New Books in Environmental Studies

The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the present that might bring into being a more just future.In Whose Ruins could easily be categorized as Environmental History or Native Studies. But Puglionesi forges a book that is more than either field could accomplish alone. The “power” of the book’s subtitle has a double meeting: political power and the energy sources of a capitalist economy (oil, hydropower, and nuclear energy).The book is organized into four sections, or “sites,” that visit four evocative land features: a hulking, conical earth mound in present-day West Virginia adjacent to a decommissioned state prison; wells dug into the ground in smalltown Pennsylvania; rocks that tell stories (they’re etched with petroglyphs) along the Susquehanna River with kin fragmented elsewhere; the Sonoran Desert rich with pottery, uranium, and physicists, both white and Native. In each of these sites, people with different political projects—some announced, some implicit—have generated multiple accounts of the landscapes and ideas of value.Within a context of shifting political power, white-settler stories about each site displaced empirical knowledge of Native labor, skill, presence, and endurance with harmful fables of white origins and of Native communities’ need for white “rescue.” Into the present day, the effect has been to justify white theft of Native land and deadly violence against tribal communities for the purposes of resource extraction. In the end, even the false white origin stories became a resource to commodify.Puglionesi is a writer of poetry, fiction, academic scholarship, and, now, In Whose Ruins, a mass-market trade publication. She holds a PhD in History of Medicine and is a lecturer in Medicine, Science and Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. On the page, Puglionesi has a friendly, funny, quiet presence—an affable Where’s Waldo that centers the relationships of historical actors (including spirits) and the work of scholars such as Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Eve Tuck.This conversation explores ways of living in good relation via writing; the status of truth; the relevance of singer-songwriter Prince for labor studies; and many other themes. It discusses the important book by Chadwick Allen, Earthworks Rising (Minnesota, 2022). In an unrecorded snippet, we also swap names of our favorite local indie bookstores. So check out Red Emma’s the next time you’re in Baltimore, MD (or on Bookshop.org) and Symposium, Riff Raff, and Paper Nautilus when your compass points to Providence, RI.Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the "affective infrastructures" emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire--crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era's immense environmental struggles. Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century (U Minnesota Press, 2022) reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Tonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river.And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations.But the lake is currently stressed by climate change, overfishing, and hydropower damming. Abby Seiff’s Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) tells the stories of those who live along the lake’s shores, and how they try to keep their lives and livelihoods going.In this interview, Abby and I talk about Tonlé Sap, how it’s changed in recent years–and what the lake’s communities tell us about what it means to be a climate refugee.Abby Seiff is a journalist who was based in Southeast Asia for nearly a decade, working as an editor at the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post and writing for publications such as Time, the Economist, Al Jazeera, and Pacific Standard, among others. She is now a freelance correspondent.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Troubling the Water. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others.Instead of thinking of the international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns ranging from US-China rivalry to climate change, and from nuclear proliferation to peacekeeping. A major contribution to international relations theory, this book promises to reshape our understanding of the forces driving change in world politics.Jeff D. Colgan is Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University and the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. He is also author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). 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 NBN Environmental Studies interview, dancer, performer, and literary scholar Dr. Taylor Eggan joins us to speak about his new book Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and Settler Colonial Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2022). A text best described as an intellectual bestiary using environmental philosophy, literary theory, settler colonial studies, decolonial theory, and speculative realism, Unsettling Nature addresses logics embedded with ecological homecoming narratives rooted in idealistic notions of getting back to nature. By applying the impressive catalog of critical theory combined with an array of unique literary artifacts, Eggan transports the reader from the American West to Southern Africa, exploring the complex dynamics of colonial homemaking throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Structured around six chapters and two excursus, Unsettling Nature identifies the root of logics of elimination and erasure within the coloniality of nature, informing contemporary ecological homecoming narratives. Concluding the text by evoking exo-phenomenology, Eggan illustrates how unsettling settler legacies can be performed through "sustained practices of reciprocity and acts of solidarity" to recognize and resolve the uncanny anxieties of alienation and belonging embedded in Western approaches to homemaking and being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world—from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments—social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people?Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology can help us understand how and why they do this challenging work. Tackling neoliberalism head-on, these communities are making big changes by crafting distributive and regenerative systems that depart from capitalist approaches. The vivid case studies presented range from activist water protectors to hemp farmers to renewable energy cooperatives led by Indigenous peoples and nations. Alongside these studies, Malin and Kallman present incisive critiques of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and neoliberalism, while demonstrating how sociology’s own disciplinary traditions have been complicit with those ideologies—and must expand beyond them.Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in a time of crises. 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 Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism."Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered “land reform” policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until U.S.-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974.The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale UP, 2022) provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.Jo Guldi is associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on the history of Britain, the British Empire, modern development policy, and property law. She is the author of Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State and (with David Armitage) The History Manifesto and lives in Richardson, Texas. Twitter. Website.Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life: toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted.As Lukas Ley shows, the residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure, ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this predicament through the temporal lens of a “meantime,” a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better future—a “chronic present.”Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it—and shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding.Lukas Ley is head of research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In 1997 sixty-two containers fell off the cargo ship Tokio Express after it was hit by a rogue wave off the coast of Cornwall, including one container filled with nearly five million pieces of Lego, much of it sea themed. In the months that followed, beachcombers started to find Lego washed up on beaches across the south west coast. Among the pieces they discovered were octopuses, sea grass, spear guns, life rafts, scuba tanks, cutlasses, flippers and dragons. The pieces are still washing up today. Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea (Unicorn, 2022) is a colourfully illustrated and engaging tale, for all ages, of the Lego pieces and the stories behind their continuing discovery by beachcombers and fishermen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies