New Books in Environmental Studies

What does climate change adaptation look like in Bangladesh? And what kind of gendered social landscape does climate change adaptation have to navigate in Bangladesh?Bangladesh is among the countries most at risk from the negative consequences, and often spoken of as ground zero of climate change. In recent years, more attention has been devoted to grappling with the question of how gender intersects with climate change and adaptation.In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Kathinka Fossum Evertsen to discuss these questions and more, as we focus on gender and climate change adaptation in Bangladesh.Kathinka Fossum Evertsen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institue for Social Research. Her research interests include questions of migration, gender, and climate change, as well as the politics that shape how these issues are understood and how they intersect.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even need to reduce incoming solar radiation in order to lower unacceptably high temperatures. Such unproven and potentially risky climate interventions raise mind-blowing questions of governance and ethics.Wake Smith's book Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers readers an accessible and authoritative introduction to both the hopes and hazards of some of humanity's most controversial technologies, which may nevertheless provide the key to saving our world.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Robert Charette, engineer, consultant, and contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum magazine, talks about his twelve-part series, “The Electric Vehicle Transition Explained,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The series takes a systems perspective on electric vehicles, and talks about all of the potential barriers – from a lack of minerals, to stressing out the electricity grid, to being short on consumers or workers – that face EVs, which are too often cast as a climate change cure-all. Charette and Vinsel also talk about the kinds of thinking that are necessary if we are to have realistic policies around EVs.Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms.Mushroom (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Sara Rich explores the ordinary object of mushroom, one whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot.Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical, ecological, and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: that mushrooms are to be regarded with a reverence deserving of only the most powerful entities: those who create and destroy, and thrive on both.Dr. Sara Rich has also been interviewed on the New Books Network about her previous book Shipwreck Hauntography, see that episode here.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the American West. University of Idaho professor emeritus of history Adam Sowards explains why in his new book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). Sowards explains the origins of the concept of public land and how the idea has come into conflict with American's adoration for private property, as well as how different stakeholders have come into conflict over the proper use of resources on these lands. From ranching and timber cutting to tourism and wilderness, the US government has attempted to make public lands fulfill several different roles, and in doing so have turned them into something of a political football over the course of the twentieth century. But, as Sowards argues, by being such a malleable, egalitarian, and controversial project, they have come to represent the hope and inconsistencies within American democracy itself.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the American West. University of Idaho professor emeritus of history Adam Sowards explains why in his new book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). Sowards explains the origins of the concept of public land and how the idea has come into conflict with American's adoration for private property, as well as how different stakeholders have come into conflict over the proper use of resources on these lands. From ranching and timber cutting to tourism and wilderness, the US government has attempted to make public lands fulfill several different roles, and in doing so have turned them into something of a political football over the course of the twentieth century. But, as Sowards argues, by being such a malleable, egalitarian, and controversial project, they have come to represent the hope and inconsistencies within American democracy itself.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Feeling bad about the environment? You should. Artist Alexis Rockman talks about his art, the potential for real change, and his ongoing relationship with the American Museum of Natural History.Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePodAlexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson's book Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Routledge, 2020) brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal.The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific islands, experiences of life-long defenders of the land and forests in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and eastern Canada, and efforts to halt the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure from North America to South Africa. They offer various perspectives on how a just transition toward a fossil-free economy can take shape, as they share efforts to protect water resources, better feed their communities, and implement new approaches to urban policy and energy democracy.Climate Justice and Community Renewal uniquely highlights the accounts of people who are directly engaged in local climate struggles and community renewal efforts, including on-the-ground land defenders, community organizers, leaders of international campaigns, agroecologists, activist-scholars, and many others. It will appeal to students, researchers, activists, and all who appreciate the need for a truly justice-centered response to escalating climate disruptions.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with intensive theoretical interrogations, Ezra Rashkow's book The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020 (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a global intellectual history of efforts to ‘protect’ indigenous peoples and their cultures, usually from above. It also offers a critique of the activist impulse to cry ‘Save the tigers!’ and ‘Save the tribes!’ together in the same breath. It is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India but rather a history of discourses—including Adivasis’ own—about what is perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival. Examining views of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss in western and central India—particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing not only conservation and development-induced displacement but also dehumanizing animal analogies comparing endangered tigers and tribes—the book problematizes the long history of human endangerment and extinction discourse. In doing so, it shows that fears of tribal extinction actually predated scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. Only by confronting this history can we begin to decolonize this discourse.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English and Chinese audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies