New Books in Environmental Studies

Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson's book Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Routledge, 2020) brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal. The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific isl...

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is th...

Max Liboiron founder of Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist, anti-colonial laboratory talks about making better science and how they aren’t interested in dismantling the masters house (because who cares about that place) but they definitely are taking those tools. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArg...

In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed i...

In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the film director, Huang Chia-chu about his making of the eco-film, Whale Island (2020). The interview covers the Director's engagement with this amazing project to tell a "sea story" of Taiwan, his encountering with the writer, Liao Hung-chi and the photographer, Jin Lai, his choice of film translated title as well as movie...

Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell UP, 2022) examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers...

John and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsuna...

What does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (U Arizona Press, 2022) lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies.  Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and...

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hyd...

How can cultural heritage give us the methodological tools and source material to confront climate change? How can the cultural heritage sector lead the way into a future that proactively faces the climate crisis? Who can be involved in this work—who gets to identify as a “cultural heritage expert”—and what is the work to be done? Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage (Routledge,...

Zack Furness, an associate professor of communications at Penn State Greater Allegheny, talks about his 2010 book, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. One Less Car examines the history of how bicycles became a tool and object of advocacy and activism. With roots going back 1960s countercultures and growing thro...

The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination.  In Hydronarra...

The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland....

Kimon and Richard speak with Christian Arno, founder and CEO of Pawprint, about how companies can effectively achieve sustainability goals. As a young child growing up in Aberdeen, Christian was interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. His first venture was in comic book sales, and his first clients were his parents and schoolmates on the bus. When his father learned more about the finances of Chr...

Among all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its v...

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are special places known for their distinctive flora, including pine-oak forests, sandplain grasslands, and sand dunes peppered with bearberry shrubs. Unfortunately, this unique sense of place is under threat. In recent decades, contemporary landscape practices have come to depend on environmentally stressful fertilizers and irrigation sy...

Journalist Katherine Blunt, who writes about renewable energy and utilities for the Wall Street Journal, talks about her new book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book tells the fascinating story of how declining performance at an electrical utility eventually led to wildfires and stagge...

Journalist John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for over forty years. In this interview with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel, Markoff talks about his long career, how he became a “tech journalist” long before that term even existed, and how he came to write his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Markoff and Vinsel also talk about how Brand’s life is interwoven w...

On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first interdisciplinary history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century. Philip Gooding deploys diverse source materials, including oral, climatological, anthropological, and archaeological sources, to grou...

How can we build greener infrastructure in the face of the global climate emergency? In Trade Winds: A Sailing Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping (Manchester UP, 2023), Christiaan De Beukelaer, a Senior Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management at the University of Melbourne intertwines an depth analysis of modern shipping, with a memoir of being aboard a sailing ship during the 2020 pande...

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military pe...

Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revoluti...

What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell, 2022) shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level...

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, th...

Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread health problems related to animal product consumption disrupt long held nutritional ideologies. Already a top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, Ireland has committed to expanding animal agriculture despite impending crisis....