Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Etienne Benson, Director of Department II, Knowledge Systems and Collective Life, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany (formerly Associate Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), presented his book Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms (University of Chicago Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 19 October 2020.

Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it’s easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident. But in Surroundings, we learn that the environmental past is much more complex than it seems at first glance. In this wide-ranging history of the concept through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson uncovers the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken over the last two centuries and opens our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today.

Lesley Green, Professor of Anthropology and founding director of Environmental Humanities South at University of Cape Town (South Africa), presented her book Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) on Monday, October 12, 2020, in our Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series.

In Rock | Water | Life Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa’s history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

Kate Rigby, Alexander von Humboldt Professor at University of Cologne, Germany (previously Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University), gave a Greenhouse book talk on her book Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2020) on Monday, October 5, 2020.

The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Reclaiming Romanticism rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship.

Luke Keogh, Senior Curator at the National Wool Museum (Australia), presented his book The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World (University of Chicago Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 28 September 2020.

In our technologically advanced and globalized contemporary world, it is easy to forget that not long ago it was extremely difficult to transfer plants from place to place, as they often died from mishandling, cold weather, and ocean salt spray. In this first book on the Wardian case, Luke Keogh leads us across centuries and seas to show that Ward’s invention spurred a revolution in the movement of plants—and that many of the repercussions of that revolution are still with us, from new industries to invasive plant species. From the early days of rubber, banana, tea, and cinchona cultivation—the last used in the production of the malaria drug quinine—to the collecting of beautiful and exotic flora like orchids in the first great greenhouses of the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, and England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Wardian case transformed the world’s plant communities, fueled the commercial nursery trade and late nineteenth-century imperialism, and forever altered the global environment. 

Jennifer Telesca, Assistant Professor of environmental justice at the Pratt Institute (USA), presented her new book Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 21 September 2020.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is the world’s foremost organization for managing and conserving tunas, seabirds, turtles, and sharks traversing international waters. Founded by treaty in 1969, ICCAT stewards what has become under its tenure one of the planet’s most prominent endangered fish: the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Called “red gold” by industry insiders for the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands in the sushi economy, the giant bluefin tuna has crashed in size and number under ICCAT’s custodianship.With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why have so many big bluefin tuna vanished from the Atlantic? In Red Gold, Jennifer E. Telesca offers unparalleled access to ICCAT to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. ICCAT manages the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires—and, as a result, has become complicit in their extermination.

Melody Jue, Associate Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara (USA), presented her book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 14 September 2020.

In Wild Blue Media, Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media through the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor.

Rocio Gomez, Assistant Professor in Latin American History at Virginia Commonwealth University (USA), presented her new book Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 7 September 2020.

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, Rocio Gomez examines the detrimental effects of the silver mining industry on water resources and public health in the city of Zacatecas and argues that the human labor necessary to the mining industry made the worker and the mine inseparable through the land, water, and air. Tensions arose between farmers and the mining industry over water access while the city struggled with mudslides, droughts, and water source contamination. Silicosis-tuberculosis, along with accidents caused by mining technologies like jackhammers and ore-crushers, debilitated scores of miners. By emphasizing the perspective of water and public health, Gomez illustrates that the human body and the environment are not separate entities but rather in a state of constant interaction.

Daniel Macfarlane, Associate Professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University (USA), launched his book Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy and Engineers at the World's Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 31 August 2020.

Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Essentially, this natural wonder is now a tap: huge tunnels channel the waters of the Niagara River around the Falls, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane details how engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians conspired to manipulate the world’s most famous waterfall. During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States and Canada explored various ways to maximize hydropower from the Niagara River while “preserving” the Falls. Decades of environmental diplomacy and transborder studies led to a 1950 treaty that allowed new hydro-electric stations to funnel most of the river’s water to generate power. To facilitate these diversions and lessen the visual impact of redirecting so much water, the two nations cooperated to install a range of control works while reshaping and shrinking the Horseshoe Falls.

Thom van Dooren, Associate Professor at University of Sydney (Australia), presented his book The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia University Press, 2019) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 24 August 2020.

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. The Wake of Crows is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Emily Wanderer, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Pittsburgh (USA), presented her book The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico (University of California Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 17 August 2020.

The Life of a Pest tracks the work practices of scientists in Mexico as they study flora and fauna at scales ranging from microscopic to ecosystemic. Amid concerns about climate change, infectious disease outbreaks, and biotechnology, scientists in Mexico have expanded the focus of biopolitics and biosecurity, looking beyond threats to human life to include threats to the animal, plant, and microbial worlds. Emily Wanderer outlines how concerns about biosecurity are leading scientists to identify populations and life-forms either as worthy of saving or as “pests” in need of elimination. Moving from high security labs where scientists study infectious diseases, to offices where ecologists regulate the use of genetically modified organisms, to remote islands where conservationists eradicate invasive species, Wanderer explores how scientific research informs, and is informed by, concepts of nation.