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),

This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century. James Rodger Fleming’s new book is a big picture history...

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press,

Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality of the forest,

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke Univ...

Here in the U.S. we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, with its parades, fireworks, and, of course, cook-outs. If you’re like me, the smell of a grilling burger can make you salivate from across the yard.

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Fee...

In Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River (University of New Mexico, 2015), Kenna R. Archer examines the history of the Brazos river. The river, which runs from eastern New Mexico through Texas and to the Gulf of Mexico,

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and find emergent opportunities?

The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs.

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy,