New Books in Environmental Studies
891 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 days ago - ★★★★ - 19 ratingsInterviews with Environmental Scientists about their New Books
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Episodes
Mayfair Yang, "Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)
May 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAn interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmenta...
Chris Begley, "The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival" (Basic Books, 2021)
May 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourPandemic, climate change, or war: our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival. In The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival (Basic Books, 2021), archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakd...
John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Comstock Publishing, 2021)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesLives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Comstock Publishing, 2021) explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through eight interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient...
Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourGrain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It’s all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia. Author of numerous books, his latest is Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the W...
Cleo Wölfle Hazard, "Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice" (U Washington Press, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesRivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice (U Washington Press, 2022) explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and resto...
Liz Carlisle, "Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming" (Island Press, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesA powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the na...
Eve Darian-Smith, "Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesRecent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford UP, 2022), Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the p...
Christopher W. Wells, "Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader" (U Washington Press, 2018)
May 20, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence—but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing an...
Corey Byrnes, "Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges" (Columbia UP, 2019)
May 19, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCorey Byrnes’ Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a work of considerable historical and disciplinary depth. Byrnes brings together the Tang dynasty poetry of Du Fu, Song travel writing about the same, late Qing cartographic ventures, texts written by Western travelers in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as contemporary Chinese film and landscape art (among many other sources) to analyze how the Three Gorges region has been...
Alicia Puglionesi, "In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire" (Scribner, 2022)
May 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the pres...
Jacob Doherty, "Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability" (U California Press, 2021)
May 18, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesUganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability (U California Press, 2021) tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, pla...
Irune Gabiola, "Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres" (Peter Lang, 2020)
May 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres (Peter Lang, 2020), Irune del Rio Gabiola examines the power of affect in structuring decolonizing modes of resistance performed by social movements such as COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). Despite a harsh legacy of colonialism, indigenous communities continue suffering from territorial displacements, dispossession, and human rights abuses due to extract...
Kai Bosworth, "Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
May 16, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesStunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues tha...
Abby Seiff, "Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
May 12, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesTonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river. And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations. But the lake is currently...
Jeff D. Colgan, "Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order" (Oxford UP, 2021)
May 10, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesWhen and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of int...
Taylor Eggan, "Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination" (U Virginia Press, 2022)
May 09, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn today's NBN Environmental Studies interview, dancer, performer, and literary scholar Dr. Taylor Eggan joins us to speak about his new book Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and Settler Colonial Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2022). A text best described as an intellectual bestiary using environmental philosophy, literary theory, settler colonial studies, decolonial theory, and speculative realism, Unsettling Nature addresses logics embedded with ecological homecoming n...
Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan E. Kallman, "Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
May 05, 2022 08:00 - 33 minutesAs the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world—from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments—social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people? Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology ...
Pandemic Perspectives 9: Covid, 'Scientism,' and the Betrayal of the Enlightenment
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism." Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Pers...
Jo Guldi, "The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights" (Yale UP, 2022)
May 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered “land reform” policies beginning in...
Lukas Ley, "Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
April 29, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesIce caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations ...
Tracey Williams, "Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea" (Unicorn, 2022)
April 29, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesIn 1997 sixty-two containers fell off the cargo ship Tokio Express after it was hit by a rogue wave off the coast of Cornwall, including one container filled with nearly five million pieces of Lego, much of it sea themed. In the months that followed, beachcombers started to find Lego washed up on beaches across the south west coast. Among the pieces they discovered were octopuses, sea grass, spear guns, life rafts, scuba tanks, cutlasses, flippers and dragons. The pieces are still washing up ...
Larry E. Swedroe and Samuel C. Adams, "Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing" (Harriman House, 2022)
April 28, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe investment industry is fast approaching a point where one-third of global assets under management are invested with a sustainable objective. But do sustainable investment products do what investors expect them to do? How can an investor tell if their investments are having the social impact they want? Does that impact come at a financial cost? And how can investors weave their way through the web of confusing acronyms, conflicting agency ratings, and the mass of fund offerings, confident ...
Mary Louise Pratt, "Planetary Longings" (Duke UP, 2022)
April 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Planetary Longings (Duke UP, 2022), eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of t...
Faisal H. Husain, "Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourRivers of the Sultan offers a history of the Ottoman Empire's management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, meta...
Deborah Gordon, "No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 19, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesIn No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+), an innovative, open-source model that estimates global oil and gas emissions. Gordon iden...
Merging the Local with the Global: A Conversation with a Malaysian Youth Climate Advocate
April 18, 2022 08:00 - 25 minutesIn the past few years, youth-led groups such as the Fridays for Future school strike movement have changed the face of climate activism globally. In this interview, Malaysian youth climate advocate Farhana Shukor talks about her experience working on climate change issues in her native country as well as at the international stage as an observer at the COP26 climate conference in November 2021. Farhana discusses the significance of loss and damage in the Malaysian context, her wishes for Sout...
Jeff Sebo, "Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 18, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our us...
Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)
April 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.” Like all facets of daily life, th...
Ecosphere
April 13, 2022 08:00 - 21 minutesJohn Linstrom talks about the ecosphere, a way of understanding the world deriving principally from the work of ecologist and philosopher Stan Rowe. We also refer briefly to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, crown shyness in trees, Aldo Leopold’s idea of a ‘land community’, Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance and knowledge humility. John Linstrom is a 7th year Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of English, New York University., and series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for the Coms...
Pandemic Perspectives 6: COVID and the Importance of Political Understanding
April 13, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesIn this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned University of Cambridge political theorist John Dunn about what the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our alarming low levels of collective political judgement. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed p...
Bethany Wiggin et al., "Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
April 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourTime cannot be measured in so many coffee spoons, or that is what editors, Dr. Bethany Wiggin, Dr. Carolyn Fornoff, and Dr. Patricia Eunji Kim argue in Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Bearing the marks of radical hope and constructive pessimism, Timescales resembles something-like a twenty-first century manifesto. By Writing, righting, and rioting across pages and disciplines, Timescales enters an entangled plurality of temporal streams with spac...
Laura J. Martin, "Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration" (Harvard UP, 2022)
April 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEnvironmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology. Restoration has been a touc...
Paul Stephenson, "New Rome: The Empire in the East" (Harvard UP, 2022)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesAs modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome: The Empire in the East (Harvard UP, 2022), Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional te...
Pandemic Perspectives 5: Necessarily Global--How the Pandemic Forces Us To Think Bigger
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesIn this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Andy Hoffman, the dynamic and innovative business professor at the University of Michigan, about what the pandemic has brought to light to effectively address our many pressing global problems. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and...
Hilda Lloréns, "Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice" (U of Washington Press, 2021)
April 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhen Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generatio...
Urban Climate Change and Adaptation: Messages from the IPCC Report for Southeast Asia
April 04, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutes“An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are the greatest climate risks for the region and where are we in terms of adapting to them? And why are the concepts of maladaptation and climate resilient development important as we focus ou...
Sophie Chao, "In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua" (Duke UP, 2022)
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode we speak with Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022). Her new book examines the lives of Marind people in West Papua as they are transformed by Indonesian colonialism. These transformations are epitomized in Marind relations to two species of trees: Sago palm, a source of subsistence which is profoundly meaningful to them, and oil palm, an introduced species grown in mono-crop plantations which are ...
Ilan Kelman, "Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries" (UCL Press, 2022)
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesAntarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022) edited by Ilan Kelman Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identi...
Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesAs much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implem...
Heather Goodall, "Georges River Blues: Swamps, Mangroves and Resident Action, 1945–1980" (ANU Press, 2022)
March 25, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesGeorges River Blues: Swamps, Mangroves, and Resident Action, 1945-1980 (ANU Press, 2022) by Heather Goodall The lower Georges River, on Dharawal and Dharug lands, was a place of fishing grounds, swimming holes and picnics in the early twentieth century. But this all changed after World War II, when rapidly expanding industry and increasing population fell heaviest on this river, polluting its waters and destroying its bush. Local people campaigned to defend their river. They battled municipal...
Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)
March 23, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesOur future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox. "Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minde...
John Bellamy Foster, "The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology" (Monthly Review Press, 2021)
March 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIt is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for. In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our rel...
The Future of Disorder: A Discussion with Helen Thompson
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesIn her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What ...
Peter B. Lavelle, "The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China" (Columbia UP, 2020)
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2020), Peter Lavelle offers a fascinating narrative history of natural resource development in China during the tumultuous 19th-century. Faced with an unprecedented confluence of natural disasters, wars, rebellions, foreign incursions and social problems, Qing Dynasty officials and elites looked to the natural world as a source of wealth, security and power. Lavelle grounds his...
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, "All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 18, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesAll Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challe...
Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund, "Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
March 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHarsh conditions, intense isolation, and acute danger inevitably impacted the making and communicating eighteenth-century scientific knowledge leading up to the first International Polar Year in 1882. In her new book, Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Country (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund demonstrates the instability of nineteenth-century scientific practices and the challenges of producing trave...
Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss, "Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species" (U Washington Press, 2021)
March 16, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesHerring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved for millennia through interactions with key spawning areas, but humans have also significantly impacted the species’ distribution and abundance. Combining ethnological, historical, archaeological, and political perspectives with comparative reference to other No...
Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza, "A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism" (Oxford UP, 2021)
March 15, 2022 04:00 - 1 hourIn A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (Oxford UP, 2021), Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginn...
Leadership and Humility: A Conversation with Major General Ken Wisian
March 14, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesFor today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Ken Wisian, who is geophysicist and Associate Director in the Environmental Division of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, Ken was a senior state executive responsible for disaster recovery, oil spill prevention and response, and coastal infrastructure and environmental protection for Texas. And as a military officer, he participated or lead military disaster response efforts for the Shuttle Co...
Jo Handelsman, "A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet" (Yale UP, 2021)
March 07, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesA World without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet (Yale University Press, 2021) by celebrated biologist Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climate change, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery. Humans depend on soil for 95 percent of global food production, yet let it erode at unsustainable rates. In the United States, China, and India, vast tracts of farmland will be barren of topsoil within this century. The c...