Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Frederico Freitas, Assistant Professsor of History at North Carolina State University (USA), discussed his book Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border (Cambridge University Press, 2021) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 12 April 2021.

Today, one-quarter of all the land in Latin America is set apart for nature protection. In Nationalizing Nature, Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region’s territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants from their densely populated Atlantic seaboards to a sparsely inhabited borderland. In the 1970s, a change in paradigm led the military regimes in Brazil and Argentina to violently evict settlers from their national parks, highlighting the complicated relationship between authoritarianism and conservation in the Southern Cone. By tracking almost one hundred years of national park history in Latin America’s largest countries, Nationalizing Nature shows how conservation policy promoted national programs of frontier development and border control.

On Monday, 29 March 2021, the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk was joined by Jonathan Padwe, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, to discuss his book Disturbed Forest, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands (University of Washington Press, 2020).

In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial bombardment and the American invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, only to find themselves relocated to the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge regime. Now back in their homeland, they have reestablished agriculture, seed by seed.

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories tells the story of violence and dispossession in the highlands from the perspective of the land itself. Weaving rich ethnography with the history of the Jarai and their treatment at the hands of outsiders, Jonathan Padwe narrates the highlanders’ successful efforts to rebuild their complex, highly diverse agricultural system after a decades-long interruption. Focusing on the ecological dimensions of social change and dispossession from the precolonial slave trade to the present moment of land grabs along a rapidly transforming resource frontier, Padwe shows how the past lives on in the land.

C. Anne Claus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University (USA), presented her book Drawing the Sea Near: Satoumi and Coral Reef Conservation in Okinawa (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 22 March 2021.

This richly detailed, engagingly written ethnography focuses on Okinawa’s coral reefs to explore an unusually inclusive, experiential, and socially just approach to conservation. Claus provides a compelling look at how transnational conservation organizations negotiate institutional expectations for conservation with localized approaches to caring for ocean life.

Timo Maran, Professor of Ecosemiotics and Environmental Humanities at Tartu University, presented his new book Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies (Cambridge University Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse book talk series on Monday, 15 March 2021.

This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today’s unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena. The arguments in this Element are developed in three steps that take inspiration from both humanities and biological sciences: 1) Showing the diversity, reach and effects of sign-mediated relations in the natural environment from the level of a single individual up the functioning of the ecosystem. 2) Demonstrating numerous ways in which prelinguistic semiotic relations are part of culture and identifying detrimental environmental effects that self-contained and purely symbol-based sign systems, texts and discourses bring along. 3) Demonstrating how ecosemiotic analysis centred on models and modelling can effectively map relations between texts and the natural environment, or the lack thereof, and how this methodology can be used artistically to initiate environmentally friendly cultural forms and practices.

Pratik Chakrabarti, chair in the history of science and medicine and director of the Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Manchester, presented his book Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse book talk series on Monday, 8 March 2021.

In Inscriptions of Nature, Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality.

Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.

Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Research Fellow in Religion and Theology at Australian Catholic University, joined the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk series to discuss her book Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021) on Monday, 1 March 2021.

Thoreau’s Religion presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau’s most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-Lewis demonstrates that Thoreau’s ascetic life was a form of religious practice dedicated to cultivating a just, multispecies community. The book makes an important contribution to scholarship in religious studies, political theory, English, environmental studies, and critical theory by offering the first sustained reading of Thoreau’s religiously motivated politics. In Balthrop-Lewis’s vision, practices of renunciation like Thoreau’s can contribute to the reformation of social and political life. In this, the book transforms Thoreau’s image, making him a vital source for a world beset by inequality and climate change. Balthrop-Lewis argues for an environmental politics in which ecological flourishing is impossible without economic and social justice.

Benjamin Cohen, Associate Professor of Engineering Studies and Environmental Studies at Lafayette College (USA), discussed his book Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (University of Chicago Press, 2019) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book series on Monday, 22 February 2021.

In Pure Adulteration, Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed.

Jemma Deer, Researcher-in-Residence at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Germany), talked about her book Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloombury, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 15 February 2021.

In Radical Animism, Deer offers a new theory of animism for an age of environmental crisis, elaborated through innovative readings of classic and contemporary literary texts. The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers – from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka – Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how ‘literary animism’ – the active and transformative life of literature – can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.

Craig Santos Perez, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, discussed his book of eco-poetry Habitat Threshold (Omindawn, 2020) in the Greenhouse book talk series on Monday, 8 February.

With Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry that explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future. The book begins with the birth of the author’s daughter, capturing her growth and childlike awe at the wonders of nature. As it progresses, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, the ravages of global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinction, water rights, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, he mourns lost habitats and species, and confronts his fears for the future world his daughter will inherit. Amid meditations on calamity, this work does not stop at the threshold of elegy. Instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected—a future in which we cultivate love and “carry each other towards the horizon of care.”

Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.

Stefania Barca, Zennström visiting professor in Climate Change Leadership, Uppsala University, Sweden, joined the Greenhouse book talk series on Monday, 1 February 2021 at 16:00 to discuss her book Forces of Reproduction (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents ‘Man’ as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This book develops a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour– or the ‘forces of reproduction’. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the Environmental Humanities.