New Books in Environmental Studies

By Marshall PoeScience Natural Sciences

New Books in Environmental Studies episodes

November 13, 2017 John Ryan Fischer, “Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i” (UNC Press, 2015)
John Ryan Fischer‘s book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) is a fascinating look at how a common animal—the cow—changed the landscapes, economies and peoples of both California and Hawai’i, and linked them together in unexpected ways, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the introduction of cattle into each of these societies by Europeans, not only did the cows bring ecological change, but they fundamentally altered how people lived, worked, earned their living and interacted with the world at large. As California’s and Hawai’i’s economies became increasingly focused on cattle, especially the hide and tallow industries in the 1820s and 30s, the changes both in the land and the people who worked it paved the way for broader colonial projects both by European countries and eventually the United States.
Ryan Fischer is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He specializes in environmental history, and studied under environmental and Early American history heavyweights Louis Warren and Alan Taylor at University of California Davis, which has one of the best environmental history programs in the nation.
Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster.

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58 min
November 02, 2017 Climate Change Skepticism with Lawrence Torcello
How does corporate misinformation and partisan skepticism effect what we know about climate change? Lawrence Torcello is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Philosophy. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, democratic theory, and climate justice.
The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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33 min
November 01, 2017 Anthony Chaney, “Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness” (UNC Press, 2017)
Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) offers an examination of the intellectual life and ideas of Gregory Bateson that came to fruition in the midst of the social upheaval of the 1960s. Bateson trained in the natural sciences and anthropology, moved to the field of psychiatry and conceptualized the double bind theory of schizophrenia. Leading a research group of scientists and captivated by the possibilities the double bind theory offered in understanding the anxiety of the age, he sought to connect it with other intellectual currents such cybernetics, game theory, evolutionary and communication theory. Working across disciplines, he addressed the modern problem of the distinctions between fact/value, reason/emotion, nature/culture, producing an inescapable double bind for society. Plunging into the paradox of the human condition, he challenged the instrumental view of solving social problems, breaking new ground against binary thinking and in addressing the ecological crisis as a system in runaway. Without appealing to metaphysics, he articulated a holistic theory of mind as a new foundation for thinking about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Chaney has provided a rich exploration of a fascinating thinker who set the foundations for the information age.
This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
56 min
October 23, 2017 Tore C. Olsson, “Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Tore C. Olsson‘s Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017) tells a remarkable and under-appreciated story. It’s about how, in the 1930s and 40s, a group of reformers in the US and in Mexico undertook projects to transform the rural worlds of their respective countries in the name of social justice and agrarian productivity. Olsson demonstrates how closely the histories of Mexico and the American South in particular paralleled one another, and how parallel histories yielded parallel problems, including mass rural poverty, landlessness, and economic deprivation. Whether in Mississippi or Michoacan, Tennessee or Tabasco, the rural masses saw few tangible benefits in the economic miracle heralded by boosters in Atlanta and Mexico City, Professor Olsson writes. And so in that decade historians sometimes like to call the long 1930s, Mexican and US reformers crossed the border again and again, to share models and ideas, and to undertake projects of rural revitalization through varying methods and with varying results. Olsson’s book recovers a world in which like-minded Mexicans and Americans worked together, toward what they hoped would be a more just world, in concert and in solidarity. Tore C. Olsson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Monica Black is Lindsay Young Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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56 min
October 06, 2017 Rebecca Jones, “Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia” (Monash UP, 2017)
In Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia (Monash University Publishing, 2017), Rebecca Jones, a senior research fellow at Monash University, explores the natural and cultural dimensions of drought in southeastern Australia. Utilizing diaries from the 1890s through the 1950s, Jones investigates the range of responses farmers and graziers have developed to drought.

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16 min
September 22, 2017 Sara Dant, “Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016)
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments.
In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West.
Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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56 min
September 05, 2017 Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016)
Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas C. Kawa‘s Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests (University of Texas Press, 2016) examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, Kawa highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control–a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.
Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods.

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27 min
August 19, 2017 Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany” (U. Michigan Press, 2014)
The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explores how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to use tourism and landscape planning to reshape East Germans’ definition of their homeland. He also demonstrates the messy boundaries between state and society, in which East Germans refused to change patterns of pre-World War II nature activities such as hiking and camping; conservationists and the regime found common ground on concepts of landscape management; and environmentalism resulted in a fundamental break between society and the state. The People’s Landscape contributes to our understanding of East Germany’s environmental history as well as to our understanding of the nuances of the relationship between state and society under dictatorships.
Scott Moranda is Associate Director of History at SUNY Cortland.

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47 min
August 13, 2017 Alice Weinreb, “Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study.
The global industrial food system grew out of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. In 1914, that system became a weapon of war. For combatant states, maintaining (and disrupting) food supply chains emerged as a major military-strategic objective. Today, all states are caught up in the global food system, but Germany in the twentieth-century provides a unique place to observe its fascinating and often distressing historical permutations, because the country’s history condenses so many modern forms of state (imperial, fascist, socialist, liberal-democratic), not to mention global crises and political caesurae–the World Wars, the rise of National Socialism and its defeat, the country’s division and reunification.
Professor Weinreb’s ambitious, wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study also offers a wealth of perspectives on such topics as food aid, school lunches, obesity, the condition of hunger, and gendered labor, among many others.
Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century Europe, on the history and politics of food, European environmental history, and on the Holocaust.
Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history.

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56 min
August 02, 2017 Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017)
Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainage would improve the value of the lands in the region, the locals resisted such efforts to disrupt their ways of life through a variety of legal and extralegal means. In response the crown moved from efforts to develop consensus for the plans to asserting royal authority in environmental management in order to start the projects, beginning by the 1620s the first of a series of efforts that over the course of the next half-century drained many of the fens in the region.

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55 min

About New Books in Environmental Studies

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.