Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Paul Huebener, Associate Professor of English at Athabasca University (Canada), presented his book Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 15 June 2020.

The environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time. From the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, to the rapid dying of coral reefs, to the quickening pace of extreme weather events, the patterns and timekeeping of the natural world are falling apart. We have broken nature’s clocks. Lying hidden at the root of this problem are the cultural narratives that shape our actions and horizons of thought, but as Paul Huebener shows, we can bring about change by developing a critical literacy of time. Moving from circadian rhythms and the revival of ancient frozen bacteria to camping advertisements and the politics of oil pipelines, Nature’s Broken Clocks turns to works of fiction and poetry, examining how cultural narratives of time are connected to the problems of ecological collapse and what we might do to fix them.

Emily Pawley, Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College (USA), discussed her book The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University of Chicago Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 June 2020.

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, US history and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

David Fedman, Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, Irvine (USA), discussed his book Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 1 June 2020.

Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile, channeled Korea’s forest resources into supply chains that grew in tandem with Japan’s imperial sphere. These mechanisms of resource control were only fortified after 1937, when the peninsula and its forests were mobilized for total war.

In this wide-ranging study David Fedman explores Japanese imperialism through the lens of forest conservation in colonial Korea—a project of environmental rule that outlived the empire itself. Holding up for scrutiny the notion of conservation, Seeds of Control examines the roots of Japanese ideas about the Korean landscape, as well as the consequences and aftermath of Japanese approaches to Korea’s “greenification.” Drawing from sources in Japanese and Korean, Fedman writes colonized lands into Japanese environmental history, revealing a largely untold story of green imperialism in Asia.

Christine Eriksen, Senior Lecturer in geography, and Susan Ballard, Senior Lecturer in art history, from the University of Wollongong (Australia) presented their jointly authored book Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants, and People (Palgrave, 2020) in our Greenhouse online book series on Monday, 25 May 2020.

Through a truly interdisplinary study, this book explores how fire, plants and people coexist in the Anthropocene. In a time of dramatic environmental transformation, the authors examine how human impacts on the planetary system are being felt at all levels from the geological and the arboreal to the atmospheric. The book brings together the disciplines of human geography and art history to examine fire-plant-people alliances and multispecies world-making. The authors listen carefully to the narratives of bushfire survivors. They embrace the responses of contemporary artists, as practice becomes interwoven with fire as well as ruin and regrowth. Through visual, textual and felt ways of being, the chapters illuminate, illustrate, impress and imprint the imagined and actual agency of plants and people within a changing climate — from Aboriginal ecocultural burning to nuclear fire. By holding grief and enacting hope, the book shows how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to the interdependencies of fire, plants and people in the Anthropocene.

Angela Cassidy, Lecturer in Science & Technology Studies at University of Exeter, discussed her book Vermin, Victims and Disease: British Debates over Bovine Tuberculosis and Badgers (Palgrave, 2019) in our Greenhouse online book talk series on Monday, 18 May. This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in British cattle. This question has plagued several professional generations of politicians, policymakers, experts and campaigners since the early 1970s. Questions of what is known, who knows, who cares, who to trust and what to do about this complex problem have been the source of scientific, policy, and increasingly vociferous public debate ever since. This book integrates contemporary history, science and technology studies, human-animal relations, and policy research to conduct a cross-cutting analysis. It explores the worldviews of those involved with animal health, disease ecology and badger protection between the 1970s and 1990s, before reintegrating them to investigate the recent public polarisation of the controversy. Finally it asks how we might move beyond the current impasse.

Author and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee discussed her book Two Trees Make a Forest (Virago Books, 2019) on Monday, 11 May in our Greenhouse book talk series. Between tectonic plates and conflicting cultures, Taiwan is an island of extremes: high mountains, exposed flatlands, thick forests. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather’s life, written on the cusp of his total memory loss, Jessica J Lee hunts his story, in parallel with exploring Taiwan, hoping to understand the quakes that brought her family from China, to Taiwan and Canada, and the ways in which our human stories are interlaced with geographical forces. Part-nature writing, part-biography, Two Trees Make a Forest traces the natural and human stories that shaped an island and a family.

Antony Adler, Research Associate at Carleton College (USA), presented his book Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea (Harvard University Press, 2019) on Monday, 4 May in our Greenhouse online book series. We have long been fascinated with the oceans, seeking “to pierce the profundity” of their depths. In studying the history of marine science, we also learn about ourselves. Neptune’s Laboratory explores the ways in which scientists, politicians, and the public have invoked ocean environments in imagining the fate of humanity and of the planet from the early nineteenth century to the Cold War—conjuring ideal-world fantasies alongside fears of our species’ weakness and ultimate demise. Embracing our fears, fantasies, and scientific investigations, Antony Adler tells the story of our relationship with the seas.

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University (USA), discussed her book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (WW Norton, 2019) in our Greenhouse online book talk series on Monday, 27 April. Floating Coast offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationships between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coasts has won numerous accolades including being awarded the George Perkins Marsh prize for best book in environmental history from the American Society of Environmental History in 2020.

Eva Haifa Giraud, Lecturer in Media Studies at Keele University (UK), discussed her book What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion (Duke University Press, 2019) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 20 April 2020. By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes after Entanglement?, for all their conceptual power in implicating humans in ecologically damaging practices, these theories can undermine scope for political action. Drawing inspiration from activist projects between the 1980s and the present that range from anticapitalist media experiments and vegan food activism to social media campaigns against animal research, Giraud explores possibilities for action while fleshing out the tensions between theory and practice. Rather than an activist ethics based solely on relationality and entanglement, Giraud calls for what she describes as an ethics of exclusion, which would attend to the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are realized. Such an ethics of exclusion emphasizes foreclosures in the context of human entanglement in order to foster the conditions for people to create meaningful political change.

Paul Merchant, Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at University of Bristol (UK), presented Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University Press of Florida, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 13 April 2020. Merchant co-edited the volume with Lucy Bollington, who is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Film at University College London. This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil’s War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment.