Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that she began to rediscover her place in the landscape—and in the cosmos—by way of watching birds.

Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2023) brings the avian world richly to life. Kumar’s perspective is not that of a list keeper, counting and cataloguing species. Rather, from the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and from the snowy plovers building shallow nests with bits of shell and grass to the white-breasted nuthatch that regularly visits the apricot tree behind her family’s casita in Santa Fe, for Kumar, birds “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.” At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar’s reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that “seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.”

Our guest is: Priyanka Kumar, who is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and award-winning writer. She is the author of Conversations with Birds, The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an experienced writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

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From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (U Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Micah Muscolino explores how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and how the communities navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews, Dr. Muscolino demonstrates that for the inhabitants of China’s countryside, conservation programs became part of an extractive mode of accumulation that intensified labor demands and entailed loss of control over resources.
Dr. Muscolino recounts how changes to the physical environment played out in villages, on farms, and within households. His multitiered investigation uncovers the relationship between the forces of nature, Chinese state policies, and the embodied experiences of rural men and women. The book also highlights the contestations and compromises that the state’s environmental interventions triggered in rural society. By illustrating how state-building and revolution in modern China altered human relationships with the natural world, Dr. Muscolino shows that examining everyday interactions with the environment is integral to understanding history from the perspectives of China’s common people. He offers a timely reminder that environmental protection cannot come at the cost of marginalized communities’ dignity, interests, or aspirations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Eucalypts, iconic to Australia, have shaped art, science and landscapes worldwide. With around nine hundred species, from towering giants to compact mallees, these trees inspire awe and curiosity. Their hardwood has driven industries, sparked protests and even toppled governments. Their aromatic leaves hold healing properties yet fuel devastating wildfires.
Eucalyptus (Reaktion, 2025) by Professor Stephen Hopper blends Aboriginal knowledge and Western science to uncover the rich natural history, biology and conservation of eucalypts. It explores their evolution, cultural significance and surprising roles in modern life, offering insights into sustainable ways to coexist with these remarkable trees. Featuring stunning photographs from fifty years of fieldwork, this is the first comprehensive review of Aboriginal eucalypt wisdom, paired with cutting-edge scientific discoveries.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022)

edited by Ilan Kelman

Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects that should be more prominent in policy and practice.

The authors and artists place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes. Given the diversity and disparity of the influences and changes, the book’s contributions connect to provide a more coherent and encompassing perspective of how society views Antarctica, scientifically and artistically, and what the continent provides and could provide politically, culturally, and environmentally.

Offering original research, art, and interpretations of different experiences and explorations of Antarctica, explanations meld with narratives while academic analyses overlap with first-hand experiences of what Antarctica does and does not – could and could not – bring to the world.

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Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic’s materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic’s saturation.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationship between the Indian State, forest-dwelling communities, and forest conservation regimes.

The book builds on years of fieldwork across the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha, and Karnataka with forest-dwelling communities, Adivasi and Dalit activists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, to tell a turbulent story of battling for environmental justice. Kodiveri traces the continuing rhetorics of conservation and sovereignty in the forest practices of the colonial and the postcolonial Indian State, the entanglements between the climate crisis, resource extractivism, and eco-casteism, and credits the forest-dwelling communities for finding courageous and creative ways of securing their access and stewardship of forest resources.

Governing Forests hopes for the possibility of “healing of historical antagonisms” between conservationists and forest dwellers through a co-productive model Kodiveri calls “negotiated sovereignty”, a governance paradigm rooted in a jurisprudence of care and repair.

Arpitha Kodiveri is an environmental law and justice scholar and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College.

Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email:[email protected]

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Jemma Deer’s Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) invites the reader to take a moment and to ponder on the way of reading. In her book, the author challenges the narcissistic position of the human being: a status that has been established for some time and which has already been challenged before but does not seem to be changing quickly. The Anthropocene reveals the dangers which are connected to the human centrality and power; on the other hand, it requires new ways of engaging with the environment. These new ways are not limited to the gestures of consideration in relation to the profound changes that led to climate change in particular. They ask for a new mode of thinking when the inanimate is part and parcel of the human being. In this regard, Jemma Deer draws attention to reading and writing as ways and modes of engaging with the inanimate and with the environment that serves as a habitat for the acts of reading and writing. The book offers strategies for reading literary texts across cultures and times: the works by Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf reveal new echoes in the context of the Anthropocene. Radical Animism is a gentle invitation to abandon human superiority and to explore the ways that subvert a conventional hierarchy of the human and the non-human.

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In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest Rights Act 2006, a law enacted to secure the largest redistribution of property in independent India by recognising the tenure and use rights of millions of landless forest dwellers.

Beginning with the devastating destruction of a north Indian village Vaidya calls Ramnagar, inhabited by landless Dalits and Adivasis, the book follows the interventions of activists, forest dwelling communities, political parties, and corporations during the drafting of the law and traces how each of these coalitions shapes the law’s implementation. Vaidya shows how this ambitious law became a battleground of competing legal potentialities — at once a tool of exclusion, dividing forest dwellers along caste and class lines, and yet a platform for resistance, enabling forest dwellers to challenge State domination.

A multi-scalar study, Future of the Forest is attentive to the everyday politics of staking a forest rights claim, revealing how the law opens space for fluid (and often extralegal) interpretations, shifting political authority, and diverging aspirations.

Anand Vaidya is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email: [email protected]

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A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens borne by rich and poor countries.

Climate change is increasingly accepted as a global emergency creating irrevocable losses for the planet. Yet, each country experiences these losses differently, and reaching even inadequate political agreements is fraught with contestation. Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage (U Chicago Press, 2025) untangles the complex relationship between deteriorating environmental conditions, high politics, and everyday diplomatic practices, focusing on the United Nations’ agreement to address “loss and damage” and subsequent battles over implementation.

Lisa Vanhala looks at the differing assumptions and strategic framings that poor and rich countries bring to bear and asks why some norms emerge and diffuse while others fail to do so. Governing the End is based on ethnographic observation of eight years of UN meetings and negotiations and more than one hundred and fifty interviews with diplomats, policymakers, UN secretariat staff, experts, and activists. It explores explicit political contestation, as well as the more clandestine politics that have stymied implementation and substantially reduced the scope of compensation to poor countries. In doing so, Governing the End elucidates the successes and failures of international climate governance, revealing the importance of how ideas are constructed and then institutionally embodied.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, Oxford University Press).

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In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers foster an ethics of care in the Himalayan communities of Ladakh. She explores the way these relations are changing due to climate change, the growth of the wage economy at the expense of traditional agricultural and pastoral lifestyles, and increased military presence resulting from Ladakh's status as a border area. This book will be of interest to those who are interested in the anthropology of ethics, ethics in Buddhist communities, and the anthropology of climate change.

Kate Hartmann is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies at Harvard University. Her work explores issues of perception and materiality in Tibetan pilgrimage literature, and she can be reached at [email protected].

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