New Books in Environmental Studies
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.
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1126
Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Enviro...
Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool University Press, 2013) by Tariq Jazeel.
66 min
1127
William Viney, “Waste: A Philosophy of Things” ...
What is waste? William Viney‘s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, including literature, sculpture and architecture. The text begins by stressing the importance of time to our und...
37 min
1128
Heather Menzies, “Reclaiming the Commons for th...
The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers...
43 min
1129
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, an...
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods ...
74 min
1130
James Nisbet, “Ecologies, Environments, and Ene...
It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Land Art work TheLightning Field,
57 min
1131
Silver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life,...
The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean,
49 min
1132
Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden ...
Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout,
40 min
1133
John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course ...
Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L.
65 min
1134
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Un...
The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Ho...
54 min
1135
Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013)
Jon Mooallem‘s book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals In America (Penguin, 2013) is a tour of a few places on the North American continent where animal species are on the very brink of...
53 min
1136
John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in ...
Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again.
55 min
1137
Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Ant...
When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries,
69 min
1138
John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlant...
When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines” — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to,
44 min
1139
Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Maki...
Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? In Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest C...
73 min
1140
Brian Allen Drake, “Loving Nature, Fearing the ...
What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public...
36 min
1141
Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic...
Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk,
54 min
1142
Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on ...
In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and techno...
69 min
1143
Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the ...
It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that...
32 min
1144
Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Deve...
Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the la...
32 min
1145
Jen Huntley, “The Making of Yosemite: James Mas...
I used to hike in and around Yosemite National Park. To me (and I imagine thousands of other visitors), Yosemite was the embodiment of “nature,” something grand, pristine, and, well “natural.” Of course there is a sense in which that is true: Yosemite ...
67 min
1146
Char Miller, “Public Lands, Public Debates: A C...
From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington, Char Miller takes readers on a wild romp through the contests, debates,
46 min
1147
Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global E...
One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics,
62 min
1148
Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Ar...
I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson and myself.
54 min
1149
James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered H...
In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived.
60 min
1150
Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life...
If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought the wild tooth and nail in a never-ending effort to brin...
62 min