New Books in Environmental Studies
867 episodes - English - Latest episode: 26 days ago - ★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Environmental Scientists about their New Books
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Episodes
Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesOur hosts, Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, sat down with Dominic Boyer to talk about his new book, No More Fossils, which appeared just last year (2023) from the University of Minnesota's "Forerunners" series. We talked at length about his book, its gestation in basic questions about how to divest from fossil energy and fossil culture, and the grounds for optimism about our future. In a wide ranging discussion, we also talked about utopia, our investment in memoir and place-based writing,...
Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesThe most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year. From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-ol...
India’s Waste Problem: A Discussion with Pamela Das
March 29, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesHow is India tackling its persistent wage management problems? And, are new infrastructural solutions the way forward? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pamela Das about the new infrastructures that are increasingly being put in place to help Indian cities confront the problem of waste and how to handle it. Estimate suggests that by 2025, India will generate 1.3 billion metric tonnes of municipal solid waste every year. With a recycling rate at below 20 percent, the negative conseq...
Rachel S. Gross, "Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America" (Yale UP, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesRachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billi...
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., "Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThere is a growing consensus that environmental narratives can help catalyze the social change necessary to address today's environmental crises; however, surprisingly little is known about their impact and effectiveness. In Empirical Ecocriticism, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder combine an environmental humanities perspective with empirical methods derived from the social sciences to study the influence of environmental stories on our a...
Charlie Hertzog Young, "Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future" (Footnote Press, 2023)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCharlie Hertzog Young became a climate activist in his early teens. His journey led him onto airport runways and into the halls of power, but also to a serious mental health breakdown. He had to rebuild himself physically and psychologically, before focusing his efforts on collective mental recovery in response to a planet in crisis. Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future (Footnote Press, 2023) explores how climate chaos and the failure of those in power ...
Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourExploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Ruth A. Morgan reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organisations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnat...
Travis Rieder, "Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices" (Dutton, 2024)
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIn a world of often confusing and terrifying global problems, how should we make choices in our everyday lives? Does anything on the individual level really make a difference? In Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices (Dutton, 2024), Travis Rieder tackles the moral philosophy puzzles that bedevil us. He explores vital ethical concepts from history and today and offers new ways to think about the “right” thing to do when the challenges we face are larger and more co...
David E. Gilbert, "Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography" (U California Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesTwo decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography (U California Press, 2024) is their story. David E. Gilbert offers an account of the ways...
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, "Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield" (U California Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesForests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield (U California Press, 2024) questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations-endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores RED...
Flora Lu and Emily Murai, "Critical Campus Sustainabilities: Bridging Social Justice and the Environment in Higher Education" (Springer, 2023)
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesIn response to student demands reflecting the urgency of societal and ecological problems, universities are making a burgeoning effort to infuse environmental sustainability efforts with social justice. In this edited volume, we extend calls for higher education leaders to revamp programming, pedagogy, and research that problematically reproduce dominant techno-scientific and managerial conceptualizations of sustainability. Students, staff and community partners, especially those from histori...
Benjamin J. Pauli, "Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis" (MIT Press, 2019)
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesOriginally published in 2019, Benjamin Pauli’s book, Flint Fights Back offers lasting insights into one of the most important drinking water-caused public health crises of American history. In this 2024 interview Pauli shares some explanations from the book but also offers his insights, in this year of the 10th anniversary of the Flint Water Crisis, on what is happening in Flint today and what, after all, we have learned from the fight for clean water in Flint, Michigan. -Patricia Houser, New...
Christy Spackman, "The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage" (U California Press, 2023)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesHave you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this un...
Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesAir conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoceptio...
Cristina Brito, "Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesCristina Brito's book Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) deals with peoples' practices, perceptions, emotions and feelings towards aquatic animals, their ecosystems and nature on the early modern Atlantic coasts by addressing exploitation, use, fear, empathy, otherness, and indifference in the relationships established with aquatic environments and resources by Indigenous Peoples and Europeans. It focuses on large aquatic fauna, es...
Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 28, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesIn Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarch...
The Taste of Water: A Conversation with Christy Spackman
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAfter WAY too long a hiatus, Peoples & Things is back! GET EXCITED!! In this episode, host Lee Vinsel interviews Christy Spackman, Assistant Professor of Art/Science with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University, about her recent book, The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023). Most Americans drink water that has gone ...
James S. Damico and Mark C. Baildon, "How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change" (Teachers College Press, 2022)
February 13, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourClimate change and climate denial have remained largely off the radar in literacy and social studies education in the United States. How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change (Teachers College Press, 2022) addresses that gap with the design of the Climate Denial Inquiry Model (CDIM) and clear examples of how educators and students can confront two forms of climate denial: science denial and action denial. The CDIM highlights how critical literacies specifica...
Daniel Capper, "Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World" (Cornell UP, 2022)
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesDaniel Capper's book Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World (Cornell UP, 2022) delves into ecological experiences in seven Buddhist worlds, spanning ancient India to the modern West, offering a comprehensive analysis of Buddhist environmental ethics. Capper critically examines theories, practices, and real-world outcomes related to Buddhist perspectives on vegetarianism, meat consumption, nature mysticism, and spirituality in nonhuman animals. While Buddhist environmental et...
Ross S. Purves et al., "Unlocking Environmental Narratives: Towards Understanding Human Environment Interactions Through Computational Text Analysis" (Ubiquity Press, 2022)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 27 minutesEnvironmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and their surroundings. Situated at the intersection of the environmental and digital humanities, Unlocking Environmental Narratives: Towards Understanding Human Environment Interactions Through Computational Text Analysis (Ubiquity Press, 2022) examines the potential for studying these sources with computational methods. The volume introduces research question...
Greg Ellermann, "Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature" (Stanford UP, 2022)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWhile much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature (Stanford UP, 2022) insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the...
Marco Armiero et al., "Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism" (MIT Press, 2022)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini's Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism (MIT Press, 2022) does not pursue the ghost of a gree...
Charlotte Coté, "A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast" (U Washington Press, 2022)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFood is at the center of everything, writes University of Washington professor of American Indian Studies Charlotte Coté. In A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (U Washington Press, 2022), Coté shares stories from her own experience growing up and living in the Pacific Northwest. From salmon, to wild berries, to community gardens, the food abundance of this region is central to Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty. C...
Jared D. Margulies, "The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesCacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world's most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, Jared D. Margulies' book The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade (U Minnesota Press, 2023) takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lov...
Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesSince the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agricultural practices. But who really benefits from Right to Farm Laws? And what can be done to promote real agricultural, rural, and environmental justice? Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC Press, 2023) offers valuable history and incisive commentary on these questions. Si...
Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra S. Penn, "Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesThere is a growing need across social, environmental, and policy challenges for richer, more nuanced, yet actionable and participatory understanding of the world. Complexity science and systems thinking offer hope in meeting this need. But in their 2022 book Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra (Alex) S. Penn argue that ‘systems mapping’ is a necessary a starting point for understanding complex adaptive ...
Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan, "The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesPolitical Scientists Patricia Strach (The University at Albany, State University of New York) and Kathleen S. Sullivan (Ohio University) have written a fascinating and important exploration of trash. More precisely, this is a complex examination and analysis of the development of our municipal sanitation processes and structures, highlighting intersecting policy areas, urban and local politics, and racial, gender, and class politics. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to C...
Neall W. Pogue, "The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesHow does the Bible instruct humans to interact with the Earth? Over the last few decades, white conservative evangelical Christians have increasingly taken positions against environmental protections. To understand why, Meghan Cochran talks with Neall W. Pogue about his book The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022) in which he examines how the religious right became a political force known...
Dana R. Fisher, "Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action" (Columbia UP, 2024)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 32 minutesWe've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsen...
Gustav Cederlof, "The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba" (U California Press, 2023)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesIn the pursuit of socialism, Cuba became Latin America’s most oil-dependent economy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country lost 86 percent of its crude oil supplies, resulting in a severe energy crisis. In the face of this shock, Cuba started to develop a low-carbon economy based on economic and social reform rather than high-tech innovation. The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba (University of California Press, 2023) by Dr....
Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesThe first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentr...
Robert Michael Morrissey, "People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America" (U Washington Press, 2022)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBy putting the Midwest at the center of Vast Early America, University of Illinois historian Robert Morrissey reconfigures the power dynamics in the story of North America during the era of colonialism. In his award-winning People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (U Washington Press, 2022), Morrissey tells a story that centers the edge - the places where the vast American prairies meet the forests of the Great Lakes. This "ecotone" region is a zo...
Melanie Joy, "How to End Injustice Everywhere" (Lantern, 2023)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn this eye-opening and compelling work, psychologist Melanie Joy reveals the common denominator driving all forms of injustice. The mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse humans is the same mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse nonhumans and the environment, as well as those in our own groups working for justice. How to End Injustice Everywhere: Understanding the Common Denominator Driving All Injustices, to Create a Better World for Humans, Animals, and the Planet (Lantern Pu...
China’s Environmental Footprint in Ghana: Non-State Responses
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesMusicians and community activists in Ghana have raised their voices to increase awareness of the environmental impact of Chinese activities in the country. The chart-topping song “Greedy men” by Stonebwoy directly criticizes Chinese illegal gold mining in the region. On a separate occasion, a community movement compelled the Ghanaian Minister of Environment to cancel a Chinese coal plant project. In this episode, Dr Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi, lecturer at the Lagos State University in Nigeria, j...
Leigh Claire La Berge, "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary" (Duke UP, 2023)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 37 minutesAt the outset of Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke UP, 2023), Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism...
Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world. When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated the...
Robert R. Janes, "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" (Routledge, 2023)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesWho do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading? Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat (Routledge, 2023) proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the implications of societal collapse from a multidisciplinary perspective and considers the potential museums have to contribute to the reimagining and transitioning of a n...
Nature-Study
December 29, 2023 09:00 - 22 minutesIn this episode, John Linstrom tells us about Nature-Study, an educational movement that began in the rural classrooms of American Progressive Era. It takes students and learners of all kinds out of the classroom, away from the textbook, and into the world, to observe and learn. It offers us a mode of attunement to the world that we might use to heal the divide between rural and urban, and kindle the kind of social change we need to get the world off fossil fuels. Our conversation is centered...
Boria Sax, "Enchanted Forests: The Poetic Construction of a World Before Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesLinking literature, philosophy, art, and personal experience, a moving exploration of the wooded landscape’s power. In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State, which had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish, and Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who currently live and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles, an...
Jean Yen-chun Lin, "A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourEnvironmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smo...
Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesThe Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Dr. Slobodkin reveals how the ...
Tom Özden-Schilling, "The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science After the War in the Woods" (Duke UP, 2023)
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods (Duke University Press, 2023) by Dr. Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Dr. Özden-Schill...
Abigail Agresta, "The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesHow did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived? In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irriga...
John Perlin, "The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization" (Patagonia, 2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 28 minutesA Foundational Conservation Story Revived. Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.” This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the m...
Tracy E. Perkins, "Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism" (U California Press, 2022)
December 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDespite living and working in California, one of the county's most environmentally progressive states, environmental justice activists have spent decades fighting for clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and safe, healthy communities. Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism (U California Press, 2022) tells their story—from the often-raucous protests of the 1980s and 1990s to activists' growing presence inside the halls of the state capitol in...
Anne Baillot, "From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis" (Open Book Publishers, 2023)
November 26, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesHow do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future? In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establi...
Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)
November 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhy is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is lactose-intolerant? Why are gigantic new dairy farms permitted to deplete the sparse water resources of desert ecosystems? Why do thousands of U.S. dairy farmers every year give up after struggling to recoup production costs against plummeting wholesale prices? Exploring these questions and many more, Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfoo...
Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)
November 18, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesFlorentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down ...
Alexa Weik von Mossner, "Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative" (Ohio State UP, 2017)
November 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAffective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017) explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, Alexa Weik von Mossner develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology. This approach helps to clarify how we interact with environmental narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays pa...
Plantationocene
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit. In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraw...