New Books in Environmental Studies

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries, dreams prophetic and dreams instrumental. In this brilliant new ethnography of a village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, those dreams are woven into the lives and deaths of a bookful of selves (both human and non-human) to help readers reconsider what it means to be a thinking, living being and why it matters to anthropology, science studies, and beyond. In creating this “anthropology beyond the human,” Kohn calls into question our tendency to conflate representation with language, rethinking the relationship between human language and other forms of representation that humans share with other beings. Here, human lives are both emergent from and contiguous with a wider semiotic community of were-jaguars and sphinxes, barking dogs and falling pigs, men and women alive and dead, walking stick insects and tanagers, spirit masters and rubber trees. It is a transformative, inspiring, and critically meticulous book that deserves a wide readership and rewards close reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines”  — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions.” Every generation regards its own environment as natural and healthy, failing to recognize that the status quo is but a pale imitation of what previous generations enjoyed. The term was coined by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist, and it’s most often applied to the collapse of global fisheries. Our oceans are plundered, but our lack of historical context prevents us from noticing. John Waldman is determined to wake us up to what we’ve lost. Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College, is the author of Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations (Lyons Press, 2013), a book that not only elucidates the predicament of plummeting fisheries, but also provides a roadmap for escaping it. Waldman’s focus is diadromous fish — the migratory species, like salmon, sturgeon, eels, and shad, that once ran in great pulses up and down every East Coast river, providing sustenance for ecosystems and human communities. Centuries of dam construction, overfishing, and other deleterious forces have reduced these once-spectacular migrations to just a fraction of their historic abundance; yet thanks to our shifting baselines, we seem scarcely to have noticed, which only makes the problem worse. Waldman calls this phenomenon — in which species disappear from people’s awareness and so lose their advocates  — “eco-social anomie.” Fortunately, the news for migratory fish is not all catastrophic. Waldman documents a number of heartening restoration efforts, especially dam removals, that are helping some species rebound, and proving that diadromous fish still have constituents. While the Atlantic Coast’s fish runs may never return to their former glory, there’s still time to restore their relevance to ecosystems and human lives. “Poor shad!” wrote Henry David Thoreau, to whom Waldman’s book is dedicated. “Where is thy redress?” Running Silver certainly isn’t complete redress for our troubled rivers, but it offers a guide to making amends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? In Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2013), Michael J. Hathaway explores these questions in a rich study of Yunnan’s engagement with environmentalism and the World Wildlife Fund. As celebrated in the book’s title, Hathaway introduces the notion of changing “environmental winds” as a tool for understanding the transformative power of social formations in Yunnan and beyond. The narrative emphasizes the agency of many different kinds of actors in the co-creation of environmentalism in Yunnan, from humans to elephants, and pays special attention to the importance of Chinese intellectuals and local Yunnan people in incorporating China into a global conservation circuit. The story ranges from the global 1960s, touching on China’s role in the anticolonial movement in Africa and feminist movement beyond, through the establishment of the first transnational conservation efforts in Yunnan in the 1980s, and into the shaping of global environmental efforts by an indigenous rights movement in the 1990s. It is a fascinating story that will be of interest to both Chinese and environmental studies. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public figures with wildly different political orientations. Throughout his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (University of Washington Press, 2013), Brian Allen Drake analyzes the complex relationship between modern conservatism and postwar environmentalism. Through a wide-ranging narrative that fuses together elements of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Drake illuminates the tense nature of a movement that sought to balance an aversion to centralized government power with a desire to protect America’s natural landscape. Brian Allen Drake is a lecturer in the University of Georgia History Department. His previous work has appeared in Environmental History, the Great Plains Quarterly, and the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and technology in the 1960s. Based on an archive that spans texts, oral histories, and interviews with some of its major figures, The Gaia Hypothesis charts the development of the idea of the earth as a self-regulating organism. Ruse explores the development of the idea by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, and analyzes the nature and bases of the reactions to Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas from within different scientific and public communities. All of this is contextualized in a deep history of the different world concepts and philosophies of nature that informed the heated debate over Gaia, considering the idea of the earth as organism and nature as a self-regulating system in a range of texts that include Plato’s Timaeus, the work of German idealists, and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, among many others. (The attentive reader will also note a surprising connection between Gaia and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.) The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia and its histories. It is also a wonderfully lively and readable narrative. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that carbon emissions produce, like big houses, cool cars, and tasty food imported from far-away places. We don’t want to do that. So what’s a global citizen to do? One idea is to take control of the environment, engineering-wise. Why cut back when we can simply manage the carbon-cycle a bit like we manage the climate in hothouses? In Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering(Yale UP, 2013), Clive Hamilton surveys the proposals big-thinking engineers have dreamed up to control the carbon-cycle on a truly massive scale. Some are wacky, others less so, but all are, well, very bold. Does any of it make sense? Can any of it be done? Hamilton investigates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the late 19th century. Engineered irrigation appealed to both private individuals and the state as a way of mediating California’s competing interests, creating prosperity and fulfilling an American agrarian ideal. Ideas about irrigation, settlement and development circulated the world and Teisch shows how California’s experts circulated to Australia, South Africa and Palestine, frequently returning with new knowledge then applied to California. Despite their aspirations, few of California’s engineers were as successful as they wished but they had a lot to contend with. Teisch’s engineers inserted themselves into the tumultuous social transformations of the turn of the twentieth century, attempting to shape capitalism, all levels of government and even the developing nation state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

I used to hike in and around Yosemite National Park. To me (and I imagine thousands of other visitors), Yosemite was the embodiment of “nature,” something grand, pristine, and, well “natural.” Of course there is a sense in which that is true: Yosemite was not made by the hand of man. But in another sense that understanding is false, as Jen Huntley explains in The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origins of America’s Most Popular National Park (UP of Kansas, 2011). Yosemite the Place may be “natural,” but Yosemite the Park is not. It was made by a set of people with a variety of interests, some familiar to us (e.g., making money) and others not (e.g., purifying the nation). Suffice it to say that the makers of Yosemite the Park were not exactly “environmentalists” as we understand them. They were people of their own time, and with that time’s ideas and values. Jen does a terrific job of exploring them (and the fascinating James Hutchings in particular), what they thought, what they wanted to do, and what they did to create Yosemite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies