New Books in Environmental Studies

In Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), futurist Bryan Alexander explores higher education during an age of unfolding climate crisis. Powered by real-world examples and the latest research, Alexander assesses practical responses and strategies by surveying contemporary programs and academic climate research from around the world. He establishes a m...

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have sha...

The news concerning climate change isn’t good. The warming of our planet now threatens to trap millions of people in extreme poverty while destabilizing the global order in ways that exacerbate existing global inequalities. Mitigation and adaptation strategies, even if adhered to, may not be sufficient. The situation seems hopeless. However, in Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (O...

How can we stop infrastructure from damaging the planet? In Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond (U Chicago Press, 2023), Christina Dunbar-Hester, an associate professor in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, explores the history of the San Pedro Bay area to tell the story of oil’s impact on LA. The book o...

Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping account of what happened when Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change. Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve...

Wendy Lynne Lee's This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2022) provides students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental philosophy and ethics. Mitigating the effects of climate change will require global cooperation and lasting commitment. Of the many disciplines addressing the ecological crisis, philosophy is perhaps best su...

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financial assets. The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which ma...

The journal of Global Environmental Politics (GEP) has hit a tremendous milestone in 2020—celebrating its 20 years of publication with the MIT Press! In this episode, two of the journal’s Co-Editors Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal reflect on the origins and goals of GEP, its immeasurable impact on the discussions of relationships between global political forces and environmental change, and th...

How might we imagine justice in times of ecological harm? How are human struggles for social justice entangled with the lives of other beings including plants, animals, fungi, and microbes? What is at stake when claims are made about who or what is the subject of justice? These questions and more are explored in this conversation between Terese Gagnon and Sophie Chao, co-editor of the new volume T...

The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco (U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems...

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library, 2022) looks at threats to forest life across the globe. Dr. John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value. The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – throu...

We know that eating animals is bad for the planet and bad for our health, and yet we do it anyway. Ask anyone in the plant-based movement and the solution seems obvious: Stop eating meat. But, for many people, that stark solution is neither appealing nor practical. In Meat Me Halfway: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet (Prometheus Books, 2022), author and founder...

Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, Kirstin Munro's book The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households (Bristol UP, 2023) describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the a...

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. In Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press, 2023) geographer Andrew Curley, a member o...

How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari? In Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford UP, 2020), Thomas M. Lekan illuminates the controversial origins of this national park by examining how Europe's greatest wildlife conservationist, former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning d...

In this episode of High Theory, Karl Dudman tells us about the Cooperative Extension System. Formed in 1914 as an extension of the Land Grant University system in the United States, the Cooperative Extension System is an extraordinarily public model of scientific communication. There is an extension officer in every county of the US. The original goal was to transmit academic scientific knowledge...

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in...

Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the United States in recent decades. But as Joseph Giacomelli shows in Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), this is actually nothing new: as far back as Gilded Age America, climate uncertainty...

What does climate change adaptation look like in Bangladesh? And what kind of gendered social landscape does climate change adaptation have to navigate in Bangladesh? Bangladesh is among the countries most at risk from the negative consequences, and often spoken of as ground zero of climate change. In recent years, more attention has been devoted to grappling with the question of how gender inters...

Reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize...

Robert Charette, engineer, consultant, and contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum magazine, talks about his twelve-part series, “The Electric Vehicle Transition Explained,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The series takes a systems perspective on electric vehicles, and talks about all of the potential barriers – from a lack of minerals, to stressing out the electricity grid, to being short o...

They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. Mushroom (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Sara Rich explores the ordinary object of mushroom, one whose encounters with humans are usu...

Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the American West. University of Idaho professor emeritus of history Adam Sowards explains why in his new book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). Sowards explai...

Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the American West. University of Idaho professor emeritus of history Adam Sowards explains why in his new book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). Sowards explai...

Feeling bad about the environment? You should. Artist Alexis Rockman talks about his art, the potential for real change, and his ongoing relationship with the American Museum of Natural History. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Conn...