New Books in Environmental Studies

As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as landgrabs, colonial dispossession, and environmentally destructive practices. Changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help us ensure a globally just wind energy future.

Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara (WVU Press, 2024) contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries—how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind—in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.

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Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to another--from a greenhouse world of sweltering temperatures and high sea levels to a "snowball earth" in which glaciers reached the equator. During this history, we now know, living things and the climate have always influenced and even shaped each other. But the climate has never changed as rapidly or as drastically as it has since the Industrial Revolution.

In The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life (Columbia University Press, 2024), Donald R. Prothero explores the astonishing connections between climate and life through the ages, telling the remarkable stories of the scientists who made crucial discoveries. Journeying through the intertwined evolution of climate and life, he tackles questions such as: Why do we have phytoplankton to thank for the air we breathe? What kind of climate was necessary for the rise of the dinosaurs--or the mammals, their successors? When and how have climatic changes caused mass extinctions? Prothero concludes with the Ice Ages and the Holocene, the role of climate in human history, and the perils of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding why the climate has changed in the past, this timely book shows, is essential to grasping the gravity of how radically human activity is altering the climate today.

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In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Meredith McKittrick explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Dr. McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, Dr. McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth's climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. 

Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. Jeremy Brecher goes beyond the national headlines and introduces readers to the community, municipal, county, state, tribal, and industry efforts advancing the Green New Deal across the United States. Brecher illustrates how such programs from below do the valuable work of building constituencies and providing proofs of concept for new ideas and initiatives. Block by block, these activities have come together to form a Green New Deal built on a strong foundation of small-scale movements and grassroots energy. A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic climate change.

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Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

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To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.” 

In A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press, 2024), J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy researcher who also works with advocacy organizations and unions—offers a comprehensive analysis of how we can actualize a just transition in the U.S. context and enact transformational changes that meaningfully improve people’s lives. Cha provides a novel governance framework called the “Four+ Pillars,” formulated from original research to provide a way to move from theory to practice. The “Pillars” framework includes a novel analysis that guides readers in understanding how to formulate effective just transition policies, what makes them just or unjust, and, similarly, what makes transition just and unjust. The framework also combines theoretical discussions with original empirical research and provides insights into perceptions of just transition. Grounded in real-world perspectives that make the case for policies that advance a just transition for all, not just fossil fuel workers, Cha charts the path forward to an equitable and sustainable future that no longer depends on fossil fuels.

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Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Dr. Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.

Our guest is: Dr. Sunaura Taylor, who is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building. 

American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and steel, which are even worse for the planet. Wood is often the most sustainable material for building, but we need to protect diverse forests as much as we desperately need more houses. Donahue addresses this modern conundrum by documenting his experiences building a timber frame home from the wood growing on his family farm, practicing “worst first” forestry. Through the stories of the trees he used (sugar maple, black cherry, black birch, and hemlock), and some he didn’t (white pine and red oak), the book also explores the history of Americans’ relationship with their forests.

Donahue provides a new interpretation of the connection between American houses and local woodlands. He delves into how this bond was broken by the rise of a market economy of industrial resource extraction and addresses the challenge of restoring a more enduring relationship. Ultimately, this book provides a blueprint and a stewardship plan for how to live more responsibly with the woods, offering a sustainable approach to both forestry and building centered on tightly connected ecological and social values.

Brian Donahue is Emeritus Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University and co-owner of Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, Massachusetts.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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In Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024), Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay enact a dialogue between cinema, philosophy, and ecocriticism to tarry with the question of ecological catastrophe. Taking as one of their conceptual points of departure Freud’s writing on negation, the authors elaborate a concept of ‘negative life’ to contest current approaches to ecocriticism predicated upon ideas of entanglement, presence, and connection. In their book, Swarbrick and Tremblay engage critically with a broad body of films—including Kelly Reichardt, Julian Pölsler, Mahesh Mathai, and Paul Schrader—and a range of conceptual paradigms (from antisocial queer theory and psychoanalytic thought to object-oriented ontology and theories of melodrama) to unsettle many of ecocriticism’s foundational assumptions. In this interview, we unpack some of the core themes and organising principles of the book and discuss the nature of collaborative writing.

Jules O’Dwyer is Teaching Associate in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge.

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Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025).

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