New Books in Environmental Studies

In Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge University Press, 2015), the historian Erik Loomis examines the relationship between workers and their environments in this century-long history of timber workers in the Pacific Northwest. He shows that the “jobs vs. environment” tradeoff oversimplifies the history of natural resource workers who have, ever since the 1910s, tried to protect their bodies, environments, and livelihoods from the worst excesses of industrial logging. During the 1980s and 1990s, the political narratives surrounding the environmental campaigns to protect ancient forests furthered the wedge between timber workers, hard-bitten by globalization, and a new class of environmentalists. The ramifications of these fights still haunt labor and environmental movements in the Pacific Northwest and around the country. What will it take to rebuild the alliances of unions and environmentalists in the present, and the future?

Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate

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This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019).  Also listen to my interview with Boyer about his volume, Energopolitics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Cymene Howe’s Ecologics and its partner volume, Energopoltics by Dominic Boyer follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy.  Jointly, anthropologists Boyer and Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere.  Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters.  The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Ecologics, Howe examines the aborted Mareña Renovables wind park to understand the resistance of indigenous residents to renewable energy development and to analyze the consequences of their exclusion from the decisions that impact their lives.  Howe further argues that a full accounting for the dynamics of energy development and its consequences cannot be achieved without including the nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and geophysical forces that shape and are shaped by wind power.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark.   His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.  He can be reached at [email protected].

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In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burned, an area larger than country of Ireland. Today I talked to Michael Kodas about the phenomenon of megafires, forest fires that burn over 100,000 acres, and why the number of these fires is increasing every year.

Kodas is the deputy director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is also an award winning photojournalist and reporter. His book Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) recently won the Colorado Book Award.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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The book today is Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management (Routledge, 2017) edited by Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha. It's the Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association's 2018 Achievement Award. South Asian architecture and landscapes are not as well known in the western design schools. This book adds to our body of knowledge about “how to” design spaces with culturally sensitivity for projects in South Asia but also what we can learn from them. It's about how their multi-faceted cultural appreciation of the land that derives from their religion, food, and way of living with ecologies affects their designs and placemaking. It’s a fascinating book to view western cultures in a new light and also our current struggles with sea level rise and ecological challenges.

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In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals, and Songs (Berghahn, 2018), eleven researchers bring new ethnographies to bear on anthropological debates on ontology and the anthropocene. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, the book’s editor Juan Javier Rivera Andía talks with host Jacob Doherty about the importance of ethnography for refreshing theoretical conversations, historicizing indigenous cosmologies in the centuries long waves of extractivism that have remade Amerindian worlds, and the persistence of more than human relationships in the face of violence and ecological crisis.

Juan Javier Rivera Andía is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the Americas, the University of Bonn; his research examines rituals and oral tradition among indigenous groups of the Andes of South America, particularly Quechua-speaking people of central and Northern Peruvian highlands.

Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor of Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History.

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Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister's book  Projective Ecologies (Harvard Graduate School of Design 2014) is about how landscape architecture can move forward in the design field beyond garden landscapes to delve into the serious issues of climate change and land use master planing affecting our global landscapes today. Projective ecologies is a “how to get started” guide to understanding what we can control, what we can’t control, and to embrace all of the creative chaos to produce good and meaning peacemaking for humans and nature.

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Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders.

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Vacant lots, so often seen as neighborhood blight, have the potential to be a key element of community revitalization. As manufacturing cities reinvent themselves after decades of lost jobs and population, abundant vacant land resources and interest in green infrastructure are expanding opportunities for community and environmental resilience. Vacant to Vibrant: Creating Successful Green Infrastructure Networks (Island Press, 2019) explains how inexpensive green infrastructure projects can reduce stormwater runoff and pollution, and provide neighborhood amenities, especially in areas with little or no access to existing green space.

Sandra Albro offers practical insights through her experience leading the five-year Vacant to Vibrant project, which piloted the creation of green infrastructure networks in Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; and Buffalo, New York. Vacant to Vibrant provides a point of comparison among the three cities as they adapt old systems to new, green technology. An overview of the larger economic and social dynamics in play throughout the Rust Belt region establishes context for the promise of green infrastructure. Albro then offers lessons learned from the Vacant to Vibrant project, including planning, design, community engagement, implementation, and maintenance successes and challenges. An appendix shows designs and plans that can be adapted to small vacant lots.

Sandra Albro, research associate at Holden Forests & Gardens, investigates how improving soil and plants can boost the ecological and social value of vacant lots in Great Lakes cities. She is project manager for two projects that test low-cost, low-maintenance urban greening projects that manage stormwater and revitalize communities in Gary, IN; Cleveland, OH; and Buffalo, NY. Ms.

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In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. Readers join him driving passed no-till, precision agriculture fields in Kansas to walking around The Centre for No-Till Agriculture in Kumasi, Ghana. Each step of the way we are reminded that adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution to align agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Throughout the book, evidence mounts -- maybe farmers and ranchers can feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to the farm.

What’s unique and refreshing, Dr. Montgomery cuts through the typical debates about conventional versus organic farming. Instead, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility – naturally reducing the reliance on herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making.

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In Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros tell the story of how a Mexican American community in El Paso have fought back against environmental injustice. The physical and social legacy of the ASARCO smelter are told through the testimonies of more than one hundred workers and community members living and surviving in the midst of toxic exposure.

Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate

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