New Books in Environmental Studies

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainage would improve the value of the lands in the region, the locals resisted such efforts to disrupt their ways of life through a variety of legal and extralegal means. In response the crown moved from efforts to develop consensus for the plans to asserting royal authority in environmental management in order to start the projects, beginning by the 1620s the first of a series of efforts that over the course of the next half-century drained many of the fens in the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility, once America’s largest producer of plutonium for atomic weapons, including the Nagasaki bomb. The U.S. government spends around $2 billion a year on cleanup efforts at Hanford, which have been the sole focus at the site since its reactors were shut down at the end of the Cold War. Melvin R. Adams was one of the first environmental engineers hired at Hanford as part of a small team focused on environmental issues. Beginning in 1979, his 24-year career at Hanford progressed alongside increasing government investment in more responsible management of nuclear waste and its disposal. In Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Washington State University Press, 2016) Adams recounts engineering efforts to mitigate and control radioactive contamination and offers amusing anecdotes of the characters tasked with cleaning up the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. He also captures the paradox of Hanford, an artifact of the atomic age surrounded (and sometimes invaded by) wild terrain, natural beauty, and flourishing biodiversity. Atomic Geography offers personal and poetic insight into a complex, contested landscape. 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 humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relationship with the other. In The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Susanna Forrest looks at the various roles horses have played in the development of human civilization and how, in turn, these roles have shaped and determined the lives of horses. Beginning with the evolutionary journey of horses, she describes how the widespread impact of their domestication has virtually eliminated truly wild horses from existence. This domestication was driven by the enormous utility of horses for humans, who used them as a source of energy, as a means of transportation, as tools of war, and as food. In the process they became a unit of measure, a source of wealth, and a symbol for writers and artists of aspects of humanity itself. As Forrest demonstrates through her own investigative travels, the roles of humans and horses in each others’ lives remains visible today, from American farms to Chinese polo clubs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields all reshaped the American landscape and people. In the gulf between growing wealth and the ills of an urbanizing nation, the spirit of Progressivism emerged. Promising a return to democracy and a check on concentrated wealth, Progressives confronted this changing relationship to the environment–not only in the countryside but also in dense industrial cities and leafy suburbs. Drawing on extensive work in urban history and Progressive politics, Benjamin Heber Johnson’s Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (Yale University Press, 2017) weaves together environmental history, material culture, and politics to reveal the successes and failures of the conservation movement and its lasting legacy. By following the efforts of a broad range of people and groups–women’s clubs, labor advocates, architects, and politicians–Escaping the Dark, Gray City shows how conservation embodied the ideals of Progressivism, ultimately becoming one of its most important legacies. Benjamin Heber Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago, and author of Revolution in Texas and Bordertown. He lives in Chicago. Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). You can find her at http://www.loriaflores.com or hanging around Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country who, like her parents, wanted to return to the land. Her subjects are Judy and Larry (her parents), the place they moved to, and the community they helped found. One of many interesting discoveries in this book is the fact that the back to the land movement took place around the country, within the same demographic, and during the same two-to three-year period in the 1970s. The causes? One was the growing concern with pollution described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Another, which deserves fuller examination, is the apocalyptic mood stemming from the atomic threat of the 1960s. Baby boomers remember, with no small amount of incredulity, schoolroom bomb practice (“How would going under my desk protect me?”). The answers that adults had were not reassuring, or they were naive. The younger generation felt imperiled, and adults were responsible. Cities weren’t safe either. By returning to the land, a person could face an uncertain future in a community of like-minded people, in home they had built themselves and that expressed their values. So move this group did, but not all to become hippies. Some formed communes that rejected middle class baggage (monogamy, capitalism, child rearing). Others had advanced degrees, found professional work, and considered themselves “square.” Live in a rural setting and you adopt rural culture: community barn raising (even if it is a geodesic dome), self-generated work (Christmas trees farms, organic produce), shared resources. The author shows that the effects of these communities since the 1970s have permeated throughout American culture. A new kind of fresh food market like Whole Foods and community food co-ops got their starts in such settings. So did recycling (a mainstay of farming culture). Whatever the circumstances that brought them into being, the results have reached far beyond their boundaries and continue to expand our lives. Kate Daloz’s essays have been published in periodicals such as American Scholar. She is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and a consultant at the College Writing Center, Baruch College, CUNY.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford University Press, 2017) traces the history of Qing nature and its environments and institutions by focusing on three case studies from the archival record: the destruction of Manchurian pearl mussels, the rush for wild mushrooms in Mongolia, and the collapse of fur-bearing animal populations in the borderlands with Russia. This is a fascinating story for readers interested in environmental history and the Qing empire alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a fascinating history of biotechnology that documents the interplay between genetic research and agricultural production; genetic engineering avant la lettre, one is tempted to say, although botanist A. F. Blakeslee, who figures prominently in the narrative, made a failed attempt to promote the designation “genetics engineer” to describe his work. Through the lens of three different technologies–x-rays, the chemical colchicine, and atomic radiation–Curry shows how chromosomes and genetic mutations became sites of speculation for industrial agriculture and of experimentation for amateur plant breeders. She deftly restores the experimental station, the marketplace, and the garden to their proper place as sites of knowledge production, showing that landscape and lab were perhaps never so separable as our modern conceit might make them appear. This is part one of a series of new work on twentieth-century biotechnology–look out for further interviews featuring some great new work published by the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones. An environmental activist turned academic philosopher, Benjamin Hale argues against this dominant consequentialist approach towards environmentalism in favor of a Kantian view. In The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (MIT Press, 2016), Hale, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, argues that we ought to act in environmentally friendly ways because it is the right thing to do. On his view, environmentally friendly action is motivated by reflecting on our reasons for acting, guided by a concern that our actions be acceptable to a wide range of parties. In this accessible discussion intended for a wide audience, Hale provides a fresh philosophical grounding for thinking about human action and inaction regarding the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. What happens to the basic services of government after democratic institutions take hold? Specifically, when do elected officials relinquish the clientelistic approach to the provision of water services? In Water & Politics, Herrera shows that middle-class and business interests play an important role in generating pressure for public service reforms. Based on extensive field research and combining process tracing with a subnational comparative analysis of eight Mexican cities, Water & Politics constructs a framework for understanding the construction of universal service provision in these weak institutional settings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, and plastic pollution, as well as the epistemologies that have shaped our understanding of these crises. Simultaneously, this series of essays also explores the intimacies and entanglements of human and non-human subjectivities in the Anthropocene, arguing for a new materialist engagement with the world. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, Alaimo’s examples and writing are often playful. This not only echoes the complexity and occasional contradictions of environmental politics but also makes Exposed a very enjoyable read. Drawing on examples from film, fiction, poetry, scientific writing, art, and activism, Alaimo considers the role pleasure has played and could play in various environmentalisms and environmental engagements. Though it bridges and contributes to scholarly work in the fields of environmental studies, feminism, materialism, and posthumanism, this book is much more than a theoretical exploration; it calls on us to rethink what it means to be human and act accordingly. Alaimo demonstrates interconnections between queer animals, naked protesters, melting glaciers, and interested scholars while providing thoughtful guidance on how to understand and respond to the environmental predicaments to which we are all, to varying degrees, exposed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies