New Books in Environmental Studies

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other related questions, discussing both why and how the Chinese state has today managed to make itself so forcefully present so far from the country's heartlands.Kinzley's fascinating new resource-centric perspective on the state incorporation of Xinjiang retrains our eyes on the material and physical dimensions to politics, showing how treasured items from oil to tungsten have attained a totemic political role as “a critical but largely overlooked factor in shaping the region’s connections to China, regional neighbours and indeed the world” (p.7). Deftly handling its multilingual and multi-perspectival scholarship, 'Natural Resources and the New Frontier' accounts for how successive ‘layers’ left by state and non-state actors - Chinese and Russian as well as British - have institutionalised the presence of outside actors in Xinjiang over time. These dynamics, Kinzley shows, also underlie much of the discord evident between Han Chinese immigrants and indigenous Turkic groups in this troubled region today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

None of the climate news that we’re getting is good right now, especially now that a number of governments are reversing or failing to meet commitments they made as part of the Paris Climate Accord. One of the challenges facing human societies and the planet is the issue of aridification. As freshwater is depleted and unsustainable agricultural practices place more stress on soil than can be supported, an increasing amount of land is being lost to erosion, a process that will only become worsen as the planet heats up in the coming decades. Despite plentiful information and awareness, most of the solutions that have been offered up have failed to meaningfully stop the damage being done to the planet.In Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2018), Hannah Holleman  looks at the Dust Bowl as one of the first manmade global environmental catastrophes. She begins by noting its manmade dimensions and the underlying forces that helped to create it as well as similar catastrophes across the globe. The underlying forces of imperialism and white supremacy fed the seizure of land from indigenous populations everywhere. White policymakers were aware of the environmental damage that was being wrought, but were unwilling to revise their behavior in a way that would undermine property or profit, which shaped both the New Deal and contemporary responses to climate change such as the Paris Climate Accord. To avoid further catastrophe, people all over the world must seek more radical solutions."The Dust Bowl continues to haunt, inspire, and teach us — but as this book shows, we have missed its most profound and far-reaching implications. Unearthing a wealth of new sources, and pulling together disparate analytical threads, Holleman tells a story of global ecological crisis — then and now — rooted in global systems of domination and extraction. A tour de force of engaged scholarship from an exhilarating new voice."—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes EverythingZeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming.  Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse.  With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for sustainability.  Instead, they propose an ethos of co-existence that is receptive to how different societies and cultures interpret catastrophe.  A pluralistic approach to the Anthropocene, they suggest, may allow us to achieve environmental sustainability while honoring human dignity and justice.Amanda Lynch is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.Siri Veland is Senior Researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying website for educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state. James Morton Turner is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. His first book was the award-winning The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Washington Press, 2012). Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. His previous books includes Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013), Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wing, 2005), and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land. Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kate Parker Horigan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University, and a co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore. In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative (University of Mississippi Press, 2018), she explores some of the numerous narratives generated by Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects on residents of New Orleans in 2005. Her investigation includes personal narratives of those directly affected by the hurricane and which were recorded as part of the “Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston” project (SKRH).  In SKRH – which was set up by folklorists Carl Lindahl and Pat Jasper – survivors were given the training and other resources to interview one another about their experience of the events (see this site for more information).  Horigan notes that many of the narratives collected by SKRH counter widespread and pernicious claims which circulated via the media and through other channels during and after the disaster, including allegations that victims threatened those involved in the rescue effort. Horigan also interrogates survivor narratives as they are re-presented within more mainstream works inspired by the event, including Dave Egger’s Zeitoun; A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, a graphic novel by Josh Neufeld; and the documentary film, Trouble the Water. She argues that such re-presentations: “propagate dangerously limited and stereotypical representations, which in turn inform responses to disasters such as Katrina.  They also allow audiences to feel sympathy for survivors, without feeling complicit in their conditions of suffering or compelled to act” (5). Horigan suggests that an alternative and more ethical route in re-presenting narratives is to do so in such a way that the original narrators are able to negotiate the ways in which their stories are reproduced.  In other words: When trauma becomes public, as the insatiable appetite for disaster stories demands that it must, the texts that most ethically adapt personal narratives are those that include the survivors’ own crucial engagement with the processes of narrative production” (5). Ultimately, Horigan argues that a “better grasp on the processes of narration and memory is critical for improved disaster response because stories that are widely shared about disaster determine how communities recover” (5). 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a book about change. The Jola, a people living in Guinea-Bissau, have long cultivated rice and formed their social identity around its growth, but recent changes in climate, economic, political and social circumstances have rendered this a precarious existence. As a result, individuals from the village where Prof. Joanna Davidson has spent years conducting in-depth ethnographic fieldwork have been forced to integrate not just the outside world, but changes in their own society. How these changes have affected them and how they have dealt with them, along with what this means in terms of our thinking about development theory and social change in general, form the major theme of this excellently researched book that tells us about the history of rice in Africa, West Africa generally and about a village in particular. We’ll talk to her about how she found the village where she did her work, how she became interested in the topic, what the Jola as a people are like, the changes they are experiencing as well as what we might learn about the Jola and even ourselves. Jeffrey Bristol is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Boston University and a JD candidate at the University of Michigan Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2018), Connie Chiang reveals hidden layers of the experiences of Japanese Americans interned by their government during the 1940s. Chiang, a professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College, argues that the non-human environment mediated every facet of the detainees lives from their labor to their recreation to the feelings of isolation and despondency they felt. Many of the thousands forcibly removed to incarceration camps had moved from the verdant Pacific coast to the stark deserts and mountains of the interior West. This movement from one climate to another profoundly influenced the meaning and experience of incarceration and provoked emotions ranging from sadness and betrayal to resilience and even occasional joy. Chiang’s book is an excellent reminder of environmental history’s power to reveal new stories about old histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Austin, Texas has a reputation as a vibrant, youthful capital city buoyed economically and culturally by the University of Texas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Andrew M. Busch argues that this identity was consciously constructed over the course of the twentieth century and came at a price. Busch, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Coastal Carolina University, uses a bevy of promotional material and other municipal records to credibly argue that Austin’s image as a city of “industry without smokestacks” appealed to white-collar knowledge workers after World War II was a racially coded message that shaped the city’s racial geography. Environmental racism revolving around water rights, noise pollution, gasoline farms, and segregated public space all shaped Austin’s history and continue to do so up to today. City in a Garden is a wonderfully interdisciplinary history that critiques colorblind sustainability and provides an alternate and just vision for the new urbanism of the early twenty-first century. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies