New Books in Environmental Studies

In her new book, Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), historian Joy McCann explores the history of the vast Southern Ocean, from icy Antarctica to the southern coastlines of Australia, South America, and South Africa. From the journals of navigators centuries ago to scientific instruments today, the ocean has been more than just a scientific lab or food source, but a place where the environmental and cultural converge. 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 Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Utah State University Assistant Professor of History Seth Archer traces the cultural impact of disease and health problems in the Hawaiian Islands from the arrival of Europeans to 1855. Colonialism in Hawaiʻi began with epidemiological incursions, and Archer argues that health remained the national crisis of the islands for more than a century. Introduced diseases resulted in reduced life spans, rising infertility and infant mortality, and persistent poor health for generations of Islanders, leaving a deep imprint on Hawaiian culture and national consciousness. Scholars have noted the role of epidemics in the depopulation of Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania, yet few have considered the interplay between colonialism, health, and culture – including Native religion, medicine, and gender. This study emphasizes Islanders’ own ideas about, and responses to, health challenges on the local level. Ultimately, Hawaiʻi provides a case study for health and culture change among Indigenous populations across the Americas and the Pacific. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American 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

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna, the contributions to this edited collection invite curiosity, care and wonder in their meditations on these objects of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Marco Armiero is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Robert S. Emmett is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Roanoke College Environmental Studies program. Ruth A. Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. 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 Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake (University of Washington Press, 2017), Joanna Dyl documents the course and effects of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and subsequent fire that destroyed significant portions of America’s Pacific metropolis. She argues that the earthquake temporarily broke down many of the social divisions that had ordered San Francisco’s society for the previous half-century, bringing individuals from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds together in the wreckage. However, the city leaders and administrators worked to rebuild San Francisco–including the very social divisions of race, class, gender that were so disrupted by the earthquake. In addition, San Francisco was demonstrably a “Seismic City,” shaped by and subject to the tectonic forces of Northern California, and yet it was rebuilt in ways that downplayed, ignored, or actively concealed this fact. Dr. Joanna Dyl is an environmental historian and author, and winner of the Rachel Carson Prize for the best dissertation in American environmental history. Her research interests include natural disasters, urban history, and coastal environments. She currently teaches in the Department of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, and her next project explores American beaches. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire. 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 West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Jim Clifford brings together histories of water and river systems, urban history, environmental history, and labor history. Using archival materials with a particular focus on Ordnance Survey maps and historical GIS (geographical information systems), he explores Greater London’s second important river, the Lea, using it as a lens through which to track industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. He shows how the River Lea made West Ham an attractive area for industrial development, drawing manufacturing and chemical plants to the area. Workers followed, and over the course the second half of the 19th century the area grew rapidly in population, so that West Ham became one of Britain’s largest industrial centers. At the same time, the River Lea and the marshlands through which it flowed were transformed by pollution and development, ultimately generating important political responses by the early 20th century. Jim Clifford is an Associate Professor of Environmental History at the University of Saskatchewan. His research focuses on the history of Britain and the British world during the long 19th century, with particular focus on the industrialization of Greater London and its relationships to global commodities. In addition to this work, he is developing a broader historical GIS project to track the distant environmental effects of commodity chains, which you can view here. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic boxes. She has spent years treating and disentangling why chronic (and particularly auto-inflammatory) conditions seem to be on the rise in kids. She argues that toxicants in our food supply (from pesticides to genetically modified crops) is a major culprit. In What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), Dr. Perro teams up with medical anthropologist Vincanne Adams, PhD, to explore the complex history of the agrochemical industry and the challenges in studying and regulating the human and health impacts of pesticides, herbicides and agricultural biotechnology. Together, they link case studies of Dr. Perro’s patients to the bigger story of how our foods have potentially also become poisons. Michelle Perro, MD is a pediatrician with over thirty-five years of experience in acute and integrative medicine. Previously, she attended at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, as well as managing her own practice, Down to Earth Pediatrics. She is currently lecturing and consulting as well as working with Gordon Medical Associates, an integrative health center in Northern California. Vincanne Adams, PhD is professor and vice-chair of Medical Anthropology, in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has published six books on the social dynamics and politics of health and scientific knowledge including, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (2013), and Metrics: What Counts in Global Health (2016). She is currently editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the flagship journal for the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not exhaust its soils, denude its forests, empty its mines, or squander the potential of underappreciated resources. They spoke the language of conservation as enthusiastically as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but the South’s new, “permanent” economy was to be constructed by private interests alone—a pursuit animated in part by the specter of federal intervention if they were to fail. Bryan shows that this concern with permanence helps explain many of the era’s signature developments, such as the widespread adoption of fertilizer, the rapid development of the tourism sector, and the appearance of all manner of “waste” industries, from cottonseed to cement. But this more careful stewardship of resources came at great social and environmental costs. Agriculture remained a low-wage, labor-intensive sector, and new industries were no better. For boosters, this was a feature, not a bug. A permanent economy would maintain not only resource stocks but also white supremacy and the power of elites. And ensuring the persistence of natural resources was no safeguard of environmental quality. Many of the new enterprises that succeeded in sustaining their resource base, like the paper industry, exacted the greatest toll on southern air, waters, and bodies. Bryan has not only given us a more convincing, nuanced, and unified account of the New South, he also offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of a politics of sustainability too narrowly shaped around profits and growth. William D. Bryan is an environmental historian based in Atlanta. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries. Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship. An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the daily lives. Casey Walsh‘s Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) fills this hole by with a compelling history of bathing, the use of mineral and hot springs, and water politics in central Mexico from Aztec rule to the 21st century. Through Spanish colonialism, state efforts to police bathing, and capitalist initiatives to appropriate aqueous commons, healing waters have become increasingly commodified and entrapped in infrastructure. However, as Walsh demonstrates with close attention to popular understandings of health and water, and the efforts of subaltern communities to maintain access and rights to local resources, water continues to be open to alternative, intimate interpretations of its value, powers, and uses. Rather than a uniform, abstract resource, water is also a plural, heterogeneous substance; appreciating this heterogeneity may help address the water crises of the 21st century. Virtuous Waters is freely available in electronic format here. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico. 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 Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Midwest, where the prairie, plowed into “Amber Waves of Grain,” came to signify all the promises of settler colonialism. The Profit of the Earth explains the creation of this arrangement by excavating the ways that farmers, settlers, and, bureaucrats learned about the earth and its possibilities as they sought a living, a profit, tax income, or national progress. In this way, Fullilove demonstrates that the advent of the American style of agriculture grew out of the co-optation and reworking of local forms of rural knowledge. Courtney Fullilove is an Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico. Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley. 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, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the University of Melbourne, explores the long history of Australia’s climate, centuries before official weather records began. As the world’s climate continues to change, Australians will especially feel the more extreme climate impact their lives, economy, and environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Mackay’s life began humbly, immigrating as a child from an impoverished Irish household to New York City where he worked selling newspapers in the streets. Within four decades, he was a stakeholder in one of the wealthiest precious metal strikes in the history of the American West, and by the end of his life was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s fascinating story in The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West (Scribner, 2018). Crouch’s book is about more than Mackay’s rags to riches tale, however. The Bonanza King is also a portrait of Virginia City, Nevada, as it grew from dusty mining camp to mountain boomtown before falling again into relative obscurity. Mackay and Virginia City together encapsulate how the mineral economy of the Great Basin could create and destroy seemingly on a whim, and The Bonanza King is a rollicking retelling of how the man and the place were inseparably linked during the heady days of the Gilded Age West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. 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 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). But how do climate scientists reach these conclusions? In Philosophy and Climate Science (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Eric Winsberg presents the elements of climate science in an accessible but rigorous framework that emphasizes their relation to a variety of key debates in the philosophy of science: the relation between evidence and theory, the nature and uses of models and simulations, the types of probability involved, the role of values in science, and others. Winsberg, who is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, both explains how climate scientists try to understand the chaotic and complex system that is the earth’s atmosphere, and uses climate science as an extended case study of how scientific knowledge is created and debated before it is used to inform public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writes Darren Frederick Speece in Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (University of Washington Press, 2017). The book is an exhaustive study of the California timber industry and the environmentalists who used a wide range of tactics, from sit ins and sabotage to courtroom battles, to protect redwood ecosystems. Speece takes a bottom up approach to this history, telling the story from the perspective of the myriad individuals on both sides of the battle who shaped Pacific Coast environmental politics in the mid to late twentieth century. Defending Giants argues that historians of environmentalism have focused too much on birds-eye, national-level politics and have missed the important front line work performed by rural activists, who often put their lives on the line in protection of forests at risk of disappearing forever. Defending Giants is also available as an audio book from University Press Audio Books. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Environmentalists often talk like revolutionaries but agitate like reformers. But however moderate its tactics, environmentalism has led Americans to questions rarely asked: Is economic growth necessary? Must individual freedom and democracy be paramount? Can human reason save us? And, especially, are nature and humanity of equal worth? These questions haunted mainstream groups aiming to gain popular support. They have also animated fringe groups, especially in the American West, which are frequently criticized, lampooned, or dismissed. But these are questions that need our attention, says historian Keith M. Woodhouse, author of the important new intellectual and political history of environmentalism’s most radical lines of thought and the people who have fought hardest for them: The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). Woodhouse mines the writings of EarthFirst! and other groups and finds that their insistence on a moral equivalence between humans and nature has, as critics charged, led them to dismiss social and economic inequality and sometimes permitted racist and fascist musings. Yet they also had a demonstrable influence on the Sierra Club and other mainstream groups. And, even more importantly, they persistently foregrounded the importance of humility, doubt, and even pessimism, which he argues environmentalism abandons at its peril. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caffea arabica migrated first to the Arabian Peninsula (which accounts for its being incorrectly named arabica instead of ethiopica), then traveled further to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and beyond, is a fascinating tale. This local plant becomes a global necessity; a tropical variety evolves into the cash crop of Central America, a monoculture of short plants crowded into straight rows. But on its home ground, coffee doesn’t play by these rules. Ethiopians consume 50 percent of their production domestically. “Coffee is our bread.” As it was embraced in the West in the early 1600s, it was regularly condemned by religious leaders in every country. Coffee houses brought people of different classes together, creating conversation and the exchange of ideas. This was dangerous. Not in Ethiopia. The coffee-drinking habit defines Ethiopian culture. Everyone drinks it, all day in small clay cups, and always with others, never alone. It is the definition of community. “Coffee is our bread.” By contrast, the North American bond with the morning cup of joe (Chock Full o’Nuts, Maxwell House) is undergoing a evolution into a pricey “boutique drink” (started by Seattle’s Starbucks and Berkeley’s Peet’s). Four or five dollars for a cup of coffee? But coffee is first a plant, so agriculture is destiny. Due to its genetic vulnerability (Koehler reveals a historical lack of coordination in international research among the coffee-growing nations), it could too easily become the Irish potato of the twenty-first century. Coffee leaf rust, caused by a fungus, is one of its greatest threats. This fungus brought the discovery of the variety Robusta (Caffea canephora) by Dutch growers in Java in the late nineteenth century. Robusta is the wunderkind of instant coffee due to its stronger flavor and higher caffeine content compared to Arabica. Robusta’s tropical durability made it the crop of choice in Central America, but coffee leaf rust has followed it there. When a crop fails, the grower is ruined. Sometimes the only option is to migrate elsewhere. The other enemy is climate change. Increase the growing temperatures by two degrees and production is affected. This also hits water availability for crop irrigation. And then there is man. Will UNESCO’s designation of World Heritage Site protect the Kafa Forest from rampant deforestation? And why did the poet Arthur Rimbaud end his days as a coffee planter in Yemen? Will you now ponder these uncertainties as you sip your doubleshot iced latte macchiato? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018), Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey discuss the genealogy of garbage and how it grew in quantity and changed in consistency in liberalising India. The book also provides us with an exhaustive birds eye view of the technological, socio-political and administrative challenges faced by those who work for a cleaner India. Ian Cook is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest and also the host of Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures. Juli Perczel is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France. Focusing on the years in and around 1668, Sahlins shows how deeply the king, the court, and the anatomists, artists and writers around it thought with and through animals as Louis XIV redefined royal authority along the lines of absolutism. Through brilliant analyses of the Royal Menagerie and artistic and scientific studies of domestic and exotic fauna, Sahlins demonstrates how absolutism constituted a radical shift in worldview, not only regarding human animals, but the natural world as well. 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 plight of today’s coal miners has gained significant attention in recent U.S. politics. As coal mining practices and technologies change in the United States, coal miners face job reductions, but their futures are wrapped up in broader national questions surrounding global trade, the environment, mechanization, and deindustrialization. In his new book, Augustana College professor Brian James Leech examines a previous moment of technological change in American mining history that created social, economic, and environmental disruption. In the early to mid-twentieth century, open-pit mining became more common in hard-rock mining in the western United States. The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2018), examines this transition from underground to open-pit mining in Butte, Montana. Open-pit mining required more space, but fewer, lower-skilled workers. Whole communities were relocated, while new environmental hazards developed. The book explores the social and environmental consequences of the transition as well as discussing how the company and surrounding communities reacted to the changes. Finally, The City That Ate Itself also discusses the closing of the Berkeley pit, the largest open-pit in Butte, and its legacy. In this episode of the podcast, Leech discusses open-pit mining in Butte within the context of the United States’ long and complicated history with mining. He explains when and why open-pit mining came to Butte and how the local community reacted. In the discussion, he explains how new technology changed mining and miners’ lives. Further, he answers questions about the effects of the very visible industrial mining space expanding in Butte. We also discuss Leech’s use of oral history interviews as sources, nostalgia for earlier mining days, and the relevance of this history to today’s political discussions about industrial mining jobs. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She 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

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds beautifully. His book, called Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2016), tells the important and dramatic story of how the creation and development of a regional energy system linked Southwestern metropolitan and rural spaces. The book, Needham writes, “constructs a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.” Needham shows how that system produced and concealed geographic inequality. Post-World War II Southwest cities depended on abundant cheap energy, namely coal, and the primary source was far away in the Navajo lands. In addition to fueling the rapid metropolitan development, those lands also absorbed the majority of the energy system’s pollution. In other words, while city-dwellers and suburbanites consumed cheap energy, the Navajo bore the brunt of the ecological costs. The book would be of interest to urban historians, environmental historians, Native American studies scholars, historians of technology, and anyone wanting to engage in discussions of inequality and ecology. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly recesses of American cities in the 19th century. In the decades on either side of the fulcrum between “miasma theory” and the modern germ theory of disease, Americans typically linked smell with healthfulness, or lack thereof. In places like Chicago, New York and Boston, as industrializing businesses generated ever-greater amounts of noxious fumes, medical professionals, policymakers and ordinary people employed various techniques to follow stenches to their source–not always accurately. In a fascinating urban history that centers around the “invisible sense,” Kiechle examines not only what 19th-century cities smelled like, but how people’s thinking about smells changed and how that knowledge came to change their urban environments. This book is a highly creative and unusual glimpse into a realm of environmental history that is rarely accessible to modern observers. Sean Munger is a historian, author, podcaster and speaker. He has his own historical podcast, Second Decade. 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 When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain. Using the concept of a “food regime” as a theoretical frame, Magnan identifies three broad periods of stability in the relationship between Canadian wheat and British bread: a “UK-centered” food regime from about 1870 to 1914, a “mercantile-industrial” food regime from 1945 to 1972, and a “corporate” or “corporate-environmental” food regime from 1995 to the present. Separating these three periods are two periods of instability, the first including the two World Wars and the second beginning with the simultaneous oil crisis and entry of the Soviet Union into the global wheat trade in the 1970s. Through these phases of relative stability and instability, Magnan traces the institutions that linked the cold, dry Canadian prairies to the cities of Britain, including banks and food processing companies, with particular focus on the Canadian Wheat Board from 1935 until its dissolution in 2012. André Magnan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina. His research and teaching interests include the sociology of agrifood systems, globalization and development, and sociological theory. Magnan has two principle areas of research. First, he has examined the history and politics of grain marketing on the Canadian prairies, with a focus on the rise and fall of the Canadian Wheat Board, one of Canada’s most important agricultural institutions. His second area of research focus is the financialization of agrifood systems. Here Dr. Magnan has examined changing patterns of farm structure and ownership in Canada and Australia, documenting how financial investors of different stripes are buying farmland on a large scale. Part of a multi-year study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, this research aims to understand how new patterns of farmland ownership could affect family farmers, rural communities, and the agricultural industry. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art & Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century (University of Kentucky Press, 2013) is the result of multiple research methodologies including extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival investigation, and rhetorical analysis. The book’s introduction includes a history of tobacco production in the United States along with a summary of changes in attitudes towards the product over time – the most significant shift coming in the wake of the 1964 Surgeon General’s report confirming its detrimental health effects. Thereafter, the book is divided into three parts. Part One offers a detailed description of the work involved in raising the eponymous crop as well as how that process has changed over time. Part Two, titled “The Shifting Meanings of Tobacco,” is based upon Ferrell’s study of the representation of tobacco – or its non-representation – in the Kentucky Department of Agriculture newsletters from the 1940s up until the time of her fieldwork (c. 2007); here Ferrell shows how the state’s response to tobacco’s fluctuating fortunes played out in rhetorical decisions made manifest on the page. For example, recent depictions of tobacco farming suggest it has been relegated to part of Kentucky’s heritage rather than its present, despite the state still being home to thousands of tobacco farms. In the third part of the book, Ferrell combines her ethnographic research with her study of rhetoric to consider what it means to be a tobacco farmer in Kentucky in the 21st century; whereas claiming such an identity in the past might well engender pride and respect, it has become stigmatized and therefore more likely to provoke disdain at best. Partly as a result, recent decades have seen the development of the complex concept of tobacco nostalgia, characteristics of which include mourning the “golden age of the tobacco man”. In addition, Ferrell investigates why “just growing something else” is by no means as simple an endeavor as it sounds. Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century has been widely-acclaimed. For example, in his review for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Jeffery A. Duvall described Ferrell’s monograph as “an illuminating account of how burley tobacco, once a proud symbol of the economic strength and cultural heritage of the commonwealth, has in recent years been scrubbed from the consciousness and public image of Kentucky, and the impact this has had upon tobacco farmers in the state.” In addition, Burley received the 2014 Wayland D. Hand Award (awarded by the American Folklore Society to the best book to combine historical and folkloristic methods and materials). Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State 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

Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered. Historian Anna Zeide, in Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), carefully traces how canners convinced a nation of consumers who ate little but seasonal, fresh food to dare to crack open an opaque container of unknown origins and put its contents into their bodies. The feat required reshaping everything from federal regulatory practices and the makeup of academic faculties to the way food was advertised and the genetic composition of peas. When the canning industry has seen its hard-won reputation for providing a wholesome staple of American pantries come under attack from consumer groups and environmentalists starting in the 1960s and 70s, it has doubled down on its techniques of obfuscation, brand burnishing, and regulatory capture. For those endeavoring to reform the American food system, the book is a sobering presentation of just what they are up against. Anna Zeide is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. 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 Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature and frequency of material supplies needed to maintain a navy at sea. Unlike the relatively self-sufficient sailing ship, steam-powered vessels had an almost insatiable appetite for coal, requiring resupply much more frequently. Further, not just any coal would do: after extensive tests on the quality of coals from across the globe, engineers found that Welsh steam coal was the essential fuel for Britain’s steam-powered navy, and there were precious few suitable alternatives. These facts, then, shaped the construction and maintenance of a system of fossil-fuel infrastructure that spanned the globe. Gray rounds his analysis out by following coal’s journey from mines, through depots and coaling stations, in lighters, and then into ships holds. He identifies coaling stations as unique imperial spaces, in which naval personnel, administrators, and local inhabitants crossed paths. He considers the innumerable hands and backs that groaned under the weight of tons of black rocks, including indigenous laborers and British sailors. Throughout, he demonstrates conclusively the utter centrality of coal to the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, and hence to the British Empire. Steven Gray is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Naval History at the University of Portsmouth. He studies imperial, maritime, transnational, global and transoceanic history, with particular interest in the material infrastructures of global networks, and how these facilitated the mobility of goods, people, militaries and empires. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art and Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018), is a fine-grained examination of the local reaction to the most serious accident in the history of U.S. nuclear energy. It is also a sweeping study of the construction of arguments for and against nuclear energy and atomic weapons from the end of the World War II to the present. Zaretsky follows that debate through a transformative six-year debate in central Pennsylvania, where conservative activists launched protests that drew heavily from the examples of environmentalism, the antiwar movement, second-wave feminism, the black freedom struggle, and black and women’s health activism. Yet rather than pushing them to the left, their fight with pronuclear forces in industry and government made them more conservative. They articulated an ethnonationalist argument about a threatened nation betrayed by its leaders and illustrated it with ecological images of the damaged bodies of mothers, babies, and the unborn. This “biotic nationalism” helped conservatives paint a convincing picture of the America of the 1970s and 1980s and remains potent today, as visible in the “Crippled America” described by Donald Trump. Natasha Zaretsky is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of American Decline, 1968-1980 (UNC Press, 2007) and co-editor of Major Problems in U.S. History Since 1945 (4th ed., Cengage, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Women’s History, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. 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, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production in Darjeeling, India. Based on more than a decade of feminist longitudinal ethnographic research, Sen investigates why independent women small farmers growing tea on their own land experience market-based social justice regimes like Fair Trade differently from women wage laborers in tea plantations. Simultaneously circumspect and hopeful of the extent and kind of empowerment Fair Trade can bring about, women workers nonetheless use sustainable development as a space to mobilize for more favorable intra-household relations, collective bargaining and access to resources. Everyday Sustainability received the Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association in 2018. Sen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Conflict Management at the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development in Kennesaw State University. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. 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 Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Tim Neale examines the controversy over the 2005 Wild Rivers Act in the Cape York Peninsula of Northern Australia. Through detailed analysis of the role of traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, the media, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems, Neale reveals the ways in which the future of the north was contested. In the process, Wild Articulations reveals the overlapping, contesting, and sometimes surprising relationships between environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia. The book shows how the Act both revealed and fundamentally altered the politics of environmentalism and indigeneity. With implications stretching far beyond Australia, Wild Articulations asks questions such as ‘Who is or should—ethically or legally—be recognized as rightfully interested in indigenous country? What attachments to wild spaces are we willing to recognize as legitimate? What futures do those living in “wild” places want, and what can they expect?’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Not all city dwellers are bipedal, according to Frederick L. Brown, author of The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2016). The history of Seattle, and all cities, is as much about its non-human inhabitants as its human ones, argues Brown, an independent scholar working on a contractual basis with the National Park Service. Salish-speaking people, the earliest inhabitants of the Puget Sound, had myriad relationships with animals. They thought of them as important symbols and as spiritual guides, and used them as a critical resource base. The species of animals living around the Puget Sound changed with European arrival and conquest, but the complicated relationships they had with humans did not. Cattle, horses, mountain lions, dogs, and salmon, all meant different things to different people at different times. Brown tracks these changes in use and attitude and argues that our perception of animals is shaped by the paradox of the pet food dish. The bowl we put out for our cats and dogs, Brown says, is an enduring symbol of our fraught relationship to creatures we by turns, eat, ignore, or love, depending on the context and the species in question. The history of the human city is indeed much more than a human history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. 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 disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017) by historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby. Much more than a history of mosquitoes and scientists, the book attends to ecology, economy, and culture to explore how yellow fever arrived in the Gulf South, why yellow fever epidemics became commonplace in the Crescent City, why they finally abated, and how residents made sense of the disease. Willoughby finds answers in landscapes: the contours of sugarcane plantations, the sprawl of a city brimming with global capital, the severed connections of a military occupation, the new rural railroad network of the postbellum South, the urban zones of public health interventions, and the massive plantations and infrastructure that followed imperial expansion across the hemisphere. Within these places, the notions of racial, ethnic, and geographic otherness permeating theories about susceptibility to yellow fever echoed broader social and political discourse. Both local and transnational, this study presents the spread of yellow fever as an unintended consequence of colonial and imperial development and raises important questions about our approach to controlling epidemic diseases today. Urmi Engineer Willoughby is an assistant professor of history at Murray State University in western Kentucky. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has held postdoctoral fellowships in world history at Colby College and the University of Pittsburgh. She is the co-author (with Merry Wiesner-Hanks) of A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History (Duke University Press, forthcoming). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. 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 historian Peter A. Kopp‘s book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (University of California Press, 2016) examines the fascinating history of a very special plant: the hop. From its prehistoric origins to its use in ancient and medieval beermaking, the hop was already an important crop in human agriculture when it first appeared on Colonial American shores, but when it made its way to Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley in the mid-19th century, it changed itself, the region, and the world forever. Savvy farmers, brewers and marketers soon turned the Willamette Valley into the “Hops Capital of the World,” and began to bend the entire world’s beer industry to their will. The hop somehow managed to survive and even flourish during Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, then almost fell victim to a disease that nearly destroyed the fields of aromatic plenty, but laboratory science and big business spelled a resurrection for the hardy hop. This book is a highly readable and interesting new look at the history of beer and the origins of the Pacific Northwest’s famed craft brewing culture. Peter A. Kopp is Associate Professor and Director of Public History at New Mexico State University in las Cruces, New Mexico. In addition to researching hops and beer, Dr. Kopp also works on the history of tourism and various aspects of environmental history in the U.S. Southwest. His book Hoptopia won the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award last year, 2017. Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster. He also has his own historical podcast, Second Decade, on the Recorded History Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Historians, writes Dagomar Degroot, rarely feature in discussions about global warming. With his new book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Degroot seeks to remedy this significant omission. The book asks what past cooling, in the form of the Little Ice Age—a variable but overall cold climatic regime that affected much of the world and endured from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries—can teach us about future warming. Focused on the Dutch Republic from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, The Frigid Golden Age examines how and why this particular society prospered during a time of climatic upheaval. What was it about the Dutch Republic that allowed its citizens to thrive during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age? Through detailed analysis of the commerce, military and culture of the Republic, The Frigid Golden Age examines the resilience and adaptability of a society in the face of climate change, and what it might teach us about our own predicament. 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 The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adequately prepare for potential disasters. Leveraging examples of high-impact events, The Ostrich Paradox summarizes how preparedness efforts are affected by issues with human memory, risk probability comprehension, and information overload. Finally, the authors provide a tool for assessing and mitigating these biases through a behavioral risk audit. The book is a slim volume that may lend itself for use in professional settings as a training tool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from the environmental experience of Soviet communism? These are just some of the questions motivating historian Andy Bruno‘s book, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book is the first to consider nature and the environment as actor and participant, rather than passive subject, in Soviet history. It traces the history of economically driven environmental change on the northern Kola Peninsula, covering the construction of railroads, phosphate mining, reindeer farming, nickel and copper smelting, and energy industries, from the Imperial period to the post-Soviet era. The Nature of Soviet Power shows how nature shaped, and was shaped by, the Soviet system, and sees Soviet environmental history as part of the global pursuit for unending economic growth amongst modern states. 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 an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subsistence and human dignity. Historian Robert Hunt Ferguson, in Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2018), makes the surprising case that the Depression-era Mississippi Delta provided the necessary conditions for the flowering of such an endeavor. New Deal policies inspired socialist optimism while their racial exclusions left displaced tenant farmers looking for work and attracted to enterprises like Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, which promised to break them from the cycle of debt and offer them equal access to the schooling, medical care, and opportunity enjoyed by the white middle class. These cooperative farms drew inspiration from the transnational communitarian movement and advanced the radical visions of the American Socialist Party and the religious left, including celebrated theological Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as president of their board of trustees. While the experiment struggled with agro-ecological obstacles and internecine power struggles, and ultimately could not withstand the postwar attacks of white supremacist movement, Delta and Providence stand as models of how those trapped within withering hegemonies imagine a most just and free society and set out to do the daily labor of bringing it into being. Robert Hunt Ferguson is an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his publications include “Mothers Against Jesse in Congress: Grassroots Maternalism and Cultural Politics of the AIDS Crisis in North Carolina” (Journal of Southern History, Feb 2017). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Can we have sound media that is ecologically sound? Can we fine tune our media production and consumption habits to a greener key? How can an environmental perspective on sound media contribute to our understanding of how media culture is involved in the ecological crisis? These are just some of the questions Jacob Smith is trying to answer in his latest book, Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015). The book brings an ecological critique to the history of sound media technologies and contributes with an environmental perspective to the field of sound studies. It is more than a methodological and theoretical exploration. It is a reckoning with our media consumption practices in an age where speed and volume are taken for granted, and alternatives to the digital are disregarded with huge costs. Hartz Canary Training Record is the jingle used in the episode and was kindly provided by Jacob Smith. It was cut and edited for the purpose of this 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

What can we learn about African American life between the world wars if we center our attention on the parks and pleasuring grounds of the urban North? That is what historian Brian McCammack endeavors to find out in his new book, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago (Harvard University Press, 2017). McCammack’s study is the first book-length environmental history of black Chicago and the first sustained exploration of the how the 1.6 million black southerners who moved to northern cities between 1910 and 1940 thought about and interacted with the natural world. He follows black Chicagoans’ through both the greenspaces of the South Side and rural retreats across the Upper Midwest. He finds their experiences of nature were shaped by racial exclusion, intraracial class conflict, and paternalistic reform efforts. Many of their preferred forms of outdoor recreation blended southern traditions with new practices coded as modern. And they articulated their devotion to nature in terms often indistinguishable from white northerners, raising troubling questions about why postwar environmentalism ended up overwhelmingly white. Brian McCammack is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Lake Forest College in suburban Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Hurricanes, fires, a volcano eruption: disasters are political, as Christopher Church argues. His new book, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), elaborates on the particular politics of catastrophe in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Using an array of methods ranging from close reading of texts to GIS mapping to digital analysis of language, Church tells a compelling story of the relationships between citizenship, race, and natural disasters. The peculiar journey of these colonies as they became departments of France was shaped by responses to devastating events. This book conjured those events in vivid detail and opens up new ways to understand them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early European colonization of North America upside-down. In the last decades of the 16th and first decades of the 17th century, three empires—Spain, France and England—each sought to establish new colonial projects on the continent of North America. They had the misfortune to embark on these projects at the most severe point of a global climatic shift called the Little Ice Age, whose harsh winters, droughts and storms seemed to plague the unready Europeans at every turn. From Florida to Maine, North Carolina to New Mexico, climate and weather-related difficulties challenged European colonists in a multitude of ways, and White explains how even the nominally successful colony projects, like Jamestown, were lucky near-misses whose success was by no means inevitable. This is a totally new look at the early history of Europeans in North America, which holds significant lessons for coping with and thinking about our modern problems of anthropogenic climate change. Sam White is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. An expert on climate and environmental history in the early modern period, he is also the author of the acclaimed book The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-founder of the Climate History Network, a resource for historians and other professionals studying climate history and climate change. Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster. He also has his own historical podcast, Second Decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (Basic Books, 2016). Coyotes as a species predate humans in North America, and people have been, by turns, fascinated and horrified by coyotes for as long as the two creatures have coexisted. The coyote’s relationship with humans has been, as Flores describes it, a rollercoaster. Considered a semi-deity figure and trickster god among many Indigenous cultures across the American West, the first Europeans to encounter the coyote were puzzled by the animal. Lewis and Clark struggled to fit coyotes into existing categories; was it a jackal, or closer to a wolf? By the end of the nineteenth century however, Americans had largely decided the coyote was, above all, a nuisance and took up arms to eradicate the animal. The effects were both gruesome and surprising. While government-laid traps and poisons killed millions of coyotes, many thousands also migrated to cities as a means of escaping the attempted extermination. Today, coyotes can be found in every American state save Hawaii and have even crossed their final frontier into New York City. Coyote America traces the history of this nigh-mystical animal (an “American Avatar” in Flores’s estimation) and their long, tortured, relationship with humans. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity. How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the state? Find out in our conversation with Andrew S. Tompkins about his new book Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016). By weaving government documents and police records with activist newspapers and oral history interviews, Andrew explains how a transnational network of activists emerged around the issue of nuclear power despite social divides and diverse interests inside the movement. Andrew S. Tompkins is a historian specializing in modern Europe. He is a lecturer at University of Sheffield, a former Humbolt Fellow, and current research associate of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Ryan Fischer‘s book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) is a fascinating look at how a common animal—the cow—changed the landscapes, economies and peoples of both California and Hawai’i, and linked them together in unexpected ways, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the introduction of cattle into each of these societies by Europeans, not only did the cows bring ecological change, but they fundamentally altered how people lived, worked, earned their living and interacted with the world at large. As California’s and Hawai’i’s economies became increasingly focused on cattle, especially the hide and tallow industries in the 1820s and 30s, the changes both in the land and the people who worked it paved the way for broader colonial projects both by European countries and eventually the United States. Ryan Fischer is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He specializes in environmental history, and studied under environmental and Early American history heavyweights Louis Warren and Alan Taylor at University of California Davis, which has one of the best environmental history programs in the nation. Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

How does corporate misinformation and partisan skepticism effect what we know about climate change? Lawrence Torcello is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Philosophy. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, democratic theory, and climate justice. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tore C. Olsson‘s Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017) tells a remarkable and under-appreciated story. It’s about how, in the 1930s and 40s, a group of reformers in the US and in Mexico undertook projects to transform the rural worlds of their respective countries in the name of social justice and agrarian productivity. Olsson demonstrates how closely the histories of Mexico and the American South in particular paralleled one another, and how parallel histories yielded parallel problems, including mass rural poverty, landlessness, and economic deprivation. Whether in Mississippi or Michoacan, Tennessee or Tabasco, the rural masses saw few tangible benefits in the economic miracle heralded by boosters in Atlanta and Mexico City, Professor Olsson writes. And so in that decade historians sometimes like to call the long 1930s, Mexican and US reformers crossed the border again and again, to share models and ideas, and to undertake projects of rural revitalization through varying methods and with varying results. Olsson’s book recovers a world in which like-minded Mexicans and Americans worked together, toward what they hoped would be a more just world, in concert and in solidarity. Tore C. Olsson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Monica Black is Lindsay Young Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 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 Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia (Monash University Publishing, 2017), Rebecca Jones, a senior research fellow at Monash University, explores the natural and cultural dimensions of drought in southeastern Australia. Utilizing diaries from the 1890s through the 1950s, Jones investigates the range of responses farmers and graziers have developed to drought. 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 Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest. Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas C. Kawa‘s Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests (University of Texas Press, 2016) examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, Kawa highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control–a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. 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 new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explores how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to use tourism and landscape planning to reshape East Germans’ definition of their homeland. He also demonstrates the messy boundaries between state and society, in which East Germans refused to change patterns of pre-World War II nature activities such as hiking and camping; conservationists and the regime found common ground on concepts of landscape management; and environmentalism resulted in a fundamental break between society and the state. The People’s Landscape contributes to our understanding of East Germany’s environmental history as well as to our understanding of the nuances of the relationship between state and society under dictatorships. Scott Moranda is Associate Director of History at SUNY Cortland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies