New Books in Environmental Studies

By Marshall PoeScience Natural Sciences

New Books in Environmental Studies episodes

September 06 Stuart McHardy, "Scotland's Geomythography: Myth, Landscape and the Roots of Culture" (Luath Press, 2025)
What can we learn from our landscape? How can Geomythography help us understand our cultural heritage? What is Geomythography?
Geomythography is the interpretation of prehistoric and later societies at specific locales through a combination of oral tradition, place-names, landscape analysis and archaeology. The process is a means of finding new perspectives and interpretations to further the understanding of early and extant cultures, the continuities between them and investigating oral traditions that initially arose in pre-Christian myth, much of it concerning a Mother Goddess.
In Scotland's Geomythography (Luath Press, 2025), Stuart McHardy unveils the intricate ties between Scotland’s landscapes and the rich tapestry of its pre-Christian and later traditions. Geomythography is a vital lens through which to understand the enduring relationship between the land and its people.
The book invites readers to discover how communities have thrived within the land of Scotland, fostering a deep-rooted cultural connection. McHardy argues that respect for our ancestors and the knowledge they imparted shape not only individual identity but also communal responsibility towards future generations. This book is an essential read for history enthusiasts, those interested in myth and folklore and anyone interested in finding out more about Scotland’s Geomythography.
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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43 min
September 05 Robert Shum, "Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy?: Climate and Energy Politics between Crisis and Decarbonization" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)
Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy?: Climate and Energy Politics between Crisis and Decarbonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) tackles a critical question. Why has the world struggled so much to coordinate policy to address climate change, despite political and scientific consensus? Despite landmark agreements and expanding knowledge, emissions have fallen unevenly and progress has repeatedly stalled or reversed. Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy? explains that failure by focusing on domestic politics: how institutions distribute power, how interest groups exploit “access points,” and why countries with similar wealth and technology diverge. Moving beyond arguments about mere political will, it situates energy and climate outcomes within the institutional architectures of industrialized oil super-producers: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Norway. Shum advances a neopluralist theory of climate politics, arguing that policy is shaped by the strategic capture of institutional venues by carbon-intensive interests. He shows how separation of powers, federalism, party systems, and electoral rules configure opportunities for a de facto carbon oligarchy. By mapping where binding decisions are made and who can reach them, the book offers a generalizable framework for diagnosing blockages, explaining cross-national variation, and identifying leverage points for sustaining ambitious climate policy over time.
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27 min
September 04 Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What
does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s
conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier (University of Arizona Press, 2025)
invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the
face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of
coexistence.
Reflecting on more than a decade of ethnographic
fieldwork with smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers,
environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists,
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani brings to light how these diverse groups
navigate the enduring impacts of settler-caused environmental depletion
and their aspirations for new ethics of care. Di Giminiani challenges
traditional Western humanism, proposing a more relational and open-ended
understanding of humanity shaped by interactions with nonhuman others.
Rather
than seeking fixed answers, the book explores the fluid and
multifaceted nature of becoming human through the lens of conservation
politics. By highlighting the entangled, multispecies worlds of southern
Chile, Di Giminiani offers a novel approach to understanding the
political project of becoming human in the Anthropocene.
Piergiorgio
Di Giminiani is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on land,
indigeneity, conservation, agriculture, and statecraft, with
ethnographic fieldwork experience in both Chile and Italy. He is the
author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile (2018) and Alterhumanism (2025). He has also co-edited several volumes, including The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging (2026), with Hélène Risør and Karine Vanthuyne, which was featured on the New Books Network; Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America (2022), with Marcelo González and Giovanna Bacchiddu; and Ecopolíticas globales: medioambiente, bienestar y poder (2016), with Ángel Aedo and Juan Loera.
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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55 min
September 02 Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice" (Temple UP, 2026)
Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates
how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a
painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s
symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be
fatal. Nearly a
third of the national cases are reported in California, where those
infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in
the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to
cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley Fever
patients adequate medical treatment.
Dr.
Sarah M. Rios examines how these populations face racial health
disparities and develop strategies of care. She connects environmental
justice activists as well as prison advocates and abolitionists who
mobilize protests and issue calls to action to the past and ongoing
efforts for medical autonomy and healthy communities. Diseases Have No Eyes emphasizes that vulnerable groups have developed an expertise
and understanding of Valley Fever out of necessity. In the process,
these community members offer an alternative public health response that
extends beyond the individual body.
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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24 min
September 01 Edward Cutler, "This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation" (Chelsea Green, 2026)
In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it.
Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain. 
Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world’s rarest Christmas tree in Sicily.
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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51 min
August 31 Raf de Bont et al eds., "Globalizing Wildlife" (UNC Press, 2026)
Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales.
The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies.
Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr.
Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.
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46 min
August 30 Prakash Kashwan, "Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group.
Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action (Bloomsbury, 2024) helps
us reimagine our approach to environmental stewardship critically
interrogating the problems associated with existing legacies of
environmentalism and how we imagine other ways to addressing the multiple planetary crises.
The
authors cast a critical eye on wealthy and influential environmental
groups that committed to anti-racist strategies in the wake of the
racial awakening of 2020. Yet, they continue to embrace false solutions
like carbon markets and biodiversity offsets, which carry deeply
racialized consequences. By tracing the roots of these misplaced
priorities to detrimental modernity steeped in colonialism and
capitalism, the authors call for transformational changes in
human-nature relationships. They distill lessons from the divestment
movement, which has questioned the fossil fuel industry's moral
standing, and food sovereignty activists, who have mobilized global
civil society to hold agribusiness corporations accountable.
In
these extraordinary times, Decolonizing Environmentalism invites
readers to embark on a transformative journey to embrace anti-racist,
emancipatory, and regenerative approaches to environmentalism.
Prakash Kashwan is
an educator, author, and scholar, whose work cuts across the fields of
climate governance, environmental and climate justice, and international
affairs. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Environmental
Studies at Brandeis University. He also holds faculty affiliations with
the Heller School of Social Policy & Management, and Politics
Department at Brandeis. Before moving to Brandeis, he was a tenured
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Connecticut and Co-directed the Economic and Social Rights Research
Program at UConn's Human Rights Institute.
Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King’s College London. Her
research focuses on global environmental politics with a particular
focus on climate and energy security, climate justice grievances,
international orders and questions concerning security and existential
risks in a warming world. She co-directs the Centre for Integrated
Research in Risk and Resilience (CIRRR) and the Environmental Security
Research Group.
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1 hr 10 min
August 29 Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels, "Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law" (NYU Press, 2026)
The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet’s biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation.
Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law (NYU Press, 2026) showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America’s colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change.
Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.
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46 min
August 29 Catherine S. Chan, "Savage: The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Savage: The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong
(Cornell University Press, 2026) explores the dark side of colonial
modernity through canine eyes, showing the many ways that dogs
involuntarily contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century Hong
Kong. Dr. Catherine S. Chan follows the piecemeal transplantation of
British animal humanitarianism as pedigree dogs accompanied hardening
class differences, dogmeat became a contested racial issue, and dogs
were roped into the long list of undesirables fabricated in the
so-called golden era of reforms following the social disturbances of the
1960s.
Dr.
Chan reveals a fragmented civilizing project that constructed dogs as
dangerous, filthy, and unnecessary nuisances in a burgeoning city,
rationalizing the slaughter of tens of thousands of dogs alongside
paradoxical criticism of the native population for perpetrating animal
cruelty and the promotion of British animal humanitarianism. Departing
from anthropocentric perspectives in understanding the use of
Britishness in the molding of modern cities, Savage
restores the presence and agency of dogs to encourage a rethinking of
the patchiness of British colonial governance and the long-lasting
repercussions that modernity can have on our relationship with animals.
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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
42 min
August 26 David Helvarg, "Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In
a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million
years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are
largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one
of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s
an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars,
crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital to a functioning ocean
and the countless coastal communities that make their living from the
sea. Unlike coral reefs, whose similar plight plays out in tropical
waters highly visible to vacationing tourists, kelp forests thrive along
cold-water coastlines far from tourist centers. What will it take to
stop the decline before these underwater playgrounds bursting with
colorful life become vast fields of lifeless urchin barrens?
For readers who know kelp only as tangles on the ocean surface or smelly mounds of seaweed littering beaches, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp (Princeton University Press, 2026) reveals a thriving three-dimensional underwater world of color
and beauty whose loss if allowed to happen will reverberate in
unimaginable ways for both nature and humans. David Helvarg, a veteran
journalist and accomplished scuba diver, takes us on a memorable journey
beneath the waves through kelp’s natural and human history, the
billions of dollars of products and services it contributes to our
global economy, the unwitting human activities that threaten its
survival, and the hopeful movements around the world to restore kelp
habitat. Helvarg introduces us to Indigenous leaders promoting sea otter
reintroduction, out-of-work urchin fisherman,
documentary filmmakers, and ocean scientists all working in an unlikely
collaboration to restore and protect kelp forests while promoting a
growing range of uses for food, medicine, and energy.
Forest
of the Sea is the first book to document what is at stake if we lose
these irreplaceable marine jewels, helping readers to understand how
these natural systems might adapt and survive.
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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30 min

About New Books in Environmental Studies

From the publisher's feed

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.