If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same s...
Jan 30, 2020•40 min•Ep. 103
In Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920-1940 (University of Arizona Press, 2018), Salvador Salinas fills an important gap in the history of the Zapatista Revolution in Morelos - namely, what happened after 1920. In this meticulously researched account of everyday life between 1920 and 1940, Salinas shows that many of the democratic and economic gains Zapatistas made only came after the death of their famous general. Using ejidos, municipal authorities and water administration, Me...
Jan 29, 2020•44 min•Ep. 68
Why do even successful clean energy policies fail to create momentum for more renewable energy? In her new book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (Oxford University Press, 2020), Leah Stokes analyzes policy-making in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Ohio to understand the dynamics of clean energy policy. This remarkably ambitious work urges political scientists to refocus on the manner in which interest groups prevent o...
Jan 28, 2020•47 min•Ep. 398
The relationship between Islam and the environment has a long and rich history across various Muslim societies. Anna M. Gade , Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlines several strains where these domains intersect in her book Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations (Columbia University Press, 2019). Gade takes the reader through a number of literary and scriptural sources that Muslims have deployed over history but also steeps her analysis in decades of on th...
Jan 24, 2020•56 min•Ep. 164
How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford University Press 2019) explores these battles in the most sensitive geographic spaces of the Federal Republic. Join us for a conversation with Astrid M. Eckert illuminating how the border reflected Cold War debates back to society in ways that continue to shape Germ...
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 82
In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with J. L. Anderson about the 2019 book Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America published by West Virginia University Press. Anderson provides a history of pigs in America from the first arrival on the continent in the Columbian Exchange to the modern agribusiness of pork production, describing how we have “remade” the animal through breeding, feeding, medicating, legislating, and housing hogs. Despite the contemporary association between...
Jan 21, 2020•59 min•Ep. 52
Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose and what does it tell us about militarism in American culture? Josh Reno’s Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness (University of California Press, 2019), explores the myriad afterlives of military waste and the people who witness, interpret, manipulate, and reimagine the...
Jan 17, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 55
Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further war...
Jan 10, 2020•44 min•Ep. 49
Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the oversea...
Jan 08, 2020•45 min•Ep. 244
Recent debates over the building of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico divide have raised logistical and ethical issues, leaving the historical record of border building uninvoked. A recent book, written by UT Austin professor Dr. C.J. Alvarez , offers an over one-hundred-year history that extends to before the building of a border wall in 1990. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide (UT Press, 2019) recounts the history of how both US and Mexican government a...
Jan 03, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 56
Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry have written a practical, informative, and inspiring guide to teaching environmental history. It also happens to be fun. A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles (Duke University Press, 2018) offers strategies and approaches that educators can apply in a variety of settings: from high school classrooms to college courses, and from environmental history and environmental studies courses to US and world history surveys. Wakild and Berry ...
Dec 31, 2019•53 min•Ep. 45
Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful c...
Dec 30, 2019•31 min•Ep. 46
By choice or not, the catastrophes of global warming and mass extinction task young generations with reorienting human relationships with the earth’s systems, resources, and lifeforms. The extractavist mindset that promised prosperity in the 20th century now spells doom in the 21st and leaves us unprepared to live on a damaged planet. Into this space academics have birthed a dizzying number of tongue-twisting neologisms, but editors Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy provide us wi...
Dec 27, 2019•46 min•Ep. 242
Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosive population growth, climate change, and the density of cities, Darius Sollohub , Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession (University of Texas Press, 2019) embraces the digitally savvy disruptors who are joining the field at a crucial time as it grapples wit...
Dec 24, 2019•52 min•Ep. 36
After Jim Rossi began writing his M.A. thesis in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the project took an unexpected turn. His research on the solar industry in the Mojave desert brought him into close contact with a number of entrepreneurs in clean technology, and start-ups in the renewable energy sector. He soon stumbled upon several alleged “scams” and “long cons” in the industry, and his book, Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper , tells the real life story of his effort to g...
Dec 24, 2019•38 min•Ep. 45
In his new book, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2019), Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, noting that both filmmaking and film viewing has an often-hidden impact on the environment. He reviews four blockbusters, "Gone with the Wind," "Singin’ in the Rain," "Twister," and "Avatar" to provide useful examples of the ecological toll of movies. Hunter is the Environmental Media Sch...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 63
Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local levels to develop and implement plans to mitigate a community's greenhouse gas emissions and increase the resilience of communities against climate change impacts. This fully revised and expanded edition goes well beyond climate action plans to examine the mix of policy and planning instruments availa...
Dec 06, 2019•50 min•Ep. 33
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, g...
Dec 03, 2019•58 min•Ep. 42
In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully writes that, “Every once in a while, an outstanding work of scholarship comes along that transforms the way a seemingly intractable injustice is seen and, in so doing, also transforms the way it should be approached and addressed by all concerned.” In this second episode in our new series, New Books in I...
Nov 29, 2019•45 min
Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are finding ways to profit from waste while diverting materials from overcrowded landfills. Yet beyond these benefits, this “new” resource still poses serious risks to human health and the environment. In her new book Waste (Polity, 2019), Kate O’Neill traces the emergence of the global political economy ...
Nov 26, 2019•45 min•Ep. 44
How do states use cultural policy? In Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate (Routledge, 2018), Penelope Plaza Azuaje , a lecturer in architecture at the University of Reading explores the case study of Venezuela to think through the relationship between states, territory, and culture. The book develops the idea of culture as a resource, showing the close relationship between oil and culture, and culture and oil, along with t...
Nov 15, 2019•35 min•Ep. 141
Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. She is the author of many books including Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion Books, 2018). Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses , Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitica...
Nov 15, 2019•33 min•Ep. 612
In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers foster an ethics of care in the Himalayan communities of Ladakh. She explores the way these relations are changing due to climate change, the growth of the wage economy at the expense of traditional agricultural and pastoral lifestyles, and increased military presence resulting fro...
Nov 12, 2019•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 59
We talk with Michael E. Mann , a Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, about his journey through the climate wars over the past two decades and the role that experts have to play in moving out of the lab and into the spotlight to defend the scientific process. Doing so is more important now than ever, he says, as corporation-funded think tanks continue to churn out information that deliberately sows skepticism among the public about our role in clim...
Nov 11, 2019•41 min•Ep. 42
In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019) , Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate change also requires that we rethink the concept of energy itself. Although a seemingly self-evident and natural scientific object, the idea of energy that informed the development of fossil fueled capitalism is a surprisingly modern invention. In the 19th century, as tinkerers sought to explain mystical...
Nov 04, 2019•43 min•Ep. 221
Elena Past’s recently published Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human (Indiana University Press, 2019) studies a complex of issues surrounding on-location films made in Italy and the way their production leaves lasting, material traces on the environment. The films span a number of regions and ecospheres within Italy: the Adriatic, site of the petrochemical wastelands in Antonioni’s Red Desert; the Neapolitan hinterland’s toxic waste dump in Garrone’s Gommora; the plight of an outlander goatherd i...
Nov 04, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 2
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, ...
Nov 03, 2019•38 min•Ep. 45
By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University of California, Riverside, specializes in Vietnamese environmental history. In Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes of Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2018) he examines the impacts of warfare in the region around Hue in central Vietnam. Using cutting edge methodology drawn from GIS (graphic...
Oct 31, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 637
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus ’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how ...
Oct 24, 2019•33 min•Ep. 81
With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowing with the forms of modernity that now threaten to destroy them. Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke ...
Oct 24, 2019•46 min•Ep. 219
