New Books in Environmental Studies

In Nature's Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis (University of Regina Press, 2020), Paul Huebener argues that "the environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time."From the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, to the rapid dying of coral reefs, to the quickening pace of extreme weather events, the patterns and timekeeping of the natural world are falling apart. We have broken nature's clocks. Lying hidden at the root of this problem are the cultural narratives that shape our actions and horizons of thought, but as Paul Huebener shows, we can bring about change by developing a critical literacy of time. Moving from circadian rhythms and the revival of ancient frozen bacteria to camping advertisements and the politics of oil pipelines, Nature's Broken Clocks turns to works of fiction and poetry, examining how cultural narratives of time are connected to the problems of ecological collapse and what we might do to fix them.Nicholas Pritchard is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge interested in time and the sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What would it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? In recent years, cities have stepped up efforts to address climate and sustainability crises. But progress has not been fast enough or gone deep enough. If communities are to thrive in the future, we need to quickly imagine and implement an entirely new approach to urban development: one that is centered on equity and rethinks social, political, and economic systems as well as urban designs. With attention to this need for structural change, Reimagining Sustainable Cities advocates for a community-informed model of racially, economically, and socially just cities and regions. The book aims to rethink urban sustainability for a new era.In Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities (U California Press, 2021), Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan ask big-picture questions of interest to readers worldwide: How do we get to carbon neutrality? How do we adapt to a climate-changed world? How can we create affordable, inclusive, and equitable cities? While many books dwell on the analysis of problems, Reimagining Sustainable Cities prioritizes solutions-oriented thinking--surveying historical trends, providing examples of constructive action worldwide, and outlining alternative problem-solving strategies. Wheeler and Rosan use a social ecology lens and draw perspectives from multiple disciplines. Positive, readable, and constructive in tone, Reimagining Sustainable Cities identifies actions ranging from urban design to institutional restructuring that can bring about fundamental change and prepare us for the challenges ahead.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In today’s podcast, Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim explains how understanding harmonics of the earth provides a forward-thinking methodology to confront the challenges presented by the massive changes in the climate. In her book Song of the Earth: Understanding Geology and Why it Matters (Oxford University Press, 2021), Ervin-Blankenheim documents the history of geology, a Western epistemological exploit, properly contextualizing how geologists know what they know. Song of the Earth is framed the around three primary tenants: geologic time, plate tectonics and evolution. Through her magnificent use of brevity and clarity, the narrative, supported by the three tenants, documents the “biography of the Earth” consisting of a multiplicity of interactions occurring between geosphere-human, hydrosphere-human, biosphere-human spanning millions of years. Ervin-Blankenheim impresses throughout her narrative that life today represents only .1% of life that has existed throughout the history of the planet, yet we cannot understand the changes such as extinction without recognizing how the earth impacts life and how life impacts the earth. Without mindful recognition about the interconnectivity of ecosystem, the mechanics of extinction and survival will continue to remain opaque. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture (U California Press, 2021), Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology and the economy, Romero provides an intriguing reconceptualization of pesticides that forces readers to rethink assumptions about food, industry, and the relationship between human and nonhuman environments.Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project on ecology and agriculture in post-independence Lebanon at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. 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 Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism & Barbarism (Indigo Press, 2022), Richard Seymour, one of the UK's leading left-wing writers, gives an account of his 'ecological awakening'. A search for transcendence, beyond the illusory eternal present. These essays chronicle the kindling of ecological consciousness in a confessed ignoramus. They track the first enchantment of the author, his striving to comprehend the coming catastrophe, and his attempt to formulate a new global sensibility in which we value anew what unconditionally matters.Nicholas Pritchard is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge interested in time and the sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. In An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021), Dr. Kate Mulry examines ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, showing how agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited.In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. This book investigates how Restoration officials endeavoured to recover control and counteract any lingering questions about the king’s rightful authority after this long exile by reforming and cultivating environments on both sides of the Atlantic.An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.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

The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers (Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Pandemic, climate change, or war: our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival.In The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival (Basic Books, 2021), archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakdowns are actually less about cataclysmic destruction than they are about long processes of change. In short: it's what happens after the initial uproar that matters. Some people abandon their homes and neighbors; others band together to start anew. As we anticipate our own fate, Begley tells us that it was communities, not lone heroes, who survived past apocalypses--and who will survive the next.Fusing archaeology, survivalism, and social criticism, The Next Apocalypse is an essential read for anxious times.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital.Sorrel can take no more and she persuades her mother, Bibi, that they should flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior.  Daylight Come (Peepal Tree Press, 2020) is a great story, a call to action, and a meditation on love and lost beauty. Diana McCauley has been an environmental activist for many years. Here, she uses her storytelling powers to produce a world that is both unrecognizable and familiar. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. @alebronfWebsite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Different chapters examine how: Buddhist ontology avoids anthropocentrism, fengshui (Chinese geomancy) can help protect the landscape from economic development, popular religion organizes tree-planting, ancient dream interpretation practices avoided constructing the possessive individual subjectivity of modern consumerism, Buddhist rituals and ethics promoted compassion for animals and modern recycling, Confucian ancestor rituals and tombs have deterred industrial expansion, and also how Daoism’s potential role to deter desertification in northern China was stymied by state operations in contemporary China.A significant advance in the field of Chinese environmental anthropology, the outstanding scholars in this volume provide a unique and much needed contribution to the scholarship on China and the environment.Mayfair Yang is professor of religious and East Asian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored two monographs: Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China (American Ethnological Society Prize) and Re-enchanting Modernity in China: Ritual Economy and Religious Civil Society in Wenzhou) and has edited two books: Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation and Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China.Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies