Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country. The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiessen a...
May 28, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 79
Challenging the popular image of Buddhism as a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment, Dr. John Elverskog ’s new monograph, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), demonstrates that Buddhist institutions across Asia have actually been intimately connected to the accumulation of wealth, the consumption and exploitation of natural resources, and urbanization. What drives these acts, Dr. Elverskog argues, is a prosperity theol...
May 21, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 323
Adam M. Sowards is professor of history at the University of Idaho and a leading environmental historian. His new book, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), builds on his recent biography of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to describe what happened when a major copper corporation set out its plans to establish a massive mine in Washington state. With the Wilderness Act (1...
May 21, 2020•34 min•Ep. 729
In Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), Toshihiro Higuchi presents a history of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, by which the then-nuclear powers, US, USSR, and UK, agreed to cease, among other things, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, largely moving such tests underground (the Chinese and French continued atmospheric tests in subsequent decades). Higuchi examines the development of knowledge abou...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 86
In 2014, the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy entered the national spotlight after a showdown against federal officials over grazing rights on public lands. Two years later, his sons seized the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and occupied it for forty days with militia and sovereign citizen groups. As journalists rushed to the scene, trying to make sense of the motivations behind their anti-government politics, Betsy Gaines Quammen , a historian working on her history Ph.D., knew something was amis...
May 18, 2020•50 min•Ep. 50
Old-growth forests captivate and inspire us. Walking through them can transport us to a time before human domination of the natural world. This is especially the case with old-growth forests in the eastern part of the United States, a region with a long history of profound human disturbances of ecological regimes. Beyond their role as inspiration, old growth serves important ecological functions regionally and globally. These forests also provide several practical services to humans. How do scie...
May 14, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 51
Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings ar...
May 12, 2020•57 min•Ep. 50
During the early 1970s, a movement of rank-and-file coal miners rose up in Appalachia to challenge mine bosses and stodgy union officials. They sought greater control over the workplace and a broadened vision of industrial power. Calling themselves the “Miners For Democracy,” these reformers gained short-lived control over the union’s top leadership and earned a legacy for militant unionism. But what about coal miners in the expanding coalfields of the American West? In his new book Carbon Count...
May 06, 2020•58 min•Ep. 49
How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world. As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to...
Apr 29, 2020•57 min•Ep. 49
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris , J ames T. Campbell , and Alfred L. Brophy , is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary re...
Apr 28, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 193
For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sou...
Apr 28, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 318
Emerging out of a 2016 conference, Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek have brought together Environmental History, Latin American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in a single volume that reshapes scholarly understandings of Latin America’s Long Cold War. Rather than emphasize diplomatic, social or cultural histories of conflict, this volume emphasizes the roles of “experts” who cast themselves as apolitical technocrats just working on the ground. Chastain and Lorek’s book argues that ex...
Apr 23, 2020•49 min•Ep. 75
Jacob Blanc ’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) tells the story of the the Itaipu dam, a massive hydroelectric complex built on the Brazil-Paraguay border in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is structurally and conceptually ambitious, but so readable that it will fit well in both graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms. Blanc uses this story of a single megaproject to open up new questions about dictatorship, democracy, and the...
Apr 22, 2020•51 min•Ep. 74
Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren 's book Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020) situates agriculture as a design practice, using a wide range of international case studies and analytical essays to propose lessons for contemporary landscape architects who are interested in integrating agriculture into their designs. Agricultural processes, technologies, and cycles have long shaped landscape architectural projects, from the ornamented farm of the eighteenth century, to cont...
Apr 21, 2020•58 min•Ep. 48
In Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation , 2nd Edition (Island Press, 2019), Dr. Jodi Hilty and her co-authors expand on concepts and practices important to maintaining and restoring land connectivity. In the book and during the interview, Dr. Hilty discusses how the field as evolved over the last 15 years. She highlights a newer part of the field, Climate-wise connectivity. Climate-wise connectivity considers the effects of climate change on h...
Apr 20, 2020•55 min•Ep. 248
Wenfei Tong 's Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship and nest-building to protecting eggs and raising chicks. It delves into the reasons why some species, such as the wattled jacana, rely on males to do all the childcare, while others, such as cuckoos and honeyguides, dump their eggs in the nests of others to raise. For some birds, reciprocal promiscuity...
Apr 17, 2020•51 min•Ep. 247
Carlo Caduff ’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when such an event was widely anticipated by experts. Examining how experts in the United States framed a catastrophe that has not happened yet, the book trains a lens on the many generative ways in which the absence of a disease made preparedness a permanent project. Drawing on fieldwork among scientists an...
Apr 16, 2020•50 min•Ep. 50
The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from 'wasteland' into productive agricultural land. Though ostensi...
Apr 16, 2020•57 min•Ep. 113
In early 2019, freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposed a bold new piece of legislation, now very well known as the Green New Deal. Intended as a means of combating climate change, it stunned a number of people due to its enormous ambition, including massive overhauls of our energy systems, as well as providing housing and healthcare for everyone. Naturally a piece of legislation this large raised a number of questions, which is what my guests today are her...
Apr 14, 2020•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 162
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook...
Mar 30, 2020•52 min•Ep. 46
George Perkins Marsh Prize winning environmental historian and geographer Joseph E. Taylor III 's new book, Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Oregon State University Press, 2019), takes an innovative approach to the history of fisheries and work in the Pacific Northwest. Focusing on the Nestucca river valley, Taylor shows how nature, culture, markets, and technology affected the "callings," or identities, of residents from pre-colonial times to the very recen...
Mar 26, 2020•51 min•Ep. 49
Scholars like Ben Barber have suggested that cities provide the democratic culture to pragmatically problem-solve challenging policy issues – such as climate change. Many North American cities have announced ambitious goals to mitigate climate change, particularly the reduction of green house gases. In her new book Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto (Cornell University Press, 2019). Sara Hughes creatively combines the literature on c...
Mar 25, 2020•53 min•Ep. 414
Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) is an ethnography of Palestinian life under occupation that takes waste infrastructures as a starting point for exploring how Palestinians deal with toxicity and uncertainty, how governance happens under conditions of uncertainty, and how everyday goods circulate in and out of multiple moral economies and waste streams. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, author Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins talks to ...
Mar 09, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 59
Jerome Whitington 's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and discourses centered around the development of hydropower dams in the Mekong River Basin. Through deep and connected ethnographies, the book traces how such projects create ecologically uncertain environments and the surprising ways they offer new capacities for being human. Along the way, this study unpacks puzzles such as why corporate developers ...
Mar 06, 2020•42 min•Ep. 48
Buses can and should be the cornerstone of urban transportation. They offer affordable mobility and can connect citizens with every aspect of their lives. But in the US, they have long been an afterthought in budgeting and planning. With a compelling narrative and actionable steps, Better Buses, Better Cities : How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (Island Press, 2019) inspires us to fix the bus. Transit expert Steven Higashide shows us what a successful bus system looks like...
Mar 02, 2020•49 min•Ep. 40
Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals. In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Mons...
Feb 28, 2020•33 min•Ep. 22
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong , assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University , provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities...
Feb 25, 2020•42 min•Ep. 154
Stephanie Kaza is Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, and has written widely on Buddhism and the environment. She describes herself as a long-time lover of trees, a practicing Zen Buddhist, and an environmentalist. Green Buddhism: Practice and Compassionate Action in Uncertain Times (Shambhala, 2019) collects several essays, some written especially for this volume and others revised. They are by turns personal and reflective, and offer rich guidance for anyon...
Feb 20, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 19
Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street―our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier c...
Feb 17, 2020•29 min•Ep. 88
What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019) , Kyle Devine , an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, tells the material history of recorded music, counting the impact of music from the 78 to digital streaming. The book has a rich and detailed analysis of music’s contribution to our current environmental crisis, along with the human impact of making the materials that make our modern co...
Feb 05, 2020•43 min•Ep. 151
