New Books in Environmental Studies

From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era. Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and co...

In Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge UP, 2021), Julia Dehm provides a critical analysis of how the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) scheme operates to reorganise social relations and to establish new forms of global authority over forests in the Global South, in ways that benefit the interests of some actors while furt...

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), about his 2021 book Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (Integral Imprint, 2020). Along with his abiding interest in the work of Jung, Hegel, and Edgar Morin, Kelly’s current research areas include the evol...

Join Dr. Mary Menton and Dr. Philippe Le Billon as they dive into their new edited volume, Environmental Defenders: Deadly Struggle for Life and Territory, published by Routledge as a part of their Explorations in Environmental Studies Series in 2021. The interview explores what/who defenders are, what threats they face, and what can be done to help support and protect them.  Broken up into three...

Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021), Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York,...

In Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, S...

In Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2020), Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability...

The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today-...

Scholars have long noticed a discrepancy in how non-Western and Western peoples conceptualize the scientific and religious worlds. Non-Western traditions and communities, such as India, are better positioned to provide an alternative to the Western dualistic thinking of separating science and religion. Dr. Anil Joshi founded the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization (HESCO)...

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its earl...

One of the trailblazers in the field of Japanese philosophy, James W. Heisig, delivered his five lectures in 2019 at Boston College as the Duffy Lectures in Global Christianity. These lectures were compiled into this book, Of Gods and Minds: In Search of a Theological Commons (Nagoya & Brussels: Chisokudō Publications, 2019). In them the author begins from the assumption that if the Christian God...

Environmental protection and climate actions has embedded in China’s foreign policy and the Chinese government has recently pledged to make the Belt and Road Initiative “open, green, and clean”. How far is this an agenda designed primarily for international consumption? How do domestic interest groups respond to China’s environmental foreign relations? To what extent can they influence and shape C...

Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history's mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought. The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and foo...

The Salton Sea is a kaleidoscope. To some people, it's a waste land, a place of death only suitable for a dumping ground. For others, it's a clarion call, a warning for what humanity faces in our anthropogenically climate changed future. For still others, it's simply home. In The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Dr. Traci Brynne Voyl...

Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Cornell UP, 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, h...

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell (Princeton UP, 2021) is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet--is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United S...

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the...

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneve...

In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke UP, 2021),  Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now...

Ocean Enlightenment is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Edie Widder, Founder, CEO and Senior Scientist at Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA). After an inspiring story about how Edie Widder became a seagoing marine biologist and deep-sea diver, this conversation covers topics such as bioluminescence which is a fascinating scientific phenomenon that pr...

In 2016, the city of Mumbai was blanketed in toxic smog. The source? Fires at the nearby dumping ground of Deonar: the country’s oldest. The Deonar fire became an embarrassment for Mumbai, coming right before an international expo meant to announce the city to international investors and business. Law enforcement immediately blamed scrap dealers who lived alongside the landfill. The pickers are me...

Education is one of our main weapons in the fight against climate change. The need of the hour, therefore, is to enhance the world’s commitment to climate education, and incorporate climate change into our education systems. In a special episode that combines two of our ongoing themed series, Survival by Degrees and Quality Education, Radhika Iyengar and Christina T. Kwauk, co-editors of the book ...

Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford UP, 2018) explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene —the...

Coral Reefs: Science and Survival is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Charles Sheppard, Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. Charles Sheppard has worked extensively for a wide range of UN, governmental and aid agencies in tropical marine and coastal development issues. This conversation explores how Prof. Sheppard is trying to find a way throug...

Drawing on thirty years of research, Goulson has written an accessible, fascinating, and important book that examines the evidence of an alarming drop in insect numbers around the world. "If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse," he warned in a recent interview in the New York Times--beginning with humans' food supply. The main cause of this decrease in insect populations is t...