New Books in Environmental Studies
885 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 days ago - ★★★★ - 19 ratingsInterviews with Environmental Scientists about their New Books
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Episodes
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,...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutes“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 by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBased on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but ...
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...
Philip Lymbery, "Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future" (Bloombury, 2022)
September 19, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesFrom the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to the Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, the internationally acclaimed author of Farmageddon, goes behind the scenes of industrial farming and confronts 'Big Agriculture', where mega-farms, chemicals and animal cages are sweeping the countryside and jeopardising the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the nature that we treasure. In his investigations, however, he also finds hope in the pioneers who are battling to bring lands...
Mrill Ingram, "Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth" (Temple UP, 2022)
September 16, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesHow we relate to orphaned space matters. Voids, marginalia, empty spaces—from abandoned gas stations to polluted waterways—are created and maintained by politics, and often go unquestioned. In Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth (Temple UP, 2022), Mrill Ingram provides a call to action to claim and to cherish these neglected spaces and make them a source of inspiration through art and/or remuneration. Ingram advocates not only for “urban greening” and “green plann...
Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesCan spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lies at the heart of the research project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise” that we focus on in this episode. Also known as TRANSSUSTAIN, the project builds on the observation that scholars, activists, and even politicians in many Asian countries have found inspiration in traditional knowledge and in the premoder...
Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)
September 15, 2022 09:00 - 21 minutesWe know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms and supply psychological benefits to humans as well, improving our moods and beautifying the landscape around us. But plants don't just passively provide. They also take action. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They "know" ...
Jennifer L. Allen, "Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany" (Harvard UP, 2022)
September 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBy 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 crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. In Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard UP, 2022), Jennifer Al...
Neoliberalism
September 06, 2022 08:00 - 20 minutesIn this episode, Troy Vettese talks with us about neoliberalism. It turns out the neoliberals aren’t actually a secret cabal of dastardly villains, but a group of right wing public intellectuals who want to be taken seriously by the academic establishment, and who have been remarkably successful in reshaping the world in their image. In the episode, Troy references the work of Quinn Slobodian, Philip Mirowski, and Dieter Plehwe on the history of neoliberalism. They have written a book togethe...
Peter S. Alagona, "The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities" (U California Press, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities (U California Press, 2022) tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth’s ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, ...
Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California Press in 2022. Continent in Dust offers a political anthropological account of strange weather. It is an ethnography of China’s meteorological contemporary - the transformed weather patterns whose formations and fallouts have accompanied decades of breakneck economic development. Focusing on i...
Erin James, "Narrative in the Anthropocene" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesIn Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State UP, 2022), Erin James poses two complementary questions: What can narrative teach us about our current geological epoch, defined and marked by the irrevocable activity of humans on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems? and What can our current geological epoch teach us about narrative? Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,Maria Popova’s collective biography Figuring, Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here,Indigeno...
Josh Milburn, "Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
August 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAnimal 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 love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters. Moving beyond what humans should eat and whether to count animals as food, Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (M...
Frederico Freitas, "Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border (Cambridge UP, 2021), Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region’s territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants f...
Becky O'Connor, "The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment" (Harriman House, 2022)
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAs global governments and regulators set an agenda for net zero carbon emissions, the focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria among investors, from pension scheme members to institutions, is on the rise. The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment (Harriman House, 2022) is an indispensable guide to the history, developments and latest thinking into the future of ESG investing from some of the most influential na...
Mathew Lawrence and Adrienne Buller, "Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis" (Verso, 2022)
August 23, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesAdrienne Buller (The Value of a Whale) and Mathew Lawrence (Planet on Fire) have penned a radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic politics: Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis (Verso, 2022). The question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset manager capitalism and the explosive concentration of wealth within ...
Temperatures on the Rise: Adapting to Heat Extremes in South Asia
August 19, 2022 08:00 - 28 minutesBetween 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 impacted people's livelihoods and the environment. What made this heat wave so different and possibly worse than previous ones? Who was particularly at risk? And where does India stand in terms of adaptation strategies? In this episode, Hanna Geschewski talks with climate change researchers Dr. Chandi Singh and Dr. Emmanuel Raju about the recent hea...
The Poison Paradigm: What a Toxic Chemical Tells us about the Politics of Science
August 19, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesWe are exposed to thousands of toxic chemicals daily. This is no accident; it is by design. They are everywhere – coating our consumer products, in our food packaging, being dumped into our lakes and sewers, and in countless other places. However, for the most part, regulators say that we need not worry. That assessment is based on a simple 500-year-old adage, “the dose makes the poison.” The logic is simple: anything is poisonous, depending on how large a dose. Dosing yourself with a miniscu...
Annah Lake Zhu, "Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China" (Harvard UP, 2022)
August 18, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesMoney does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press: 2022) In Madagascar, loggers, flush with cash from the rosewood trade, don’t quite know how to react to their newfound largesse, sometimes demanding less money for their wares out of confusion. Rumors abound of how loggers make their money. There’s no way that simple wood could garner so much profit, people say, so ob...
Paolo Squatriti, "Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 17, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesIn Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paolo Squatriti asks: Why did weeds matter in the Carolingian empire? What was their special significance for writers in eighth- and ninth-century Europe and how was this connected with the growth of real weeds? In early medieval Europe, unwanted plants that persistently appeared among crops created extra work, reduced productivity, and challenged theologians who b...
Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesAnimals are staging a revolution—they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2022) threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how ...
The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesThere 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 to get to net zero. Even governments committed to net zero are wondering how they are going to do it. Eric Lonergan has tried to address that problem with the book Super Charge Me: Net Zero Faster (Agenda, 2022) - co-authored with Corrine Sawyers - which sets out to suggest ways Net Zero can be achieved. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journal...
Max Foran, "The Subjugation of Canadian Wildlife: Failures of Principle and Policy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesHardly a day goes by without news of the extinction or endangerment of yet another animal species, followed by urgent but largely unheeded calls for action. An eloquent denunciation of the failures of Canada's government and society to protect wildlife from human exploitation, Max Foran's The Subjugation of Canadian Wildlife: Failures of Principle and Policy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018) argues that a root cause of wildlife depletions and habitat loss is the culturally ingrained beliefs that unde...
Adam Sundberg, "Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBy the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange mollusks that threatened the literal foundations of the Republic. Adam Sundberg’s new book, Nat...
J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, "The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945" (Harvard UP, 2016)
August 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke's book The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard UP, 2016) explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of ...
Environmental Catastrophe
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutesIn this episode John Yargo speaks with Kim about Environmental Catastrophe. In the episode John quotes Hannah Arendt and N.K. Jemisin, discusses a Shakespeare play and a 17th century Peruvian painting, and optimistically suggests that environmental catastrophe will save us. He references the work of many scholars in the field of environmental humanities, including Geoffrey Parker and Dagomar Degroot on the Little Ice Age in Early Modern Europe, Gerard Passannante’s work on Catastrophizing, an...
Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesWhat is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question within a framework of gravity and geologic deep-time, Lindsay Starkey demonstrates in her monograph, Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe Through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) how thinkers from antiquity to the sixteen-century held their own beli...