The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014) Klein quotes Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who says that the steps being proposed to radically reduce carbon emissions would change the American way of life and put large segments of the ec...
Feb 24, 2016•3 min
How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that it provides a clear scientific, conceptual, and economic history of the issues involved. Ultimately, ...
Jan 21, 2016•1 hr 6 min
In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events around them and their role in the conflict. The ebb and flow of resource scarcity served as a metric in ...
Dec 17, 2015•1 hr
Anna L. Tsing ‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “wha...
Dec 06, 2015•1 hr 3 min
Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? Stephen Macekur a’s new book, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores this question by connecting three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the pursuit of economic development and moderniza...
Dec 04, 2015•1 hr 15 min
In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of ch...
Dec 03, 2015•52 min
In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the “forgotten,” their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller ‘s fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the proble...
Sep 23, 2015•1 hr 14 min
Nicole Starosielski ‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015) looks carefully and imaginatively at the geography of undersea cable networks, paying special attention to the materiality of network infrastructure and its relationships with the histories of the Pacific. The book revises what we think we know about the infrastructure of global networks: ...
Aug 25, 2015•1 hr 10 min
Candis Callison ‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape and influence public engagement around the issue. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) looks carefully at the discourses and practices of five collectives within and through which climate change becomes meaningful: Arctic indigenous representatives...
Aug 14, 2015•1 hr 7 min
How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton College, Oxford) tackles this essential question in his book Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford UP, 2014). The book collects twenty-five years of Shue’s innovative work on climate justice into one rich and comprehensive volume. This conversation discusses the relation between climate justice and international inequality, justice be...
Jul 21, 2015•1 hr 2 min
Political ecology is among the most vibrant sub-fields in the discipline of geography. Since the field first developed in the 1980s, political ecologists have pioneered new approaches to studying relations between society and the environment. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Routledge, 2015), co-edited by Tom Perreault , Gavin Bridge , and James McCarthy , is a compendium of over fifty essays by leading scholars in the field on different aspects of political ecology. In the field’s e...
Jun 10, 2015•52 min
Julie Sze ‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015) considers Dongtan, the Chongming Island eco-development, suburban real estate developments, and other fantasies of wild and urban lives to explore the nature of eco-desire in contemporary China. Sze sug...
May 19, 2015•1 hr
Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century, and have played a pivotal role in alerting the public about ecological problems and galvanizing public action. Yet scholars are more likely to focus on the science related to environmental problems or the policy responses to them. Finis Dunaway ‘s new book, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of ...
May 11, 2015•55 min
Eben Kirksey ‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of great thoughtfulness and beauty. Growing out of a traveling art exhibit of the same name, The Multispecies Salon (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a collection of works that explore three major questions: “Which beings flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collid...
May 10, 2015•1 hr 8 min
Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.” About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where much of the coal stripped from Navajo land is burned for energy, stands the gleaming Chase Tower in ...
Apr 26, 2015•1 hr 1 min
Thom van Dooren ‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and ...
Apr 17, 2015•1 hr 4 min
David A. Pietz ‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to disappear anytime soon. Using a careful history of water and environmental management to inform our understanding of water-related challenges in contemporary China, Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015) asks, how did China reach its current state of water insecurity, and what might it mean for both China and ...
Apr 06, 2015•1 hr 10 min
Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration with the dominant environmental discourse that, she asserts, doesn’t fully take into consideration the perspectives and interests of African Americans.Finney takes care to recognize the multiplicity of African American relationships to the natural environment and to the environmental movement, broadly u...
Mar 17, 2015•1 hr 25 min
Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Yet despite its central place in the life sciences, relatively few geographers employ evolutionary theory in their work. In his new book Evolutionary History:Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Edmund Russell makes a compelling case for why ev...
Mar 11, 2015•51 min
How up to date are you on the projected impact of climate change on human civilization in the next 100 years? Once you look at latest predictions, quickly come back and listen to this interview with Sally Weintrobe, because she brings a much-needed, yet realistic sense of hope to what most people consider a dire picture. Weintrobe, a practicing psychoanalyst and Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, organized an interdisciplinary conference of psychoanalysts, philosophers, scienti...
Feb 11, 2015•44 min
Robert Cribb and his co-authors Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin have together drawn on the resources of history, literature, film, science, and cultural theory to write Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), an unusual and fascinating story spanning four centuries of human-orangutan encounters in Southeast Asia and beyond. The book tracks these encounters from the jungles of Sumatra in the 17 century through to the cinematic performances of t...
Jan 15, 2015•1 hr
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in t...
Oct 17, 2014•43 min
Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool University Press, 2013) by Tariq Jazeel . The book uses these two sites to explore the ways in which non-secular experiences of nature inscribe Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism into the spaces of everyday life. Skilfully weaving together ethnographic and archival material, the book pushes us to re-read t...
Oct 16, 2014•1 hr 8 min
What is waste? William Viney ‘s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, including literature, sculpture and architecture. The text begins by stressing the importance of time to our understanding of waste, as opposed to more traditional conceptions that are grounded in spatial distinctions. Rather than looking at waste through the dualities of useful or not useful, dirty or clean, William Viney asks us to be attentive to our rel...
Oct 15, 2014•39 min
The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies , has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2014), Menzies outlines her discovery of a vanished way of life and argues that restoring it would help North Americans recover a deeper sense of self as well as more satisfying social relations with the people around them. It could also help th...
Oct 06, 2014•45 min
Robert Stolz ‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods in Japan. Stolz charts the transformations of an “environmental unconscious” lying at the foundation of modern social and political thought. Bad Water begins by describing the establishment of the autonomous individual as a political unit, tracing...
Oct 02, 2014•1 hr 16 min
It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet ‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Land Art work TheLightning Field, does just this by ranging freely across a wide variety of art works, practices, and attitudes from the formative decades of the environmental movement and of postwar American art. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT Press, 2014)...
Sep 10, 2014•59 min
The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for building a...
Aug 05, 2014•52 min
Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout, olive backs spattered with a constellation of black spots. The fish were gorgeous, and, roasted with oil and garlic, would prove delicious. But, having just read Douglas M. Thompson ‘s The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Ic...
Jun 17, 2014•42 min
Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World his...
Jun 04, 2014•1 hr 8 min
