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.

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.

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,

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 ideologica...

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,

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,

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility,

The history of humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relationship with the other.

The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields all reshaped the American landscape and people.

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in...

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands.

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee,

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones...

Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the the...

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal property rights to wildlife.

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a de...

In Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Anthony Lioi examines literature, film, television, and comics through an ecocritical study of nerd culture. Lioi explores Star Trek, The Hunger Games,

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures,

Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) begins with two related puzzles: why does Vietnam simultaneously plant and cut trees at unprecedented rates; and,

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned in numerous countries around the world.

Supermodel Georgie Badiel grew up in a small village in Burkina Faso where the closest source of water was many miles from home. After launching her successful modeling career, she began to speak out about the vital importance clean water can have on a...

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization,

Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016),