New Books in Environmental Studies

The climate crisis and its resulting eco-anxiety is the biggest challenge of our time. The anxiety that comes with worrying about how environmental harm will impact our—and our children’s—lives can be overwhelming. Learn how to balance practicing daily sustainability actions while caring for your own eco-anxiety in this revolutionary book from noted environmentalist Heather White.

In One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet (Harper Horizon, 2022), White shows you how to contribute to the climate movement through self-discovery and self-care. Utilizing the Service Superpower Profile Assessment included in the text, you’ll discover how your personality, interests, and strengths can be of service to others and the planet. This book will serve as your guide to:

Setting the intention each day to take a small step— a "one green thing" to care for the planet—can help ease your eco-anxiety, push the culture toward climate solutions, and create a sense of joy.

Heather White is a changemaker, an environment policy expert, an environmental lawyer, a writer, a motivational speaker, a nonprofit executive, and has been a Senate staffer.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

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.

How do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? 

Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana UP, 2022) offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from them economically, they have yielded dramatically the same environmental outcome for communities around them that included pollution with precarious effects on the health of the populations in the regions, and displacement of population from their livelihood practices.

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.

Sarah E. Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke UP, 2022) examines climate adaptation strategies that upend the neat divisions of linear temporality separate the past, present, and the future, and shows how multiple temporalities co-exist in the pressing sense of crisis that engulfs coastal spaces vulnerable to flooding. Her ethnographic account takes us to Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic floods that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equalities as seen through the lens of ‘apan jaat’ (loosely translated from Hindi/Bhojpuri to for our kind or community), which has been the dominant political ideology creating a divide between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese diasporas, in the postcolonial independent nation-state, that has been the site of both plantation slavery and indentured labor during the colonial period.

Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for the limits of ideologies such as ‘apan jaat’ and demands newer forms of political ideation and action. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through engineering experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to bringing ethical questions to bear on the technoscientific climate adaptation projects. Vaughn offers us a complex and compelling narrative that begins from the local, personal, and deeply material aspects of climate adaptation from the Global South while never losing sight of the stakes for these struggles on the global and planetary stages—showing how questions of environmental justice are inextricably tied to questions of historical racialization.

Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department.

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.

Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world.  

Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals. Prof. Vincanne Adams, is professor Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine.

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.

In From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Professor Marco Grasso examines the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry's obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of climate ethics and policy.

Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens.

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.

Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Simone Ferracina's book Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet (Routledge, 2022) re-thinks potentiality―an object’s ability to change―in architecture and design.

The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts―through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines―a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place.

As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms―as situated individuals and co-authors.

Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality.

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.

Amidst all the talk of a green revolution what about the blue stuff? There are the seas that will wash over inhabited land, there’s the sea economy with fisherman and cargo crews facing hard times and, amidst all the debate about animal rights, where do sea creatures fit in? Professor Chris Armstrong author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need a New Politics for the Ocean (Yale UP, 2022) with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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.

The global economy has become increasingly, perhaps chronically, unstable. Since 2008, we have heard about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, banks “too big to fail,” financial regulation (or the lack of it), and the European debt crisis. Wall Street has discovered that it is more profitable to make money from other people's money than by investing in the real economy, which has limited access to capital—resulting in slow growth and rising inequality. What we haven't heard much about is the role of natural resources—energy in particular—as drivers of economic growth, or the connection of “global warming” to the economic crisis. In The Bubble Economy, Robert Ayres—an economist and physicist—connects economic instability to the economics of energy.

Ayres describes, among other things, the roots of our bubble economy (including the divergent influences of Senator Carter Glass—of the Glass-Steagall Law—and Ayn Rand); the role of energy in the economy, from the “oil shocks” of 1971 and 1981 through the Iraq wars; the early history of bubbles and busts; the end of Glass-Steagall; climate change; and the failures of austerity.

Finally, Ayres offers a new approach to trigger economic growth. The rising price of fossil fuels (notwithstanding “fracking”) suggests that renewable energy will become increasingly profitable. Ayres argues that government should redirect private savings and global finance away from home ownership and toward “de-carbonization”—investment in renewables and efficiency. Large-scale investment in sustainability will achieve a trifecta: lowering greenhouse gas emissions, stimulating innovation-based economic growth and employment, and offering long-term investment opportunities that do not depend on risky gambling strategies with derivatives.

Robert U. Ayres, an American-born physicist and economist, is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD, the international graduate business school. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including (with Benjamin Warr) The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Prosperity.

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.

Like wolves, orcas have been loved and loathed throughout history. What created this complicated relationship between humans and whales? And have we changed our attitudes toward them and their habitat needs in time to save them? Science writer and biologist Hanne Strager joins us to share:

Today’s book is: The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas, by Hanne Strager, which opens as intrepid biology student Hanne Strager volunteers to be the cook on a small research vessel in Norway's Lofoten Islands. This trip would inspire a decades-long journey to learn about the lives of killer whales—and an exploration of people's complex relationships with the biggest predators on earth. In The Killer Whale Journals, Strager brings us along with her as she battles the stormy Arctic seas of northern Norway with fellow biologists intent on decoding whale-song and dialects, interviews First Nations conservationists in Vancouver, observes Inuit hunters in Greenland, and witnesses the dismantling of black market "whale jails" in the Russian wilderness of Kamchatka. Featuring photographs from Paul Nicklen, The Killer Whale Journals reveals rare and intimate moments of connection with these fierce, brilliant predators.

Our guest is: Hanne Strager, who is a biologist, whale researcher, and the future Director of Exhibitions and Visitor Experience at The Whale, a museum in Norway set to open in 2025. She cofounded a whale center in Norway and has served as the Director of Exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. She is the author of A Modest Genius: The Story of Darwin’s Life and How His Ideas Changed Everything, and The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She has served as creator and producer of the Academic Life since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of New Books Network.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re busy in the studio preparing new episodes for your academic journey—and beyond!

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.

On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project became the subject of a public hearing in a small town near the proposed site. But this time, local politicians and union leaders praised the mine proposal as an asset that would strengthen working-class communities in Minnesota.

In many rural American communities, there is profound tension around the preservation and protection of wilderness and the need to promote and profit from natural resources. In Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range (NYU Press, 2023), Erik Kojola looks at both sides of these populist movements and presents a thoughtful account of how such political struggles play out. Drawing on over a hundred ethnographic interviews with people of the region, from members of labor unions to local residents to scientists, Kojola is able to bring this complex struggle over mining to life. Focusing on both pro- and anti-mining groups, he expands upon what this conflict reveals about the way whiteness and masculinity operate among urban and rural residents, and the different ways in which class, race, and gender shape how people relate to the land. Mining the Heartland shows the negotiation and conflict between two central aspects of the state's culture and economy: outdoor recreation in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and the lucrative mining of the Iron Range.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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.