New Books in Environmental Studies - podcast cover

New Books in Environmental Studies

Marshall Poenewbooksnetwork.com
Interviews with Environmental Scientists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Episodes

Andrea Pappas, "Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740-1770" (Lund Humphries, 2023)

Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, in Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (Lund Humphries, 2023) Dr. Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous en...

May 04, 202548 minEp. 116

Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, "Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America" (Island Press, 2025)

This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters’ own files, Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America (Island Press, 2025) traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devastation of human lives. We learn that PFAS, the ‘forever chemicals’ found in everyday products, from c...

May 02, 202547 minEp. 210

Lian Sinclair, "Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations" (Manchester UP, 2024)

Why do multinational mining corporations use participation to undermine resistance? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter on a global scale? Why are there so many different global standards in mining? Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations (Manchester UP, 2024) develops a new critical political economy approach to studying extractive accumulation, drawing on three detailed Indonesian cases to explain how participato...

May 01, 202537 min

Chloe Ahmann, "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried ...

Apr 30, 202537 minEp. 363

Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and...

Apr 28, 20251 hr 8 min

Ted Levin, "The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World" (Green Writers Press, 2025)

In The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World (Green Writers Press, 2025), a former Bronx Zoo zoologist and award-winning nature writer, Ted Levin, spent Covid rediscovering his valley and the joys of watching the season pass, day by day by day. The book is a chronicle of his rediscovery of the Thetford, Vermont hillside on which he lived and a recounting of the daily joys of observing home ground as Levin (like many of us) was forced by Covid to stay home for nearly two years. In ...

Apr 26, 202531 minEp. 209

Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)

In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for th...

Apr 24, 202551 minEp. 61

Saleem H. Ali, "Sustainability: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2024)

The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'sustainability' of human societies. The term's common usage can be traced back to the advent of the Earth Summit in 1992 when 'sustainable development' was broadly embraced by the international community as an ostensibly win-win proposition for economic development, social inclusion, and ecological conservation. Yet both the natural science underpinning...

Apr 21, 202546 minEp. 29

Jennifer Clapp, "Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters" (MIT Press, 2025)

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed good...

Apr 19, 20251 hr 5 minEp. 128

María de Los Ángeles Picone, "Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina" (UNC Press, 2025)

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argenti...

Apr 16, 20251 hr 9 minEp. 232

Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, in Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting close...

Apr 10, 20251 hr 5 min

Ståle Holgersen, "Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World" (Verso, 2024)

In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves beyond simplistic understandings of societal turbulence or even disaster, arguing that crises have come to mean something very specific. Where previous analyses have treated economic and ecological crises as separate phenomena, Holgersen reveals their profound interconnection within capitalism's contradictions. Central to the book is the idea that both ...

Apr 09, 202555 minEp. 522

Duncan Watson, "Everyone's Trash: One Man Against 1.6 Billion Pounds" (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2024)

Each day, every single person in the United States, all 324 million, discards about five pounds of waste. Be it a bottle that gets placed in a recycling bin or a piece of paper crumpled and tossed into the waste bin, every bit of the daily 1.6 billion pounds cast-off has a story. Everyone's Trash: One Man Against 1.6 Billion Pounds (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2024) is full of those stories. It will wake you up and give you hope. As the author, Duncan Watson, says, "More people in America recycl...

Apr 08, 202540 minEp. 208

Tuomas Tammisto, "Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier" (Helsinki UP, 2024)

On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. Tuomas is joining me to talk about his recently published book, Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier (Helsinki UP, 2024) Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen people of Pap...

Apr 05, 20252 hr 6 min

Anna Farro Henderson, "Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood (U Minnesota Press, 2025), exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant--of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics--she brings readers into the dail...

Apr 01, 202547 minEp. 207

Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)

The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular. Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium...

Mar 30, 202545 minEp. 383

Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason L. Newton provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape. Back when resou...

Mar 29, 202556 minEp. 125

Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska Thomas Lynch takes those stories from two places - Australia and the arid American West - to compare how colonial stories have impacted land use practices. By placing Australian and American texts side by side...

Mar 28, 20251 hr 4 min

V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics ...

Mar 24, 20251 hr 4 minEp. 354

Royce Kurmelovs, "Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil" (U Queensland Press, 2024)

A riveting expose of the global oil industry' s multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australian government to undermine worldwide efforts to address environmental devastation. Researched and written by one of Australia' s most fearless investigative journalists, Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (U Queensland Press, 2024) reveals how the US petroleum industry was warned about its environmental impacts back in the 1950s and ...

Mar 23, 202535 minEp. 124

Book Chat: "A Taiwanese Eco-Literature Reader" with Ian Rowen

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-literature Reader, soon to be published by Columbia University Press. This anthology brings together translations of nine compelling stories from Taiwan, examining Taiwan’s most vibrant literary genre and its resonance to the theme of HOME. While this podcast series has featured interviews with some of the anthology’s authors, Ian speaks from the persp...

Mar 21, 202525 min

Genevieve Guenther, "The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It" (Oxford UP, 2024)

The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of our economy and save our planet. It's an analysis of the current discourse of American climate politics, but also a critical history of the terms that most directly influence the way not just conservatives but centrists on both sides of the political divide think and talk about climate change. In showing how those terms lead to mistaken beliefs about ...

Mar 20, 202531 min

Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.’ Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free’ parki...

Mar 19, 202543 minEp. 203

Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. With a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, his research interests include environmental communication, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Richard's latest book, Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2024. About the book: Si...

Mar 18, 202548 minEp. 206

Sally Coulthard, "A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects" (HarperCollins UK, 2024)

For most of human history, we were rural folk. Our daily lives were bound up with working the land, living within the rhythm of the seasons. We poured our energies into growing food, tending to animals and watching the weather. Family, friends and neighbours were often one and the same. Life revolved around the village and its key spaces and places – the church, the green, the school and the marketplace. And yet rural life is oddly invisible our historical records. The daily routine of the peasa...

Mar 17, 202532 minEp. 162

Joseph A. Seeley, "Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime border of the Japanese Empire. Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024) focuses on this river at this critical juncture, analyzing how imperial Japan attempted to harness and control this fluid border. By honing in on both human and nonhuman actors — including water, ice, timbe...

Mar 16, 20251 hr 2 minEp. 559

Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Dr. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still li...

Mar 15, 202543 minEp. 168

Jade S. Sasser, "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question" (U California Press, 2024)

Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rapidly growing field, but most researchers overlook a closely related concern: reproductive anxiety. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question (U California Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive study of how environmental emotions influence whether, when, and why people today decide to become parents—or not. Jade S. Sasser argues that we can and should ...

Mar 14, 20251 hrEp. 205

Leigh Ann Henion, "Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark" (Algonquin, 2024)

“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.” According to Dark Sky International, 99% of people in the US live under the influence of skyglow. With each artificial light we install, we grow more unfamiliar with darkness and its riches. But what if darkness, instead of being a source of danger and discomfort, ...

Mar 11, 202545 minEp. 383

On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)

Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (U California Press, 2024) shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to clima...

Mar 10, 202543 minEp. 138