New Books in Environmental Studies

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), about his 2021 book Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (Integral Imprint, 2020). Along with his abiding interest in the work of Jung, Hegel, and Edgar Morin, Kelly’s current research areas include the evolution of consciousness, integral ecologies, and transpersonal and integral theory. In Becoming Gaia, he draws upon an impressive range of scholarship from such fields as Big History, comparative religion, transpersonal psychology, and integral philosophies. Regular listeners may find Kelly’s work a wonderful complement to some of the other authors and topics we’ve shared on this channel. I found the book—and our chat—fascinating. Kelly is not alone in suggesting we are living in end times. With climate chaos, an accelerating mass extinction, and signs of civilizational collapse, the Earth community is being drawn into a planetary near-death experience! These end times, however, also mark the threshold of new planetary identity in the making. Kelly reveals the features of this new identity and invites us to consciously participate in its making. Guided by the ideal of Gaia as "concrete universal," Kelly offers compelling insights on the nature of an emerging world spirituality that some describe as a second Axial Age—on the elements of a complex-integral ethics for the Planetary Era, and on the role of the death/rebirth archetype for understanding the charged field of contemporary climate activism. The book culminates with an inspiring meditation on the possibility, in these end times, of a third way beyond both hope and despair. In contrast to the restrictive anthropocentrism and technocentrism of mainstream discourse around the Anthropocene, Kelly speaks instead of the Gaianthropocene as our new geological epoch. It is an epoch where, even and especially as we face the fires of planetary initiation, we can awaken to our deeper nature as living members of Gaia, the living Earth in and through whom we have our being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Join Dr. Mary Menton and Dr. Philippe Le Billon as they dive into their new edited volume, Environmental Defenders: Deadly Struggle for Life and Territory, published by Routledge as a part of their Explorations in Environmental Studies Series in 2021. The interview explores what/who defenders are, what threats they face, and what can be done to help support and protect them. Broken up into three parts: On Defenders, Dirty Projects, Green Projects, Environmental Defenders provides into insight into the challenges and responsibilities defenders assume through firsthand accounts and global perspectives. The accounts highlight the diversity of defender and the collective character of their struggles. It identifies how power struggles take place in various forms of violence on a daily basis. Recognizing the visible and invisible forms of violence allows the reader to understand the complex emotional and gendered dimensions embedded in environmental contests. While successfully documenting local communities, the twenty-two chapters also seek to explain the roles that corporations, NGOs, BINGOs, national, and international authorities play within the defender narrative by breaking down their complicated relationships with defenders. Finally, Environmental Defenders illustrates how assumptions derived from Global North knowledges, developmental infrastructures, and economies, while helpful and supportive in some cases, also undermine, appropriate, and/or delegitimize forms of indigenous knowledge, cultures, communities, and environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021), Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam—and the mobilization of community groups to fight the perceived injustices and oversights of these plans. Looking through the lenses of urban design and socioecological spatial politics, Goh reveals how contested visions of the future city are produced and gain power. Goh describes, on the one hand, a growing global network of urban environmental planning organizations intertwined with capitalist urban development, and, on the other, social movements that themselves often harness the power of networks. She explores such initiatives as Rebuild By Design in New York, the Giant Sea Wall plan in Jakarta, and Rotterdam Climate Proof, and discovers competing narratives, including community resiliency in Brooklyn and grassroots activism in the informal “kampungs” of Jakarta. Drawing on participatory fieldwork and her own background in architecture and urban design, Goh offers both theoretical explanations and practical planning and design strategies. She reframes the critical concerns of urban climate change responses, presenting a sociospatial typology of urban adaptation and considering the notion of a “just” resilience. Finally, she proposes a theoretical framework for designing equitable and just urban climate futures. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation. Rozum argues that environmental awareness, including its ecological and cultural aspects, is key to forming a sense of place and a regional identity. The two concepts overlap and reinforce each other: place is more local, ecological, and emotional-sensual, and region is more ideational, national, and geographic in tone. This captivating study examines the growth of place and regional identities as they took shape within generations and over the life cycle. Molly P. Rozum is the Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of South Dakota. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, and Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2020), Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability and the quest for a "just recovery" in the Caribbean emerge from specific transnational political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Because foreigners are largely ignorant of Haiti's political, cultural, and economic contexts, especially the historical role of the United States, their efforts to help often exacerbate inequities. Caribbean survival under ever-worsening environmental and political conditions, Sheller contends, demands radical alternatives to the pervasive neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and US military domination that have perpetuated what she calls the "coloniality of climate." Sheller insists that alternative projects for Haitian reconstruction, social justice, and climate resilience-and the sustainability of the entire region-must be grounded in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions that call for deeper transformations of transnational economies, ecologies, and human relations writ large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today--has also done considerable damage to the earth's ecology. Now scientists tell us: we've been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, and much more. In The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lina Zeldovich documents the massive redistribution of nutrients and sanitation inequities across the globe. She profiles the pioneers of poop upcycling, from startups in African villages to innovators in American cities that convert sewage into fertilizer, biogas, crude oil, and even life-saving medicine. She breaks taboos surrounding sewage disposal and shows how hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Ultimately, she implores us to use our innate organic power for the greater good. Don't just sit there and let it go to waste. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Scholars have long noticed a discrepancy in how non-Western and Western peoples conceptualize the scientific and religious worlds. Non-Western traditions and communities, such as India, are better positioned to provide an alternative to the Western dualistic thinking of separating science and religion. Dr. Anil Joshi founded the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization (HESCO) in the 1970s as a new movement looking at the economic and development needs of rural villages in the Indian Himalayas and encouraging them to use local resources in order to open up new avenues to self-reliance. Pankaj Jain's book Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India (Routledge, 2018) argues that the concept of dharma, the law that supports the regulatory order of the universe in Indian culture, can be applied as an overarching term for HESCO’s socio-economic work. This book presents the social-environmental work in contemporary India by Dr. Anil Joshi in the Himalayas and by Baba Seechewal in Punjab, combining the ideas of traditional and scientific ecological knowledge systems. Based on these two examples, the book presents the holistic model transcending the dichotomies of nature vs. culture and science vs. religion, especially as practiced and utilized in non-Western societies such as India. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas. The Church of the Dead offers a counter-history of American Christian origins. It centers the power of Indigenous Mexicans, showing how their Catholic faith remained intact even in the face of the faltering religious fervor of Spanish missionaries. While the Europeans grappled with their failure to stem the tide of death, succumbing to despair, Indigenous survivors worked to reconstruct the church. They reasserted ancestral territories as sovereign, with Indigenous Catholic states rivaling the jurisdiction of the diocese and the power of friars and bishops. Christianity in the Americas today is thus not the creation of missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the colonial mortandad, the founding condition of American Christianity. Weaving together archival study, visual culture, church history, theology, and the history of medicine, Jennifer Scheper Hughes provides us with a fascinating reexamination of North American religious history that is at once groundbreaking and lyrical. Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

One of the trailblazers in the field of Japanese philosophy, James W. Heisig, delivered his five lectures in 2019 at Boston College as the Duffy Lectures in Global Christianity. These lectures were compiled into this book, Of Gods and Minds: In Search of a Theological Commons (Nagoya & Brussels: Chisokudō Publications, 2019). In them the author begins from the assumption that if the Christian God is to have global significance, it will not merely be a matter of Christianity accepting cultural and religious diversity and retreating from its mission of converting the entire world to its own way of thinking about God. The conversion to tolerance and hospitality towards other modes of belief and practice marks a watershed for Christianity, but only as a transition to straighten out its past in the face of a graver, commoner concern: the care of an earth abused by human civilization and devalued by organized religion. The author approaches this question from a broader consideration of the origins and functions of gods in minds and from there suggests grounding metaphors of the divine and its relationship to the natural world in a nothingness beyond being and becoming. During our interview, I asked Jim: The ongoing challenges of bringing our ecological concerns and street activism to the centerstage of our intellectual and philosophical discussions in academia are daunting. We (academics) tend to create another specialised branch of "environmental philosophy" or "philosophy of nature" as an elective rather than the core discourse in the field of philosophy. I asked him what is needed for philosophers and specialists of religious studies to take seriously the practical concept of the "care of an earth." His nuanced answer was this: a "revolution." We also delved into the concept of nothingness as "connectedness" and the logic of soku 即 as a particular rendering of it in reference to contemporary Japanese philosophy. The examples he provided towards the end of the interview was stunning to say the least: A genuine connectedness between humans and nature, which also means to be faithful to emergences of gods in our minds from diverse cultural and historical backgrounds, should look like Kintsugi 金継ぎ. It can not only heal what is once broken but the process of healing can be beautiful and renew our appreciation of what we have broken once. We hope that philosophy programs from around the world will follow this revolutionary practice of connectedness. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Environmental protection and climate actions has embedded in China’s foreign policy and the Chinese government has recently pledged to make the Belt and Road Initiative “open, green, and clean”. How far is this an agenda designed primarily for international consumption? How do domestic interest groups respond to China’s environmental foreign relations? To what extent can they influence and shape China’s domestic and international environmental discourse? In this episode, Heidi Wang-Kaeding talks to Vorawan Wannalak about her recently published book China’s Environmental Foreign Policy (2021, Routledge), which explores China’s attempts to assert alternative norms – “Ecological Civilization” - in the global environmental governance and highlights the importance of domestic forces as a key factor that influence diverse and contradictory environmental behaviors of China at international levels. Over recent decades, China has moved from being a follower towards taking on a leadership role in global environmental governance. This book discusses this important development. It examines the key role of Chinese interest groups, showing how through various domestic dynamics they have influenced how China has approached issues such as climate change and the environment. Focusing on examples of multilateral environmental treaties, bilateral cooperation, and the proposition of alternative norms – the idea of China as an "ecological civilisation" – the book provides crucial insights on the evolution of China’s approach to international relations and engagement with global environmental governance, and contributes to the discussion of what kind of power China is poised to become. Dr. Heidi Wang-Kaeding is a lecturer in International Relations at Keele University and a co-founder of the Hong Kong Studies Association, based in the UK. Vorawan Wannalak is a PhD student at the University of Potsdam. She was a 2021 Virtual SUPRA Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.. You may also be interested in another Nordic Asia Podcast mentioned by Heidi, in which Mette Halskov Hansen discusses the concept of ecological civilization here. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history's mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought. The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani's Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors (PublicAffairs, 2021) is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Cornell UP, 2021) explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through eight interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient struggle with feral flora, Cardina shows how weeds have shaped—and are shaped by—the way we live in the natural world. Weeds and attempts to control them drove nomads toward settled communities, encouraged social stratification, caused environmental disruptions, and have motivated the development of GMO crops. They have snared us in social inequality and economic instability, infested social norms of suburbia, caused rage in the American heartland, and played a part in perpetuating pesticide use worldwide. Lives of Weeds reveals how the technologies directed against weeds underlie ethical questions about agriculture and the environment, and leaves readers with a deeper understanding of how the weeds around us are entangled in our daily choices. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell (Princeton UP, 2021) is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet--is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend up to heaven and down to hell, which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America's ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors' liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all. Sebastián Rojas Cabal is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Salton Sea is a kaleidoscope. To some people, it's a waste land, a place of death only suitable for a dumping ground. For others, it's a clarion call, a warning for what humanity faces in our anthropogenically climate changed future. For still others, it's simply home. In The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles, associate professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Oklahoma, argues that the this place has defied people's expectations and attempts at control for hundreds of years, and that the key to understanding the Salton Sea (and indeed, all environments) is to recognize that they never just mean one thing. Part environmental history, part work of environmental justice studies, The Settler Sea tackles topics as diverse as damming, geology, and the history of birding in southern California - it is a book as wide ranging and hard to pin down as contentious sea at its center. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationships of the river's varied ecosystems--grasslands, riparian forests, wetlands, and deserts--and the ecological and cultural impacts of their policies. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend. This scale, detail, and clarity of this work was inspiring. Ruth Mostern's long-term environmental history of the Yellow River, is not the story of a single channel but of a series of landscapes and entanglements between the human and natural world. Replete with detailed explanations of physical geography and water management technologies, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale UP, 2021) succeeds not only in meticulously addressing the geographical and cultural heart of Chinese history, but also in speaking to our present moment through its recurring portrayal of the relationship between environmental awareness and political possibility. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke UP, 2021), Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence-the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ocean Enlightenment is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Edie Widder, Founder, CEO and Senior Scientist at Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA). After an inspiring story about how Edie Widder became a seagoing marine biologist and deep-sea diver, this conversation covers topics such as bioluminescence which is a fascinating scientific phenomenon that provides us with a deeper understanding of fundamental biological processes and the development of new programs designed to equip a new generation with the tools they need to deal with the environmental devastation we’re facing. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In 2016, the city of Mumbai was blanketed in toxic smog. The source? Fires at the nearby dumping ground of Deonar: the country’s oldest. The Deonar fire became an embarrassment for Mumbai, coming right before an international expo meant to announce the city to international investors and business. Law enforcement immediately blamed scrap dealers who lived alongside the landfill. The pickers are men and women–poor, sometimes very young–who comb the mountain for waste that can be resold: metal, plastic, cloth and, if they’re lucky, gold and jewelry. Saumya Roy’s Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings (Profile Books, 2021) looks into the lives of a few of these pickers, as they try to survive among the mountains of trash, as government officials and judges squabble above them trying to figure out what to do. More of Saumya’s work on landfills can be found here. In this interview, we talk about the trash mountains of Deonar, the families that live there, and how they navigate life on the fringes of one of India’s largest cities. Saumya Roy is a journalist and activist based in Mumbai. In 2010, she co-founded the Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai's poorest micro-entrepreneurs; through this she met the community who depend on Deonar. Her writing has appeared in Forbes India Magazine, wsj.com and Bloomberg News among others, and she has contributed a chapter to Dharavi: The Cities Within (HarperCollins India: 2013), an anthology of essays on Asia's largest slum. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Mountain Tales. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Education is one of our main weapons in the fight against climate change. The need of the hour, therefore, is to enhance the world’s commitment to climate education, and incorporate climate change into our education systems. In a special episode that combines two of our ongoing themed series, Survival by Degrees and Quality Education, Radhika Iyengar and Christina T. Kwauk, co-editors of the book “Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action”, urge readers to pay attention to climate change in education, not just as a peripheral topic, but as a core part of curriculum design and implementation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford UP, 2018) explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene —the mise-en-scène— where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945. Jennifer Fay is Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies, Vanderbilt University Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is MA in Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Coral Reefs: Science and Survival is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Charles Sheppard, Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. Charles Sheppard has worked extensively for a wide range of UN, governmental and aid agencies in tropical marine and coastal development issues. This conversation explores how Prof. Sheppard is trying to find a way through political shortsightedness, corporate greed and societal indifference to use his experience to make the planet a better place. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Drawing on thirty years of research, Goulson has written an accessible, fascinating, and important book that examines the evidence of an alarming drop in insect numbers around the world. "If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse," he warned in a recent interview in the New York Times--beginning with humans' food supply. The main cause of this decrease in insect populations is the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides. Hence, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (Harper, 2021)'s nod to Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring which, when published in 1962, led to the global banning of DDT. This was a huge victory for science and ecological health at the time. Yet before long, new pesticides just as lethal as DDT were introduced, and today, humanity finds itself on the brink of a new crisis. What will happen when the bugs are all gone? Goulson explores the intrinsic connection between climate change, nature, wildlife, and the shrinking biodiversity and analyzes the harmful impact for the earth and its inhabitants. Meanwhile we have all read stories about hive collapse syndrome affecting honeybee colonies and the tragic decline of monarch butterflies in North America, and more. But it is not too late to arrest this decline, and Silent Earth should be the clarion call. Smart, eye-opening, and essential, Silent Earth is a forceful call to action to save our world, and ultimately, ourselves. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. In Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021), Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities. Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Indic religious traditions, a number of rituals and myths exist in which the environment is revered. Despite this nature worship in India, its natural resources are under heavy pressure with its growing economy and exploding population. This has led several scholars to raise questions about religious communities’ role in environmentalism. Does nature worship inspire Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way? Pankaj Jain's Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability (Routledge, 2011) explores the above questions with three communities, the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi, and the Bhil communities. Presenting the texts of Bishnois, their environmental history, and their contemporary activism; investigating the Swadhyaya movement from an ecological perspective; and exploring the Bhil communities and their Sacred Groves, this book applies a non-Western hermeneutical model to interpret the religious traditions of Indic communities. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”—and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back—and why now? In On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change (New York University Press, 2018), Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground—until now. Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. ­Although well-intentioned—promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community—these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible. On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work. Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. witter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Technology in World Civilization represents a milestone history of technology. First published in 1990 and now revised and expanded in light of recent research, the book broke new ground by taking a global view, avoiding the conventional Eurocentric perspective and placing the development of technology squarely in the context of a “world civilization.” Case studies include “technological dialogues” between China and West Asia in the eleventh century, medieval African states and the Islamic world, and the United States and Japan post-1950. It examines railway empires through the examples of Russia and Japan and explores current synergies of innovation in energy supply and smartphone technology through African cases. The book uses the term “technological dialogue” to challenge the top-down concept of “technology transfer,” showing instead that technologies are typically modified to fit local needs and conditions, often triggering further innovation. The authors trace these encounters and exchanges over a thousand years, examining changes in such technologies as agriculture, firearms, printing, electricity, and railroads. A new chapter brings the narrative into the twenty-first century, discussing technological developments including petrochemicals, aerospace, and digitalization from often unexpected global viewpoints and asking what new kind of industrial revolution is needed to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Kate Rigby's book Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation (Bloomsbury, 2020) rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship. Kate Rigby was recently selected to receive an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, Germany’s most valuable research award. Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. A Syrian multinational, he studied at Yale and earned a certificate in beekeeping from SOILS Permaculture Association Lebanon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through the areas they study, seeing them as living places, interviewing inhabitants and marveling at the beauty and harshness of the environment they study. Join us as we talk with Nicolas Breyfogle, David Moon and Alexandra Bekasova about their journeys and research, how the two intertwined and how that granted them new perspectives on the Russian and Soviet environment. Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, exit from coal and ending deforestation. She also reveals some insights from the annual Southeast Asia Climate Survey reports, such as perceptions in the region of the US as a climate leader and the (dis)connects between climate action and COVID-19 responses. Sharon Seah is Senior Fellow and Coordinator at the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. She co-edited 50 Years of ASEAN and Singapore (World Scientific: 2017) and Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans (NUS Press: 2019). Prior to academia, Ms Seah worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore and the National Environment Agency for fifteen years. She may be reached at [email protected]. Quynh Le Vo is a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

With COP26 and high fossil fuel prices, energy is back in the headlines. And Russia, as one of the world’s largest producers of hydrocarbons, is part of the conversation--most recently, in Putin’s refusal to expand oil production to ease global prices. The world is coming up on three major transitions—peak use of fossil fuels, renewables competing with non-renewables, and a warming climate likely to surpass the 1.5 degree threshold set by the IPCC. What do those trends mean for Russia: a great power, a major oil and gas producer, an Arctic country covered in permafrost, and an economy with strong, but increasingly outdated, levels of technological development. Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Professor Thane Gustafson, examines how Russia might react—or be forced to react—to a changing environment and energy market. In this interview, the three of us will talk about how Russia will have to change as the world warms. As the world shifts to renewables, will Russia be able to keep up? As Arctic ice melts, will Russia see shipping opportunities? And will climate change get greater salience among the Russian public? Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. A widely recognized authority on Russian political economy and formerly a professor at Harvard University, he is the author of many books, notably The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe (Harvard University Press: 2020) and Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Harvard University Press: 2017), as well as Russia 2010: And What It Means for the World (Vintage: 1995), coauthored with Daniel Yergin. We’re also joined in this interview by Yvonne Lau. Yvonne is the Asia Markets Reporter for Fortune Magazine, with a longtime interest in Russia, especially its post-Soviet economic development and its growing ties with China. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Klimat. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The volume, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (University of Illinois Press, 2021), illustrates the power of performing diverse environmentalisms to highlight alternative ways of human beingness to improve the prospects for maintaining life on the planet under threat. In the interview, I spoke with editors John McDowell and Rebecca Dirksen, who detail how poetics and performance represent strategies in managing human and nonhuman entanglements with contemporary, wicked problems (e.g., threats to bicultural diversity and rampant environmental degradation, unresolved colonial histories, and capitalist pressures). Understanding diverse environmentalisms as embodiments of knowing demonstrates “the power of performances and expressive culture to move people to action: resisting, negotiating, and finding solutions to environmental problems. These are not only performances of diverse environmentalisms, but sources of inspiration and strength for us all” (261). Performing Environmentalisms is an edited volume of ten essays broken up into three parts: Perspectives on Diverse Environmentalisms, Performing the Sacred, and Environmental Attachments. The compilation demonstrates how environmentalisms as artistic expression serve to curate tradition and create space for cultural sustainability. The array of case studies generates new strategies that incorporate a diverse set of peoples—injecting their knowledge, experiences, and practices into global conversations. Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a must read for anyone interested in investigating how creative, alternative sets of environmentalisms interpreted though traditional knowledges are integral to navigating local and global climate and ecological issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands (Princeton UP, 2021) confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds—and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it. Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation’s founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses. Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation. Brady McCartney is a scholar of religion, history, and environmental studies at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Southeast Asia is the most tectonically and geologically active region on Earth. These processes have enriched the mountains and basins with world-famous mineral and energy resources, fresh water, and highly productive soils. However, the same geological processes are responsible for incredible destruction – from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These natural hazards, coupled with the effects of human-induced climate change, are driving significant change. To talk us through these changes, Dr Sabin Zahirovic joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, exposing how climate change is amplifying existing vulnerabilities in Southeast Asia. He explains how understanding past and current geological process can help us reduce risks from natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, but also address the huge challenges faced by growing populations and increased vulnerabilities resulting from climate change. About Sabin Zahirovic: Dr Sabin Zahirovic is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sabin's research focuses on global plate tectonics and mantle evolution, and particularly for the Tethyan and Asian regions. He completed his PhD titled “Post-Pangea global plate kinematics and geodynamic implications for Southeast Asia” at the University of Sydney in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Papua New Guinea research stream of the ARC ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub at the University of Sydney. He now leads the Tectonics and Geodynamics stream of a collaborative industry project with BHP. In 2020, Sabin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to explore the rise and demise of massive reefs and carbonate platforms on Australian continental margins. Sabin is a past recipient of the GSA Voisey Medal, the Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award, and the AIPS NSW Tall Poppy award. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Asphalt: A History (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—in both its natural and processed forms—from ancient times to the present, O’Reilly sets out to identify its importance within various contexts of human society and culture. Although O’Reilly argues that asphalt creates our environment, he believes it also eventually threatens it. Looking at its role in economics, politics, and global warming, O’Reilly explores asphalt’s contribution to the history, and future, of America and the world. Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

From The Center for Humans and Nature, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a five-volume collection of essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity that highlight the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. Edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer, Kinship explores humanity’s deep interconnections with the living world. More than 70 contributors—including Joy Harjo, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, Bron Taylor, and Sharon Blackie—invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin. From the recognition of nonhumans as persons to the care of our kinfolk through language and action, Kinship is a guide and companion into the ways we can deepen our care and respect for the family of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations. Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

I recently sat down with Josep M. Coll to discuss his new book Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation (Routledge, 2021). This book is the latest and final in a series published by Routledge that includes titles by some brilliant systems thinkers I have had the fortune to interview previously on this podcast (Managing Creativity, Córdoba-Pachón; Systems Thinking for Turbulent Times, Hodgson, Part 1 & Part 2; and The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking, Ison and Straw). Series editor Gerald Midgley refers to this collection as "an essential reference point for anyone looking for innovative ways to effect systemic change, or engaging with complex problems". And Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking is the icing on the cake! Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking explores a radical new conception of business and management. It is grounded on the reconnection of humans with nature as the new competitive advantage for living organizations and entrepreneurs that aspire to regenerate the economy and drive a positive impact on the planet, in the context of the Anthropocene. Organizations, today, struggle in finding a balance between maximizing profits and generating value for their stakeholders, the environment and the society at large. This happens in a paradigm shift characterized by unprecedented levels of exponential change and the emergence of disruptive technologies. Adaptability, thus, is becoming the new business imperative. How can, then, entrepreneurs and organizations constantly adapt and, at the same time, design the sustainable futures they'd like? This book explores the benefits of applying Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking to sustainable management. Grounded in Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies, it offers a modern scientific perspective fundamentally based on the concepts of bio-logical adaptability and lifefulness amidst complexity and constant change. The book introduces the new concept of the Gaia organization as a living organism that consciously helps perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. It is subject to the natural laws of transformation and the principles of oneness, emptiness, impermanence, balance, self-regulation and harmonization. Readers will find applied Eastern systems theories such as the Yin-Yang and the Five Elements operationalized through practical methodologies and tools such as T-Qualia and the Zen Business model. They are aimed at guiding Gaia organizations and entrepreneurs in leading sustainable transformations and qualifying economic growth. Highly actionable, the book offers a vital toolkit for purpose-driven practitioners, management researchers, students, social entrepreneurs, systems evaluators and change-makers to reinvent, create and mindfully manage sustainable and agile organizations that drive systemic transformation. Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The global trends of increasing climate change are predicted to intensify over the next few decades. General consensus remains that climate change is caused by actions of various entities at various levels, and it is nearly universally accepted that it is morally unacceptable. However, who does the onus of taking action against climate change lie with? In the fourth episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Dr. Anna Luisa Lippold, programme manager at THE NEW INSTITUTE, puts forth the suggestion that the responsibility for tackling climate change is a public notion, rather than an individual effort, in the context of her work “Climate Change and Individual Moral Duties”, published by Brill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Judith Shapiro and John-Andrew McNeish's book Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance (Routledge, 2021) emphasizes how the spectrum of violence associated with natural resource extraction permeates contemporary collective life. Chronicling the increasing rates of brutal suppression of local environmental and labor activists in rural and urban sites of extraction, this volume also foregrounds related violence in areas we might not expect, such as infrastructural developments, protected areas for nature conservation, and even geoengineering in the name of carbon mitigation. Contributors argue that extractive violence is not an accident or side effect, but rather a core logic of the 21st Century planetary experience. Acknowledgement is made not only of the visible violence involved in the securitization of extractive enclaves, but also of the symbolic and structural violence that the governance, economics, and governmentality of extraction have produced. Extractive violence is shown not only to be a spectacular event, but an extended dynamic that can be silent, invisible, and gradual. The volume also recognizes that much of the new violence of extraction has become cloaked in the discourse of "green development," "green building," and efforts to mitigate the planetary environmental crisis through totalizing technologies. Ironically, green technologies and other contemporary efforts to tackle environmental ills often themselves depend on the continuance of social exploitation and the contaminating practices of non-renewable extraction. But as this volume shows, resistance is also as multi-scalar and heterogeneous as the violence it inspires. Dr Marc Hudson is a research fellow in the politics of industrial decarbonisation policy at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In her new book Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene (Brandeis UP, 2021), environmental historian Nancy Langston explores three “ghost species” in the Great Lakes watershed—woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Ghost species are those that have not gone completely extinct, although they may be extirpated from a particular area. Their traces are still present, whether in DNA, in small fragmented populations, in lone individuals roaming a desolate landscape in search of a mate. We can still restore them if we make the hard choices necessary for them to survive. In this meticulously researched book, Langston delves into how climate change and human impact affected these now ghost species. Climate Ghosts covers one of the key issues of our time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jordan Salama’s Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena (Catapult Press, 2021) is a travelogue for a new generation about a journey along Colombia’s Magdalena River, exploring life by the banks of a majestic river now at risk, and how a country recovers from conflict. An American writer of Argentine, Syrian, and Iraqi Jewish descent, Jordan Salama tells the story of the Río Magdalena, nearly one thousand miles long, the heart of Colombia. This is Gabriel García Márquez’s territory—rumor has it Macondo was partly inspired by the port town of Mompox—as much as that of the Middle Eastern immigrants who run fabric stores by its banks. Following the river from its source high in the Andes to its mouth on the Caribbean coast, journeying by boat, bus, and improvised motobalinera, Salama writes against stereotype and toward the rich lives of those he meets. Among them are a canoe builder, biologists who study invasive hippopotamuses, a Queens transplant managing a failing hotel, a jeweler practicing the art of silver filigree, and a traveling librarian whose donkeys, Alfa and Beto, haul books to rural children. Joy, mourning, and humor come together in this astonishing debut, about a country too often seen as only a site of war, and a tale of lively adventure following a legendary river. Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West (U Washington Press, 2017), the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport's long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fly-fishing enthusiast herself, Brown places the rise of recreational trout fishing in a local and global context. Globally, she shows how the European sport of fly-fishing came to be a defining, tourist-attracting feature of the expanding 19th-century American West. Locally, she traces the way that the burgeoning fly-fishing tourist industry shaped the environmental, economic, and social development of the Western United States: introducing and stocking favored fish species, eradicating the less favored native "trash fish," changing the courses of waterways, and leading to conflicts with Native Americans' fishing and territorial rights. Through this analysis, Brown demonstrates that the majestic trout streams often considered a timeless feature of the American West are in fact the product of countless human interventions adding up to a profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely. Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Populist movements thrive on short-termism because they focus on their followers' immediate grievances. Leigh argues that we should be long-termers: broaden our thinking and give big threats the attention and resources they need. Leigh outlines the biggest existential risks facing humanity and suggests remedies for them. He discusses pandemics, considering the possibility that the next virus will be more deadly than COVID-19; warns that unchecked climate change could render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable; describes the metamorphosis of the arms race from a fight into a chaotic brawl; and examines the dangers of runaway superintelligence. Moreover, Leigh points out, populism (and its crony, totalitarianism) not only exacerbates other dangers but is also a risk factor in itself, undermining the institutions of democracy as we watch. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished. Miraculously, many pets did manage to survive. But in the months that followed the hurricane, thousands of them were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, and movie stars and celebrities were airlifting food and endorsing seven-figure checks, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could. Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs (UP of Mississippi, 2021)spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind. McLaughlin tells the moving stories of the people she met along the way, both those who lost everything to the hurricane and those working beside her rescuing and transporting animals away from the neglected, derelict conditions in which they barely survived. Within this story of tragedy and cruelty, suffering and ignorance, Mississippi Barking also bears witness to selfless acts of bravery and compassion, and the beauty and heroics of those who risked everything to save the animals that could not save themselves. Chris McLaughlin is founder and executive director of the Animal Rescue Front. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston with a BA in earth sciences, she lives in Massachusetts with two cats. This is her first book. Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which was optioned for TV/Film development in 2021. A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2021) complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain. Julie Ault is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015 before joining the faculty at Utah. She is currently a faculty fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center with the goal of developing her second book project, tentatively entitled Solidarity & Socialist Riches: East German Diplomacy, Environment & Technology, 1949-1989. Her research interests include the environment, transnational networks, social movements, socialism, and the Cold War. Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at [email protected] or tweet to @leslieh2Os. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Climate Change, Religion, and our Bodily Future (Lexington Books, 2021), Todd LeVasseur explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously—to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places—and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world. Brady McCartney is a scholar of religion, history, and environmental studies at the University of Florida. He can be reached at: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Supply chains - and, especially, their points of failure - have become a global hot topic, encouraging us all to take a closer look at how goods move around the globe. Dr. Gero Leson has spent the better part of his career developing supply chains from the ground up, modeling a community-driven approach that holds a vision of interconnection and a broader understanding of success for Western culture. At natural soap company Dr. Bronner’s, Leson and his colleagues and collaborators have developed ingredient supply chains for key ingredients, including palm oil, cocoa, and olive oil, that have aimed to honor people and process as much as product. At times, the results have been humbling, but, also, educational and human-centered. Working in communities around the globe, including Ghana, India, and Sri Lanka, Leson’s sourcing stories demonstrate how working closely with people and recognizing the role of serendipity can have surprising and dynamic results--and lead to regenerative, more socially just supply chains. In Honor Thy Label: Dr. Bronner's Unconventional Journey to a Clean, Green, and Ethical Supply Chain (Portfolio, 2021), Leson shares case studies of his work and offers insight into the complexity of critical supply chain issues, including sustainability, regenerative organic agriculture, and fair trade. Dr. Gero Lasen is the vice president of special operations at Dr. Bronners, a top-selling brand of soaps in North America. After joining the company in 2005, he helped its transition to sourcing all major ingredients directly from certified fair trade and organic projects, built from scratch and supplied by small scale farms. Under his leadership, Dr Bronners has become a pathfinder in the global movement to establish socially just and environmentally responsible supply chains. Leson holds a masters in physics and a doctorate in environmental science and engineering. He is a regular speaker on business, sustainability, fair trade, and regenerative organic agriculture. Dr. Susan Grelock Yusem is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Currowan fire – ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest and growing to engulf the New South Wales South Coast – was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia’s Black Summer. It burnt for seventy-four days, consuming nearly 5000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. Bronwyn Adcock fled the inferno with her children. Her husband, fighting at the front, rang with a plea for help before his phone went dead, leaving her to fear: will he make it out alive? In Currowan, Bronwyn tells her story and those of many others – what they saw, thought and felt as they battled a blaze of never-before-seen intensity. In the aftermath, there were questions: why were resources so few that many faced the flames alone? Why was there back-burning on a day of extreme fire danger? Why weren’t we better prepared? Currowan is a portrait of tragedy, survival and the power of community. Set against the backdrop of a nation in the grip of an intensifying crisis, this immersive account of a region facing disaster is a powerful glimpse into a new, more dangerous world – and how we build resilience. Bronwyn Adcock is an award-winning Australian journalist and writer. She has worked as a radio current-affairs reporter and documentary maker for the ABC, as a video journalist for SBS’s Dateline and as a freelance writer, including for Griffith Review and The Monthly. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Cambodia’s Tonle Sap is the largest inland lake in Southeast Asia. Each year, during the monsoon, this freshwater lake experiences an incredible hydrological phenomenon, in which it is inundated with swelling waters from the Mekong River, causing it to rise by up to tenfold in some places, before returning to its pre-monsoon level as the dry season returns. But Tonle Sap is facing a triple environmental threat: climate change, the damming of the Mekong River, and over-fishing, with devastating impact not only on the wildlife, but also on local floating village communities. To share more, Dr Josephine Gillespie joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories and invites us to rethink global environmental protection regimes in Southeast Asia. Taking Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake as a case-study, she argues that in order to maintain the ecological, cultural, and economic integrity of the most important river and delta system in the world, environmental management projects and policies must take into account people-place dynamics and local livelihoods. About Josephine Gillespie: Dr Josephine Gillespie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geosciences, Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. She researches environmental regulation and people-place dynamics across the region, with a particular focus on Cambodia. Jo’s research projects have focused on protected areas, especially the management of world heritage places and wetlands. She is the author of Protected Areas: A Legal Geography Approach (2020) and a co-editor of Legal Geography: Perspectives and Methods (2020). Jo has published widely about environmental management in the Asia-Pacific. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019) gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future. John Cable will begin a teaching appointment at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in January 2022. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies