New Books in Environmental Studies
867 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Environmental Scientists about their New Books
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Episodes
Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 40 minutesEnvironmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature c...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 39 minutesIf the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead...
Sarah Milne, "Corporate Nature: An Insider's Ethnography of Global Conservation" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesIn 2012, Cambodia’s most prominent environmental activist was brutally murdered in a high-profile conservation area in the Cardamom Mountains. Tragic and terrible, this event magnifies a crisis in humanity’s efforts to save nature: failure of the very tools and systems at hand for advancing global environmental action. Sarah Milne spent more than a decade working for and observing global conservation projects in Cambodia. During this time, she saw how big environmental NGOs can operate rather...
What Went Wrong in the 1970s in the USA?: A Discussion with Bill McKibben
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode of How To Be Wrong we talk with author, educator, and environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of Third Act, an organization focused on bringing together people over 60 for action on climate and justice, and also 350.org, a global grassroots climate campaign. Bill’s work regularly appears in periodicals such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and he has written numerous books, the most recent being The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at H...
Matthew Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourVisions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. In No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World (Cambridge UP, 2021), Mathias Thaler examines expressions of the utopian imagination, with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian...
Prakash Kashwan, "Climate Justice in India" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesPrakash Kashwan's edited volume Climate Justice in India (Cambridge UP, 2022) brings together a collective of academics, activists, and artists to paint a collage of action-oriented visions for a climate just India. This unique and agenda setting volume informs researchers and readers interested in topics of just transition, energy democracy, intersectionality of access to drinking water, agroecology and women's land rights, national and state climate plans, urban policy, caste justice, and e...
Max Haiven, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesPalm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we live. In Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto Press, 2022), Max Haiven tells a sweeping story that touches on everything from empire to art, from war to food, and from climate change to racial capitalism. By tracing the global history of this ubiquitous elixir we see how capitalism creates surplus populations: people made dependent on capitalis...
Char Miller, "West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement" (Maverick Books, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourOn September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction throughout its many neighborhoods. For the whiter, wealthier, parts of the city, the flood was an inconvenient detriment to business. For the Latinx West Side, it was a devastating tragedy. In West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Miller (Maverick Books, 2021), Pomon...
Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry, "Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
November 30, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesBringing together 100 essential critical articles across 4 volumes, Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a comprehensive collection of the most important academic writings on ecocriticism and literature's engagement with environmental crisis. With texts by key scholars, creative writers and activists, the articles in these four volumes follow the development and history of environmental criticism, as well as interdisciplinary conversations with co...
Michael Bess, "Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesMichael Bess is the Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His fifth and most recent book is Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This study focuses on the existential risks posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics (natural or bioengineered), and artificial intelligence – surveying the solutions that have been tried, and why they have fallen short thus far. Bess descr...
Sally Weintrobe et al., "Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death" (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesClimate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) offers ways to work with the unthinkable and emotionally unendurable current predicament of humanity. The style and writing interweave passion and reflection, animation and containment, radical hope, and tragedy to reflect the dilemmas of our collective crisis. The authors model a relational approach in their styles of writing and in the book's structure. Four chapters, each with a strikingly original voice and in...
Public Participation and Contested Hydropower Development in the Mekong River Basin
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 23 minutesRegional demand for renewable hydropower from the Mekong River and its tributaries in Laos is on the rise. In June 2022, Laos exported one hundred megawatts of hydropower to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia – a historic milestone that further establishes Laos as the battery of Asia. However, these developments take place amid rising concerns for the ecological future of the transboundary Mekong River and the millions of people who depend on it. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, D...
Kasia Paprocki, "Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh" (Cornell UP, 2021)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell UP, 2021), Kasia Paprocki challenges two well-worn assumptions about climate change and its relationship with the political economy of development and agriculture, in Bangladesh, which helps shed light on how climate change becomes a politically contested category, in countries across the Global South. The first, is that climate change is simply a contemporary phenomenon without a longer history ...
Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022)
November 22, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourOn an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. But the devastating storm is only the beginning of this story. The hurricane's long effects intermingled with ongoing processes of economic downturn, racial oppression, resistance, and environmental change. In the Lowcountry, the political, economic, and social conditions of Jim Crow were inextricable from its environmental dimensions. This narrat...
Ann-Christine Duhaime, "Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2022)
November 22, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesWhy 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 wh...
Cajetan Iheka, "African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics" (Duke UP, 2021)
November 22, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn 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 H...
Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)
November 22, 2022 09:00 - 40 minutesThere'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 indigen...
Towards a Green China
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 38 minutesWhat 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 thes...
Towards a Green China
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 38 minutesWhat 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 thes...
Jennifer Eaglin, "Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol" (Oxford UP, 2022)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAs 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:...
David McDermott Hughes, "Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity" (Duke UP, 2017)
November 16, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesIn 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 i...
Ryan Poll, "Aquaman and the War Against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesIn 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 sh...
Jan Selby et al., "Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhat 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 link...
Sustainable Peatland Management and Transboundary Haze in Southeast Asia
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutesIndonesian 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 ...
Martin Puchner, "Literature for a Changing Planet" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 39 minutesWhy 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 worl...
Thom van Dooren, "A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions" (MIT Press, 2022)
November 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn 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 scien...
June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)
November 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn 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 frequen...
Sarah T. Hines, "Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia" (U California Press, 2021)
November 02, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesSarah 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 l...
Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture
October 31, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesParis 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 h...
Andreas Malm, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Verso, 2021)
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesThe 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 movemen...
Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesThe 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 acknowledg...
John Suval, "Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 19, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesThe 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 na...
Julie Sze, "Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger" (U California Press, 2020)
October 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour“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,...
Rafico Ruiz, "Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier" (Duke UP, 2021)
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrom 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 ...
Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)
October 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable. In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through c...
Saheed Aderinto, "Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria" (Ohio UP, 2022)
October 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWith this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio UP, 2022) in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria an...
Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)
October 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU, retraces the history of gold mining and orpaillage along the geological formation known as the West African Birimian Greenstone Belt. D’Avignon proposes the expression “ritual geology” to refer to “a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth”, which has both endured until today among local miners an...
M. Margaret McKeown, "Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas" (Potomac Books, 2022)
October 10, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesU.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-presidential nominee, as a target of impeachment proceedings, and for his tenure as the longest-serving justice from 1939 to 1975. His most enduring legacy, however, is perhaps his advocacy for the environment. Douglas was the spiritual heir to early twentieth-century conservation pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. His personal spiri...
Jennifer Wenzel, "The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature" (Fordham UP, 2019)
October 07, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesHow do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham UP, 2019) argues that assumptions about what nature is are a...
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
September 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in...
Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesAfter the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What to do? The stories captured in this book encompass their answer to that question: the clean-up efforts, the work with governmental and non-governmental aid agencies, and the fraught choices concerning rebuilding. Through a rich and varied set of oral histories that provide perspective on disaster planning, response, and recovery in New Jersey, A...
NBN Classic: Kate Brown, "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)
September 25, 2022 10:00 - 47 minutesThis 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 we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukrai...
NBN Classic: Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019)
September 24, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While ackno...
Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017)
September 23, 2022 16:51 - 47 minutesAward winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historical explanations for the world ecological crises and the global crisis in capitalism. Using the framework of "cheapness," A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017) takes the reader through the long h...
Fred Spier, "How the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers" (CRC Press, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHow the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers (CRC Press, 2022) offers a simple and novel theoretical approach to understanding the history of the biosphere, including humanity’s place within it. It also helps to clarify what the possibilities and limitations are for future action. This is a subject of wide interest because today we are facing a great many environmental issues, many of which may appear unconnected. Yet all these issues are part of our biosphere. For ma...
Martin Kalb, "Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa" (Berghahn, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesGerman ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and suffering of indigenous populations. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort to turn outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Berghahn Books, 2022), Martin Kal...
Nancy Fraser, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It" (Verso, 2022)
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesCapital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022), leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the co...
Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022)
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesIn this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though s...
Joshua Duclos, "Wilderness, Morality, and Value" (Lexington Books, 2022)
September 20, 2022 04:00 - 1 hourWhat if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value (Lexington Books, 2022). Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorate some of this suffering, the morality of wilderness preservation is itself in question. Joshua S....
Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021)
September 19, 2022 08:00 - 24 minutesAlex Nathanson's book A History of Solar Power Art and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of creative applications of photovoltaic (PV) solar power, including sound art, wearable technology, public art, industrial design, digital media, building integrated design, and many others. The growth in artists and designers incorporating solar power into their work reflects broader social, economic, and political events. As the cost of PV cells has come down, they have become more accessib...