Judith Shapiro and John-Andrew McNeish's book Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance (Routledge, 2021) emphasizes how the spectrum of violence associated with natural resource extraction permeates contemporary collective life. Chronicling the increasing rates of brutal suppression of local environmental and labor activists in rural and urban sites of extraction, this volume also foregrounds related violence in areas we might not expect, such as infrastructural developments, p...
Nov 16, 2021•51 min•Ep. 86
In her new book Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene (Brandeis UP, 2021), environmental historian Nancy Langston explores three “ghost species” in the Great Lakes watershed—woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Ghost species are those that have not gone completely extinct, although they may be extirpated from a particular area. Their traces are still present, whether in DNA, in small fragmented populations, in lone individuals roaming a desolate landscape in search ...
Nov 15, 2021•40 min•Ep. 47
From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West (U Washington Press, 2017), the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport's long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fl...
Nov 12, 2021•58 min•Ep. 80
Jordan Salama’s Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena (Catapult Press, 2021) is a travelogue for a new generation about a journey along Colombia’s Magdalena River, exploring life by the banks of a majestic river now at risk, and how a country recovers from conflict. An American writer of Argentine, Syrian, and Iraqi Jewish descent, Jordan Salama tells the story of the Río Magdalena, nearly one thousand miles long, the heart of Colombia. This is Gabriel García Márquez’s terri...
Nov 12, 2021•39 min•Ep. 85
Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-on e times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at ca...
Nov 10, 2021•40 min•Ep. 99
On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished. Miraculously, many pets did manage to sur...
Nov 10, 2021•54 min•Ep. 32
When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2021) complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domest...
Nov 09, 2021•53 min•Ep. 134
In Climate Change, Religion, and our Bodily Future (Lexington Books, 2021), Todd LeVasseur explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to up...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 83
Supply chains - and, especially, their points of failure - have become a global hot topic, encouraging us all to take a closer look at how goods move around the globe. Dr. Gero Leson has spent the better part of his career developing supply chains from the ground up, modeling a community-driven approach that holds a vision of interconnection and a broader understanding of success for Western culture. At natural soap company Dr. Bronner’s, Leson and his colleagues and collaborators have developed...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 84
The Currowan fire – ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest and growing to engulf the New South Wales South Coast – was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia’s Black Summer. It burnt for seventy-four days, consuming nearly 5000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. Bronwyn Adcock fled the inferno with her children. Her husband, fighting at the front, rang with a plea for help before his phone went dead, leaving her to fea...
Oct 29, 2021•52 min•Ep. 71
Cambodia’s Tonle Sap is the largest inland lake in Southeast Asia. Each year, during the monsoon, this freshwater lake experiences an incredible hydrological phenomenon, in which it is inundated with swelling waters from the Mekong River, causing it to rise by up to tenfold in some places, before returning to its pre-monsoon level as the dry season returns. But Tonle Sap is facing a triple environmental threat: climate change, the damming of the Mekong River, and over-fishing, with devastating i...
Oct 28, 2021•20 min•Ep. 43
Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019) gives readers an accessible history...
Oct 27, 2021•54 min•Ep. 105
In Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (Chelsea Green, 2021), Nicolette Hahn Niman makes the expanded case for large ruminants as part of the solution to the climate crisis. In our discussion, Hahn Niman does some myth-busting and presents a system for managing beef cattle that can enhance ecosystems rather than degrade them. Hahn Niman recognizes not all beef enterprises are equal in their impact and argues components of the industry are tone-deaf. To move the industry ...
Oct 26, 2021•51 min•Ep. 296
Chronicling the retreat of mobile pastoralization from Mediterranean coastlines, Andrea Duffy's Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World (U Nebraska Press, 2019) investigates a mystery: where did the sheep go? Duffy seeks the answer by exploring the relationship between forestry policy and pasteurization by comparing and contrasting the implementation of French Forestry in France's Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anato...
Oct 25, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 82
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we ...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 123
A little more than 70 percent of Planet Earth is ocean. So wouldn’t a better name for our global home be Planet Ocean? You may be surprised at just how closely YOU are connected to the ocean. Regardless of where you live, every breath you take and every drop of water you drink links you to the ocean. And because of this connection, the ocean’s health affects all of us. Dive in with author Patricia Newman and photographer Annie Crawley —visit the Coral Triangle near Indonesia, the Salish Sea in t...
Oct 20, 2021•54 min•Ep. 95
In Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Fores t (Indiana University Press, 2020), Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic account of Białowieża, Europe's last primeval forest. At Poland’s easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and communist histories. Foresters, biologists, environmentalists, and locals project the ancient Białowież...
Oct 20, 2021•58 min•Ep. 131
Oceans are inextricably linked to the climate. Today, oceans are warming far more rapidly than they have in the past 65 million years, placing the spotlight on the important nexus between climate change and the ocean. While there’s no doubt that climate change affects all people across the board, its effect is manifold among socioeconomically vulnerable communities, and among women in particular. In the third episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees , Prof. Nilufer Oral, Director of ...
Oct 20, 2021•26 min•Ep. 54
There’s nothing more vital to survival than water. “ Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink !”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, a...
Oct 18, 2021•41 min•Ep. 59
In Mexico environmental struggles have been fought since the nineteenth century in such places as Zacatecas, where United States and European mining interests have come into open conflict with rural and city residents over water access, environmental health concerns, and disease compensation. In Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Rocio Gomez examines the detrimental effects of the silver mining industry on water resources...
Oct 15, 2021•44 min•Ep. 134
Based on twelve years of anthropological exploration, Vincent Ialenti's Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now (MIT Press, 2020) is an engaging guide on deep time learning to reorient our understanding of time and space. As each chapter begins with creative vignettes to capture the reader's imagination and empathy and concludes with five to six reflective "reckonings," the book focuses on Finland's nuclear waste experts whose daily lives revolve around considerations of the ...
Oct 15, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 80
The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form. Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and writers in t...
Oct 15, 2021•46 min•Ep. 45
Harnessing the Sun is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jenny Nelson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Climate Change mitigation team at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. After inspiring insights about Jenny Nelson’s academic journey, the conversation examines different solar energy processes, solar energy conversion technology, novel varieties of material for use in solar cells, and the materials used to build and improve photovoltaic, and o...
Oct 11, 2021•2 hr 12 min•Ep. 66
In May 2021, a landmark court order from a district court in the Netherlands ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, one of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, needs to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030. How did a court in the Netherlands pass a ruling on a global company? Does the Paris Agreement hold for transnational private entities like Shell? What does this mean for corporations going forward? In this second episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees , Andreas Hösli answe...
Oct 06, 2021•23 min•Ep. 53
Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound (University of Washington Press, 2021) tells a story about exploitation and a story of hope. Focusing on the life histories of both humans and the natural world, Williams presents an account of how people and place are connected by demonstrating the transformation of the landscape through geologic, ecological, and cultural lenses. Through conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, and getting out in the field hims...
Oct 06, 2021•59 min•Ep. 79
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour On February 23, 2016, Shawna Lynn Jones stepped into the brush to fight a wildfire that had consumed ten acres of terrain on a steep ridge in Malibu. Jones carried fifty pounds of equipment and a chainsaw to help contain the blaze. As she fired up her saw, the earth gave way under her feet and a rock fell from above and struck her head, knocking her unconscious. A helic...
Oct 06, 2021•44 min•Ep. 43
Ranea Lenor Hanson's Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress (U Minnesota Press, 2021) weaves a narrative that captures life on the water, diverse classrooms, and the unique experiences from learning to cop with type-1 diabetes: constantly monitoring blood sugar and managing insulin levels. A mix of personal reflection and meditative vignettes, Watershed reflects how our bodies can become an extension to understanding the earth and dealing with large-scale climatic changes. Throughout...
Oct 05, 2021•54 min•Ep. 78
Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Mark Maslin, Professor of Geography at University College London. This wide-ranging conversation explores Prof. Maslin’s research on the Anthropocene which according to his definition began when human impacts on the planet irrevocably started to change the course of the Earth’s biological and geographical trajectory, leading to climate change, loss of biodiversity, deforestatio...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 59 min•Ep. 59
How can farmers adapt to climate changes? How can regenerative farmers have livelihoods that nourish themselves and their communities? How can we break free of the commodity mindset and rethink the US food system? Bob Quinn’s remarkable memoir of his decades living and working on a Montana farm offers unique insights into all of these pressing questions, with creativity, intelligence, and a healthy dash of humor. Quinn is a farmer and sustainable business leader. He founded a regional mill for o...
Sep 27, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 79
At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate (U New Mexico Press, 2020) explores the question many of us have asked ourselves: What kind of world are we leaving to our children? The realities of climate change consume the media and keep us up at night worrying about the future. But in New Mexico and the larger Southwest, climate change has been silently wreaking havoc: average temperatures in the Upper Rio Grande Basin are increasing at double the global average, super fires like Las Conchas ...
Sep 23, 2021•56 min•Ep. 77
