For more than a decade, Ethan Tapper has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the worlds of forestry, conservation, and ecosystem stewardship.

He has many years of experience managing private and public forestlands. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Forester-of-the-Year, by the Northeast-Midwest Foresters Alliance. Ethan lives in Northern Vermont, where he manages a 175-acre forest and homestead called ‘Bear Island’…and rumor has it he is a musician in a punk-rock band.

In his tender and fearless literary debut, Tapper proffers a more complex vision. He writes that we must act now in order to protect ecosystems, and that the actions we must take will often be counterintuitive, uncomfortable, even heartbreaking. In striking prose, he shows how bittersweet acts—like loving deer and hunting deer, loving trees and felling trees—can be radical expressions of compassion. In this poetic and visionary book, Tapper weaves a new land ethic for the modern world, reminding us that what is simple is rarely true, and what is necessary is rarely easy.

Countless decisions await. There are no perfect solutions; only endless bittersweet compromises. How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World (Broadleaf Books, 2024) offers a clear-eyed, hopeful vision of a world in which so much is wrong and so much is worth saving.

Michael Simpson has been actively working, researching and teaching in the watershed management and wetlands fields for 40 years. He is a licensed wetlands scientist where he has conducted numerous delineations, wetland assessments and restorations employing a variety of assessment approaches and data collection procedures, as well as designing wetlands for treatment of NPS run-off and wastewater.

He has also held a position as graduate school Professor at Antioch University New England, where he has taught courses in wetlands ecology, watershed science and management, climate science & climate vulnerability and adaptation

His primary research has been funded by both US EPA and NOAA, which has focused upon impact to natural systems and built infrastructure in riparian corridors and estuaries, from changes in land-use combined with increases in storm intensity and frequency due to projected climate change.

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A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? 

To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninusula Press, UK; Catapult, US), as well as, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as, many psychoanalytic publications.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor in the Somatic Psychology program at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

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As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge UP, 2024), Xiangli Ding provides a historical understanding of China's ever-growing energy demands and how they have affected its rivers, wild species, and millions of residents. River management has been an essential state responsibility throughout Chinese history. In the industrial age, with the global proliferation of concrete dam technology, people started to demand more from rivers, particularly when required for electricity production. Yet hydropower projects are always more than a technological engineering enterprise, layered with political, social, and environmental meaning. Through an examination of specific hydroelectric power projects, the activities of engineers, and the experience of local communities and species, Ding offers a fresh perspective on twentieth-century China from environmental and technological perspectives.

Xiangli Ding is an associate professor of history at the Rhode Island School of Design. He considers himself a historian of modern China and environmental history. At RISD, he teaches courses on East Asian and Chinese histories. His research interests lie at the intersection of the environment, technology, politics, and human life in modern China. He is the author of Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and multiple research and review articles in both English and Chinese.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency (Routledge, 2024) illuminates what the pathways from emotions to social change look like--and how they work--so we can recognize and inform our collective attempts to avert further climate catastrophe.

Debra J. Davidson engages with how our actions are governed by a complex of rules, norms, and predispositions, central among which operates our emotionality, to assess individual and collective responses to the climate crisis, applying a critical and constructive analysis of human social prospects for confronting the climate emergency in manners that minimize the damage and perhaps even enhance the prospects for meaningful collective living.

Providing a crucial understanding of our emotionality and its role in individual behaviour, collective action, and ultimately in social change, this book offers researchers, policymakers, and citizens essential insights into our personal and collective responses to the climate emergency.

Dr. Debra Davidson is professor of environmental sociology at the University of Alberta. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society (2018) and co-editor of Environment and Society (2018), as well as author of numerous articles on sociology and the environment.

Prof. Michael Simpson has graduate degrees from both Dartmouth College and Antioch New England Graduate School where his focus of studies was wetlands ecology and economics.

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In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.

Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and ecological catastrophe and that everything needs to change, and fast. Thankfully, radical environmental movements have forced the question of “system change” to the centre of the political agenda to make way for a just and livable world.

Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations takes readers on an inspiring journey across key sites of ecological crisis and contestation, showing how revolutionary politics can emerge from the convergences between place-based, often disconnected struggles. These engaging essays speak to longstanding debates in political ecology around how to advance transformations in, against and beyond capitalism. The collection starts from the belief that the environmental struggles taking place across the Global South and North are a necessary component of such transformations. The book presents unique stories of the visions and strategies of struggles organized around sovereignty, land, climate, feminisms and labour, written by scholar-activists rooted in territories around the globe, offering locally grounded yet global perspectives. Each story reflects on how to build solidarity and comradeship across diverse struggles and how new political subjects and transformative collective projects for social-ecological justice are created.

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Often stereotyped as the land of unflaggingly perfect weather, California has a world-renowned reputation for sunny blue skies and infinitely even-keeled temperatures. But the real story of the Golden State's weather is vastly more complex. From the scorching heat of Death Valley to the coastal redwoods' dripping in dew, California is home to a dizzying array of landscapes and bespoke weather patterns. 

In The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next (Heyday Books, 2024), earth scientist William A. Selby takes readers on a journey through the seasons and across the state, exploring the atmospheric science that connects us all under our single sky dome. With over 100 photographs, diagrams, and explanatory charts, Selby guides us through the grand cycles that govern the world we see, feel, and hear every day, from the cirrus clouds that swirl overhead to the breezes that beckon us outside. Unraveling the mysteries behind the state's fog, floods, fires, droughts, and snowstorms, Selby shares his love affair with the sky and reveals what these changeable energies forecast for the future of California's climate.

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From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world.

By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (Yale UP, 2024), Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and well before climate change, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context. 

In strikingly contemporary language, Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J. C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mira, Verrier Elwin, K. M. Munshi, and M. Krishnan wrote about the forest and the wild, soil and water, urbanization and industrialization. Positing the idea of what Guha calls “livelihood environmentalism” in contrast to the “full-stomach environmentalism” of the affluent world, these writers, activists, and scientists played a pioneering role in shaping global conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature. Spanning more than a century of Indian history, and decidedly transnational in reference, this book offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.

About the Author:

Ramachandra Guha is the author of many books, including India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He lives in Bangalore.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. 

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Animals in World History (Routledge, 2024) by Dr. Helen Cowie provides a concise synthesis of human-animal relations over time, charting shifting attitudes towards animals from domestication to the present day. It asks how non-human species have shaped human history, and how humans have reconfigured the animal world.

Humans have had a long and close relationship with animals. They have hunted them, consumed them as food and fashion, exploited them as energy sources, utilised them in warfare, exhibited them in zoos and menageries, and studied them for science. In the process, they have radically changed the way in which many animals live, subjecting them to captivity, altering their diets, constraining their movements and, through selective breeding, reshaping their bodies. The book explores the use of animals for sustenance, labour, companionship and display, and traces the rise of the animal rights movement. It also assesses how humans have impacted the overall biodiversity of the planet, driving some species of animals to extinction and permitting others to colonise new continents.

With case studies on animal astronauts, celebrity kakapos, globetrotting pandas and cocaine hippos, Animals in World History offers a lively and accessible introduction to human-animal relations for students and instructors of animal studies, environmental history, and social and cultural history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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Peter Hill has been working as a resource manager with a specialty in stream restoration for over two decades, first for Washington DC and then as a consultant for Great Lakes Watershed Opportunities. Currently, he is Senior Policy Advisor for Green Infrastructure at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in Milwaukee, WI.

His many years of experience in managing major, multi-agency stream and river restoration projects which necessarily needed to include building partnerships to support such multi-faceted ecological restoration efforts. Many of these resource management projects have been located in underserved areas.

With River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways (Columbia UP, 2024), Pete reaches out to both the layperson, as well as the practicing professional. His goal is to build a more comprehensive understanding regarding restoration best practices that can be tapped to meet a community’s desire for a healthy and sustainable riparian environment.

But Pete’s perspective and professional practice goes beyond just understanding different restoration approaches. He is also quite cognizant about the need to build community understanding and support for their local rivers and streams, both in rural and urban settings. To this latter point, he does feel strongly that stream and river restoration can be tied directly to a community’s environmental justice efforts.

Michael Simpson has been actively working, researching and teaching in the watershed management and wetlands fields for 40 years. He is a licensed wetlands scientist where he has conducted numerous delineations, wetland assessments, employing a variety of assessment approaches and data collection procedures, as well as designing wetlands for treatment of non-point source run-off, agricultural liquid wastes and municipal generated waste water.

Currently, his primary research for both US EPA and NOAA has focused upon impact to natural systems and built infrastructure in riparian corridors and estuaries, from changes in land-use on the watershed combined with increases in storm intensity and frequency due to projected climate change.

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