Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Marianna Dudley, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanties at University of Bristol (UK), discussed her book Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain (Manchester University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 20 October 2025.

There are turbines on the horizon. The blades whirl with metronomic rhythm. With each rotation, wind is transformed into electricity. An energy revolution is underway.

Electric wind rewinds to the beginning to explore the rise of wind energy in modern Britain. From the industrial revolution to the aftermath of war, through energy crises and the changing politics of the late twentieth century, we see how energy has shaped a nation – and how a nation is reflected and refracted through energy. Boldly charting Britain through its wildest, windiest places, this book takes us to the edges of land and beyond to think deeply about the role of nature in politics, science and technology. Visionaries and hippies join engineers and entrepreneurs. Traditions and local cultures meet infrastructure and industry in this captivating history.

At a time when action on carbon emissions is urgent, Electric wind offers examples, ideas and stories to fuel change going forwards. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in nature, climate change, landscape and the making of modern Britain.

Roy Scranton, Associate Professor and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM) at University of Notre Dame (USA), discussed his book Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 6 October 2025.

Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more “progress.”

The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We’re incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. Our brains can’t make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we’re doing.

It’s well past time, Roy Scranton argues, to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith in progress. Such unwarranted optimism will only accelerate our collective disintegration. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism.

Drawing from psychology, philosophy, history, and politics, as well as film, literature, and personal experience, Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but ultimately hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our unknowable future.

Brad Bolman, Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University (USA), discussed his book Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 29 September 2025.

Intrepid, docile, and cloaked in coats of white, black, and tan, beagles were one of the most popular breeds in the United States in the twentieth century. From Snoopy to dog shows, many Americans loved and identified with beagles. But during the same period, as scientists searched for a standard research dog, beagles emerged as something else: an ideal animal for laboratory experimentation.

Jules Skotnes-Brown, Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews (UK), discussed his book Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 15 September 2025.

Throughout the twentieth century, rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation and apartheid that brutally oppressed its Black population. At the same time, the countryside was defined by a related settler obsession: the control of animals that farmers, scientists, and state officials considered pests. Elephants rampaged on farmlands, trampling fences, crops, and occasionally humans. Grain-eating birds flocked on plantations, devouring harvests. Bubonic plague crept across the veld in the bodies of burrowing and crop-devouring rodents.

In Segregated Species, Jules Skotnes-Brown argues that racial segregation and pest control were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of “native” and “scientific.” Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts.

Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Skotnes-Brown demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.

Tina Adcock, assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University (Canada), discussed her book A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North (University of British Columbia Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 September 2025.

Exploration has long been pivotal to southern engagements with northern Canada, but it is most often associated with the nineteenth century or earlier. A Cold Colonialism offers the first extended examination of twentieth-century exploration in the Canadian North. Modern exploration helped southerners establish and maintain distinctive kinds of colonial and settler colonial power over northern Indigenous homelands.

Who explored the North between 1918 and 1965? What forms did exploration take? What did it mean to explorers and others affected by it? Tina Adcock focuses on four representative explorers with richly documented careers: mining engineer George Douglas, surveyor Guy Blanchet, ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and filmmaker Richard Finnie. Each used exploration to grapple with key, often discomfiting aspects of modernity, including industrialization, urbanization, and the specialization of knowledge.

Despite limited experience in and knowledge of the Canadian North, these explorers helped southern militaries, industries, and governments exert control over northern peoples and lands. Each also claimed belonging in and authority over the North, speaking over people who had long resided there and better understood the region. The ways that explorers felt about, thought about, and moved through the North still resonate among southern settlers in Canada today.

Richard Fallon, KE Fellow at University of Nottingham and Postdoctoral Researcher in Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum (UK), discussed his book Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of Geology and Palaeontology (Oxford University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 1 September 2025.

By the mid-nineteenth century, geologists and palaeontologists had reconstructed an authoritative narrative of Earth’s deep history, from the planet’s molten origins to the rise of humanity. Many figures in transatlantic science across subsequent decades, however, had problems with this narrative: it was too secular, inhuman, and evolutionary, or controlled too exclusively by elite scientists. Speaking from palaeoscience’s unevenly professionalized and controversy-racked borderlines, Christian fundamentalists, charismatic psychics, and respected scholars alike voiced their objections. Until now, no study has brought their work together for detailed comparative analysis. Spanning from the 1860s to the interwar decades, Contesting Earth’s History examines the fascinating history of five significant examples of fringe or ‘borderline’ palaeoscience: old- and young-earth creationism, hollow-earth theory, clairvoyant time travel, and sunken-continent catastrophism. Innovatively combining methods from literature and science studies with the history of science, this book attends not just to the conceptual content of these strange sciences, but also to their proponents’ communication of truth claims through diverse genres ranging from the scientific textbook to the epic poem. Close attention to the hitherto overlooked textual forms and literary strategies of ‘pseudoscience’ throws into relief competing conceptions of science’s audiences, methods, and forms of evidence. The authors examined in this book attempted to shift the balance of scientific power, creating textual spaces where exclusive hierarchies of expertise could be levelled away. Hijacking geologists’ and palaeontologists’ long-standing efforts at making the prehistoric past visible, these authors encouraged readers to gaze into time’s abyss with bold new eyes.

Rebecca K. Wright, Assistant Professor in History at Northumbria University (UK), discussed her book Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 12 May 2025.

In Moral Energy in America, Rebecca K. Wright offers an illuminating exploration of how the concept of energy shaped American thought, culture, and politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This essential history traces how politicians, sociologists, geographers, urban planners, economists, and intellectuals adopted the idea of energy to bolster their social programs and visions of the future through distinctive energy imaginaries.

Energy was not a stable concept in the period, and it appealed to writers and advocates across the political and cultural spectrum. While medical practitioners and social workers interwove energy into discussions of race, immigration, youth, and crime, mainstream political campaigns appealed to the public by drawing energy into political rhetoric. Wright positions energy at the heart of key intellectual debates of the period, such as the Bourne-Dewey confrontation over America’s role in World War I and the rise of technocratic ideas that envisioned energy as a new metric for societal progress.

In a thirty-year era that shook the foundations of American democracy—a period punctuated by the Great Depression, the rise of communism and fascism abroad, two world wars, and the atomic bomb—energy became a key metaphor through which to understand major transformations in American society. Wright demonstrates how energy’s many meanings transcended material and scientific definitions to influence everything from racial theories to economic policies, and ultimately played a pivotal role in molding the American moral landscape.

John Kinder, director of American Studies and professor of history at Oklahoma State University (USA), discussed his book World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 5 May 2025.

As Europe lurched into war in 1939, zookeepers started killing their animals. On September 1, as German forces invaded Poland, Warsaw began with its reptiles. Two days later, workers at the London Zoo launched a similar spree, dispatching six alligators, seven iguanas, sixteen southern anacondas, six Indian fruit bats, a fishing cat, a binturong, a Siberian tiger, five magpies, an Alexandrine parakeet, two bullfrogs, three lion cubs, a cheetah, four wolves, and a manatee over the next few months. Zoos worldwide did the same. The reasons were many, but the pattern was clear: The war that was about to kill so many people started by killing so many animals. Why? And how did zoos, nevertheless, not just survive the war but play a key role in how people did, too?

A harrowing yet surprisingly uplifting chronicle, Kinder’s World War Zoos traces how zoos survived the deadliest decades of global history, from the Great Depression, through the terrors of World War II, to the dawn of the Cold War. More than anything before or since, World War II represented an existential threat to the world’s zoological institutions. Some zoos were bombed; others bore the indignities of foreign occupation. Even zoos that were spared had to wrestle with questions rarely asked in public: What should they do when supplies ran low? Which animals should be killed to protect the lives of others? And how could zoos justify keeping dangerous animals that might escape and run wild during an aerial attack?

Zoos in wartime reveal the shared vulnerabilities of humans and animals during periods of social unrest and environmental peril. World War II–era zoos offered people ways to think about and grapple with imprisonment, powerlessness, and degradation. Viewed today, the story of zoos during World War II can be read as an allegory of twenty-first-century crises, as the effects of climate change threaten all life across the planet.

A one-of-a-kind history, World War Zoos is the story of how the world’s zoos survived the deadliest conflict of the twentieth century—and what was lost along the way.

Pollyanna Rhee, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA), discussed her book Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 28 April 2025.

A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what role did the history of Santa Barbara itself play in this? As Pollyanna Rhee shows, the city’s past and demographics were essential to the portrayal of the oil spill as momentous. Moreover, well-off and influential Santa Barbarans were positioned to “domesticate” the larger environmental movement by embodying the argument that individual homes and families—not society as a whole—needed protection from environmental abuses. This soon would put environmental rhetoric and power to fundamentally conservative—not radical—ends.

Josh Nygren, Associate Professor of history at the University of Central Missouri (USA), discussed his book The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 7 April 2025.

In the twentieth century, natural resource conservation emerged as a vital force in US politics, laying the groundwork for present-day sustainability. Merging environmental, agricultural, and political history, Joshua Nygren examines the political economy and ecology of agricultural conservation through the lens of the “conservation-industrial complex.” This evolving public-private network—which united the US Department of Agriculture, Congress, local and national organizations, and the agricultural industry—guided soil and water conservation in rural America for much of the century. Contrary to the classic tales of US environmental politics and the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, this book emphasizes continuity. Nygren demonstrates how the conservation policies, programs, and partnerships of the 1930s and 1940s persisted through the age of environmentalism, and how their defining traits anticipated those typically associated with late twentieth-century political culture.

The conservation-industrial complex promoted a development-oriented brand of conservation that aided the rise of large-scale, capital-intensive agriculture which continues today. It also reshaped the physical and political landscapes of the country, leading to impressive conservation victories and spectacular failures by privileging some environments, degrading others, and intensifying farm depopulation. In the name of environmental protection, agricultural conservation made rural America less equal.