New Books in Environmental Studies

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. Almost 70 million people depend either directly or indirectly on the Mekong for their livelihoods. It is the world’s largest inland freshwater fishery. It’s also a place of great ecological and human diversity. Until recently, the Mekong was one of the world’s least tamed rivers, but that has rapidly changed. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong (Zed Book, 2019), Bryan Eyler documents the huge disruption, both to the Mekong’s ecosystem and to the lives of the people who depend on it, caused by rampant dam construction, tourism development, pollution, not to mention climate change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta?

This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta.

The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

Debjani Bhattacharyya is Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She was a Junior Fellow of the American Institute of India Studies, and a former Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden. Currently, she is a visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sue Stuart-Smith, who is a distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener, offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it.

The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020) provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.

Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think.

Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans. Essential and pragmatic, The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives. It is also available as an audio book read by the author.

Sue Stuart-Smith, a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, took her degree in English literature at Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor. She worked in the National Health Service for many years, becoming the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire. She currently teaches at The Tavistock Clinic in London and is consultant to the DocHealth service. She is married to Tom Stuart-Smith, the celebrated garden designer, and, over thirty years together, they have created the wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community.

You too are not who you are by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance, received from thousands of individuals as pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. As situations shift, so does your community’s capacity for learning, especially social learning, which allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes alone could adapt.

Becoming Wild brings readers close to the lives of non-human animals to show how other creatures teach and learn. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside portraits of various animals in their free-living communities, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. Readers are taken behind the curtain of life on Earth and asked to reckon with the most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What would actually make America great? More people.

If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Portfolio) is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing.

Vox founder Matthew Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must.

Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever?

Matthew Yglesias is a founder of Vox, a host of the podcast The Weeds, and the author of the book The Rent is Too Damn High (Simon & Schuster, 2012). He lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The pace, intensity, and scale at which humans have altered our planet in recent decades is unprecedented. We have dramatically transformed landscapes and waterways through agriculture, logging, mining, and fire suppression, with drastic impacts on public health and human well-being. What can we do to counteract and even reverse the worst of these effects? Restore damaged ecosystems.

Karen Holl's Primer of Ecological Restoration (Island Press, 2020) is a succinct introduction to the theory and practice of ecological restoration as a strategy to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems. In twelve brief chapters, the book introduces readers to the basics of restoration project planning, monitoring, and adaptive management. It explains abiotic factors such as landforms, soil, and hydrology that are the building blocks to successfully recovering microorganism, plant, and animal communities. Additional chapters cover topics such as invasive species and legal and financial considerations. Each chapter concludes with recommended reading and reference lists, and the book can be paired with online resources for teaching.

Perfect for introductory classes in ecological restoration or for practitioners seeking constructive guidance for real-world projects, Primer of Ecological Restoration offers accessible, practical information on recent trends in the field.

Karen D. Holl is a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught ecological restoration for over 20 years.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Over the past ten years, Chantal Bilodeau has made a name for herself a playwright singularly dedicated to writing plays about the issue of climate change. These are not dry docu-dramas, but deeply human depictions of life in the far north, where climate change is a daily reality.

Forward (Tanlonbooks 2018) is the latest work in her Artic Cycle, and it follows the story of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen in two temporalities: a story moving forward through Nansen’s life, and a counter-narrative moving backwards from the present until Nansen’s time. This play both depicts the life of this larger-than-life figure and explores the ripple effects of his story through 120 years of Norwegian history. This play will be of interest to anyone looking for emotional, human-scale approaches to the overwhelming reality of climate change.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Saint Lucia’s rural landscape is more forested today than at any time in at least seventy-five years (probably much longer). This change is profoundly significant given widespread efforts to achieve sustainable development on small-island states like Saint Lucia. Yet, this seemingly good-news story runs contrary to most conventional narratives about the worsening state of the environment in the Caribbean and elsewhere. How did this remarkable change come about? What role did government, the private sector and other actors play in this? What are the links between this environmental change and wider changes in the Saint Lucian economy, politics and society? Is there more to this story than meets the eye? These questions are explored in this interdisciplinary study of changing human-environment relations since the Second World War.

Brad Walter's book The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies (UWI Press, 2019) is based on the results of a long-term, field-based research project that began in 2006. It entails the application of a novel research methodology for doing human-environment research (ACE: abductive causal eventism) that the author co-developed with a colleague from Rutgers University. This causal-historical methodology allows for the rigorous integration of findings derived from natural and social science sources, including ecological and air photo assessments, interviews, secondary data sources, and archival investigations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Jeff Schauer explains how this global attention to African wildlife evolved from late nineteenth century to the present. By tracing a complex web of ideas, organizations and practices that developed in East and Central Africa during the era of British colonialism; Schauer shows that the history of modern conservationist movements is entangled with the development of administrative systems, increased militarization and violence, nationalist and anti-nationalist agendas and the evolution of science. In other words, “wildlife is never neutral.” The book makes a compelling argument for a more critical and deliberate engagement with ideas about wildlife and conservation.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language.

Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press) shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state.

Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution.

Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.

Nathalie Peutz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies