New Books in Environmental Studies

Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establishment of agricultural and tree plantations. In Laos, the government has granted five percent of the national territory to investors as long-term land concessions since the early 2000s. Land investments, globally and in Laos, have violently and unjustly dispossessed peasants and Indigenous peoples of their life-giving land, leading to their immiseration. Yet, targeted communities have rarely accepted the theft of their land outright, often struggling to protect their land rights with varying degrees of success. How can these divergent outcomes of land control be understood?

In Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos (U Hawai’i Press, 2025), Dr. Miles Kenney-Lazar addresses these questions by investigating the development of Chinese and Vietnamese pulpwood and rubber plantations on the lands of ethnic minority Brou people in eastern Savannakhet of southern Laos. He argues that land should not be viewed as a “thing” but as a set of social relationships among different groups of people. The characteristics of these ties to land play a critical role in determining if and how its use, access, and ownership change—whether land becomes the property of plantation capitalists or remains in the possession of peasant farmers. Furthermore, the book explores the contradictory role of the state, simultaneously pursuing investment-driven economic growth built upon the coercive expropriation of land while pledging to protect a limited set of peasant land rights. Highlighting the sociality of land demonstrates that land transactions are full of friction and contestation.

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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Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

Guest Jennifer Boum-Maké is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. In addition to her monograph, she has co-edited 2025’s Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-Language Bandes Dessinées. In addition to many journal articles and contributions to collected volumes, she serves on a number of editorial boards and is one of the founders of Kwazman vwa: New Paths in Caribbean literature, an online series hosting conversations with ultracontemporary Caribbean writers.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy. Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fiber, has a long relationship to war, both in terms of supporting it and causing it. Wool's strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, and contrived shortages of same in the 20th century, have helped drive consumers' transition to the synthetic fibers that have enabled fast fashion, and as both fiber and cloth are global contemporary pollutants.

Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Professor Trish FitzSimons & Madelyn Shaw argues that the 19th century advent of southern hemisphere large scale sheep pastoralism and northern hemisphere industrialization of the woolen textile industry allowed - at least in part - the huge armies of the 20th century to exist. World War I represented a fundamental shift in the scale of armies and the kind of wars they fought. Demand for wool to outfit the tens of millions of men and women involved in fighting the war or supporting those who did grew way beyond what could be accommodated by any nation's normal supply. The contrived wool shortages of this war had a lasting impact - nations subject to supply chain difficulties began the search for substitutes that led first to the semi-synthetic rayon, and ultimately to the plastic fibers such as polyester and acrylic that dominate today's world of fast fashion.

Each chapter of Fleeced begins with a surprising object, document or image that takes us into this fascinating and previously untold history. Change is not necessarily progress. Fleeced explains how competition for wool in wartime helped create our current unsustainable and environmentally disastrous reliance on petrochemical fibers.

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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A free e-book version of Delta Futures is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier (U California Press, 2025) explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh's southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see the delta’s rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender - between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta's climate-affected future.

Jason Cons is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border (2016, University of Washington Press).

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal. In a world of cascading disasters, what are the consequences of transient care? In 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the central region of Nepal. The disaster claimed over 9,000 lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. In The Work of Disaster, based on extensive fieldwork in the region, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman examines what disaster generates, and the fraught relationship between crisis and care. Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes how emergency services transform the places they seek to assist; the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations; and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the contiguous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging with broader debates about worldmaking and the ethics of care.

Aidan Seale-Feldman is a medical and psychological anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

Elena Sobrino is an anthropologist and Lecturer in the program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University.

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Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique (U California Press, 2025) by Dr. Wendy Wolford offers new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes. Dr. Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of plantation production has shaped agricultural science, government rule, life on the land, and community development in Mozambique from the harshest years of Portuguese colonization to the present.

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.

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

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How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable.

In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights.

Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too.

Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield, the University of York, and Queen's University (in Canada), before which he studied at Queen's University Belfast and Lancaster University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), and the regular host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved.

Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.

Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: [email protected]

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An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States, No Option But Sabotage explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis.

After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement had largely gone silent. What happened? And given the threat from climate, why haven't more radical tactics re-emerged?

In No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2026), Thomas Zeitzoff traces the origins, rise, fall, and potential rise again of the movement. Using in-depth interviews with past and current activists, as well as experts, Zeitzoff covers the main factions and actors. These include: Earth First! and its early advocacy for "monkeywrenching;" the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and his years-long anti-technology bombing campaign; the connections between animal liberation, punk, and the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front and its arson campaign; and more recent climate activists and their use of disruptive tactics. Along with providing a comprehensive overview of the movement and its various sub-movements that emerged over time, Zeitzoff also asks the bigger question-given the scope and threat from climate change why haven't activists escalated their tactics? Property destruction, sabotage, and even arson were once regular features of the movement in the 1990s and early 2000s--will activists use them again, or will they stick to non-violence? Will the threat of increasing state repression scare activists, or radicalize them?

Not just a history of a major extremist movement, this book tells the story of radical environmentalism and highlights how activists are confronting the dual threats of climate change and repression, and asking themselves how far they are willing to go to protect the planet.

Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on political violence, social media, and political psychology.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Streetwise: Saving Ourselves from Big Car (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025) exposes how “Big Car”―the complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench car dependence―has pursued profit at the expense of the common good. David Obst explores how Big Car gained almost immeasurable influence over our lives, weighing the benefits and the costs of reliance on private automobiles. He details how industry covered up the harms of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund climate-change denialism. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities―from Taipei to Tempe, Copenhagen to Chicago―are experimenting with forms of transportation that offer alternatives to the dominance of cars. This is a provocative and comprehensive book.

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