental ambitions and its increasingly central role in efforts towards global sustainability, as well as the importance placed upon sustainable development by the Chinese Communist Party, and by Xi Jinping himself. To unpack these issues and discuss the potentials of a greener China, Arve Hansen is joined by some of Norway’s leading experts on Chinese environmental politics and practice, Gørild Heggelund, Yong Zhou and Bjorn Leif Brauteseth. Bjorn Leif Brauteseth is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Gørild Heggelund is Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. Yong Zhou is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. Arve Hansen is a researc

What does the concept of ecological civilisation mean in practice? And how can we understand the relationship between grand visions, legal systems, green politics and development processes on the ground in contemporary China? In this episode we focus on China’s environmental ambitions and its increasingly central role in efforts towards global sustainability, as well as the importance placed upon sustainable development by the Chinese Communist Party, and by Xi Jinping himself. To unpack these issues and discuss the potentials of a greener China, Arve Hansen is joined by some of Norway’s leading experts on Chinese environmental politics and practice, Gørild Heggelund, Yong Zhou and Bjorn Leif Brauteseth. Bjorn Leif Brauteseth is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Gørild Heggelund is Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. Yong Zhou is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. Arve Hansen is a researc

As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world. Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP, 2022) offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this progr

In Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017), David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of e

In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and rebranding of all DC Comics--transformed the character from a joke to an important figure of ecological justice. In this series, Aquaman becomes an accessible figure for charting environmental violences endemic to global capitalism and for developing a progressive and popular ecological imagination. Poll argues that The New 52 Aquaman should be read as an allegory that responds to the crises of the Anthropocene, in which the oceans have become a site of warfare and mass death. Poll contends that the series, which works to bridge the terrestrial and watery worlds, can be understood as a form of comics activism by visualizing and verbalizing how the oceans are both beyond the projects of the "human" and "humanism," and simultaneously, all-too-human geographies that are inextricable from the violent structures of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increased drought, more famine, heightened social vulnerability, and large-scale political and violent conflict; indeed, many claim that this future is already with us. Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge UP, 2022), however, shows that this is mistaken. Focusing especially on the links between climate change, water and security, and drawing on detailed evidence from Israel-Palestine, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere, it shows both that mainstream environmental security narratives are misleading, and that the actual security implications of climate change are very different from how they are often imagined. Addressing themes as wide-ranging as the politics of droughts, the contradictions of capitalist development and the role of racism in environmental change, while simultaneously articulating an original 'i

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 climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming.  In Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton UP, 2022), Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change—and how we might change paths before it’s too late. From the Epic of Gilgamesh and the West African Epic of Sunjata to the Communist Manifesto, Puchner reveals world literature in a new light—as an archive of environmental exploitation and a product of a way of life responsible for climate change. Literature depends on millennia of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and resource extraction, from the clay of ancient tablets to the

Indonesian citizens, and those of neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, have long suffered recurring haze pollution caused by peatland fires in Indonesia. To avoid these forest fires, and reduce the environmental harm and negative health impacts that transboundary haze gives rise to, Indonesia needs to restore its degraded peatlands. President Joko Widodo started this task in 2016 when he established the Peatland Restoration Agency, tasked with rehabilitating 2 million hectares of degraded peatland. What has this ad hoc body achieved since then, and where will it go from here? In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Rini Astuti to discuss why peatland fires are a particularly acute issue in Southeast Asia, and how Indonesia can play a crucial role in effectively mitigating transboundary haze in the region. About Rini Astuti: Dr Rini Astuti is a Research Fellow at Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Rini is also the Global Public Voices Fellow for the Mario Eina

In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health. Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme events. Ranging from pre-Columbian flooding in the Andes to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this book focuses on long-range recovery and recuperation, rather than short-term disaster relief. Written in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the author shows how lessons learned about civil society, governance, climate change, inequality and trauma from natural disasters have their echoes in the challenges of today’s uncertain world. June Carolyn Erlick is the Editor-in-Ch

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 Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022), Thom van Dooren offers a collection of snail stories from Hawai'i--once home to more than 750 species of land snails, almost two-thirds of which are now gone. Following snail trails through forests, laboratories, museums, and even a military training facility, and meeting with scientists and Native Hawaiians, van Dooren explores ongoing processes of ecological and cultural loss as they are woven through with possibilities for hope, care, mourning, and resilience. Van Dooren recounts the fascinating history of snail decline in the Hawaiian Islands: from deforestation for agriculture, timber, and more, through the nineteenth century shell collecting mania of missionary settlers, and on to the contemporary impacts of introduced predators. Along the way he asks how both snail loss and conservation effor

Sarah T. Hines's Water for All Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2021) chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, the country's third largest city and most important agricultural valley. Covering the period from 1879 to 2019, Hines examines the conflict over control of the region's water sources, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Through analysis of a wide variety of sources from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful Water War uprising in 2000, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers le

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 thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable, of paving over the continent to keep everyone in their cars. With Paris we’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintaining the status quo? Marx is author of the book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, out now from Verso Books. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us o

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 peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest? Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women’s suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso, 2021), Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire. Jimena Ledgard is a journalist, writer and researcher from Lima, Per

The Caspian Sea region has hitherto largely been investigated from a New Great Game' perspective that depicts the region as a geopolitical battle­ground between regional and external great powers, where tensions have been exacerbated by the sea's rich natural resources, strategic location, and legal disagreements over its status.  Agha Bayramov,'s book Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region (Routledge, 2022), by contrast, portrays a new image of the region, which still ac­knowledges the difficulties and problematic starting situation of power poli­tics there. It, however, seeks to show that there are ways forward by identifying mechanisms and means to transform the New Great Game' into processes of functional co-operation. Drawing on theoretical insights from a functionalist framework, this book examines three intertwined case studies, namely the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC), the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), and the Caspian Environmental Program (CEP). It shows that lessons learned from envi

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 antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered the nation. With one eye on Washington and the other on flashpoints across the West, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2022) tracks squatters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush-era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas. The sweeping narrative reveals how claiming western domains became stubbornly intertwined with partisan politics and fights over the extension of slavery. While previous generations of statesmen had ma

“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (U California Press, 2020) examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future. Julie Sze is Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast.  In Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (Duke UP, 2021), Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attemp