New Books in Environmental Studies

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (New Press, 2021) tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire.Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An award-winning author and filmmaker, his recent films and books include The Land Beneath Our Feet and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. He lives near Madison, Wisconsin. 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

Environmental sustainability policy has failed due to focusing on symptoms rather than the root cause problems. Through significant research and a detailed roadmap for how to achieve sustainability by 2050, Buffington provides a realistic, game changing path forward that is both good for the environment and the economy. Dr. Jack Buffington received a Ph.D. in Supply Chain Management from the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden, and a Post-Doctorate at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and now he is currently the Program Director/Professor for the Supply Chain Management program and the Denver Transportation Institute at the University of Denver. Jack has published over twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and seven books before this one. Jack’s current research efforts are focused on Africa, which he believes is the epicenter of where environmental innovation must be fostered. And he is also Sustainability Director at First Key Consulting, a global brewing consulting firm. Jack is collaborating with innovators in supply chain, sustainability, and healthcare across the planet. Before these roles, Jack was responsible for supply chain logistics for MillerCoors Brewing Company, the second-largest beer company in the U.S. and the fourth-largest worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As global change escalates, we are already starting to experience damaging tipping points in the social, ecological and climate systems that we depend upon - and much worse is to come. These shocks tell us we have left it too late for incremental change to save us: we need to change course fast to avoid the worst, yet we are acting far too slowly. Our supposed leaders appear paralysed by the complexity of the situation or, worse still, determined to maintain the status quo. This is leading to increasing despair, especially among young people. At the same time, hopeful signs of change are also growing fast. The climate movement, the spread of electric vehicles, and the rise of renewable energy are all examples of change accelerating in the right direction. They have all passed tipping points where their uptake becomes self-propelling, taking the status quo by surprise - and they are spreading worldwide. To get ourselves out of trouble in time, we need more of these positive tipping points towards global sustainability, which eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, reverse the destruction of nature, and promote social justice. Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis (Oxford UP, 2025) identifies the positive tipping points that can help us avoid the worst from damaging tipping points. It takes the reader on a journey through understanding how tipping points happen, showing how tipping points have transformed human societies in the past, and facing up to the profound risks that climate tipping points pose to us all now. Then, it offers hope and empowerment in a series of uplifting examples of social and technological changes that started small but are already spreading rapidly to transform our societies to a more sustainable state. It identifies the positive tipping points that are still needed, the forces that are opposing them, and the actions that can trigger them, showing how we can all play a part in triggering positive tipping points that accelerate us out of the climate crisis. Professor Tim Lenton OBE is Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter, where he founded the Global Systems Institute. His research focuses on understanding how life has transformed the Earth system over the past 4 billion years, and how humans are transforming it now. He uses computer models to simulate the climate and biogeochemical cycles. Tim is renowned for his work in identifying climate tipping points, which informed the setting of the 'well below 2°C' climate target. He is passionate about the opportunities for positive tipping points in human activities to accelerate action towards global sustainability. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (MIT Press, 2024), Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore.Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic new world city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites, from the futuristic, authoritarian Supertree Grove, positioned as a technologically sustainable solution to a velocity-charged and singular urban transportation system, to highly protected nature reserves and to the cemeteries, where graves and memories continue to be exhumed and erased to make way for development. Wang also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, Wang ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

­A Glimpse of Ogoni Women’s Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2025) with Mariam Olugbodi “Ogoni Women’s Activism” is a democratic feminist movement, and a nonviolent struggle against oil spills and environmental destruction in the Niger-Delta Nigeria in the 90s. The Federation of Ogoni Women Activists (FOWA) emerges to charge forward the course of sovereignty for both humans and the Niger-Delta ecosystem. The nonviolent resistance of the Ogoni Women through prayer meetings, fasting, and singing for community mobilisation epitomises a "love in action" (Dube, 2025) strategy to identity negotiation in the face of dehumanisation. The book, Ogoni Women’s Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice, is a voyage into the history of the Ogoni tribes of the Niger-Delta, their lives, their ordeals of racism in their home nation with highlights of experiences of African immigrant women, the racialised refugees abroad, who fled from their home nation to seek sovereignty. The book builds on contemporary frameworks and adopts interdisciplinary approaches to unveil the outstanding revolutionary efforts of the Ogoni women in the Niger-Delta. Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is assessesible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ (22) Olugbodi Mariam | LinkedIn, Mariam Olugbodi (0000-0001-5027-6644) - ORCID and User:Margob28 - Meta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.KSR, Stan to his friends, brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.” Mentioned in this episode: Pact for the FutureCOP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of CrowdsParis AgreementDon’t Look UpTobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely VoiceMary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) Listen and Read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA (Syracuse University Press, 2021). This book masterfully bridges the gap between academic research and real-world policy implications. Hear from the author himself as he reflects on the historical roots of disaster policy, the political forces that shape emergency response, and the enduring implications for governance today. Timothy W. Kneeland is a Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at Nazareth University. He writes on American politics and disaster policy, American science, and psychiatry. ABOUT THE BOOK: On Friday, January 28, 1977, it began to snow in Buffalo. The second largest city in New York State, located directly in line with the Great Lakes’ snowbelt, was no stranger to this kind of winter weather. With their city averaging ninety-four inches of snow per year, the citizens of Buffalo knew how to survive a snowstorm. But the blizzard that engulfed the city for the next four days was about to make history. Between the subzero wind chill and whiteout conditions, hundreds of people were trapped when the snow began to fall. Twenty- to thirty-foot-high snow drifts isolated residents in their offices and homes, and even in their cars on the highway. With a dependency on rubber-tire vehicles, which lost all traction in the heavily blanketed urban streets, they were cut off from food, fuel, and even electricity. This one unexpected snow disaster stranded tens of thousands of people, froze public utilities and transportation, and cost Buffalo hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses and property damages. The destruction wrought by this snowstorm, like the destruction brought on by other natural disasters, was from a combination of weather-related hazards and the public policies meant to mitigate them. Buffalo’s 1977 blizzard, the first snowstorm to be declared a disaster in US history, came after a century of automobility, suburbanization, and snow removal guidelines like the bare-pavement policy. Kneeland offers a compelling examination of whether the 1977 storm was an anomaly or the inevitable outcome of years of city planning. From the local to the state and federal levels, Kneeland discusses governmental response and disaster relief, showing how this regional event had national implications for environmental policy and how its effects have resounded through the complexities of disaster politics long after the snow fell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens have on communities after disasters and the efforts of well-intended individuals envisioning alternative futures in the form of urban farming. Drawing on repeated interviews with residents who began cultivation projects in New Orleans between 2005 and 2015, Kato explains how good intentions and grit were not enough to implement or sustain urban gardeners’ visions for the post-disaster city’s future. Coining the term “prefigurative urbanism,” Kato illustrates how individuals tried to realize alternative ways of living and working in the city through pragmatism and innovation. Gardens of Hope asks key questions about what inspires and enables individuals to pursue prefigurative urbanism and about the potential and limitations of this form of civic engagement to bring about short- and long-term changes in cities undergoing transformation, from gentrification, post-pandemic recovery, to climate change. Yuki Kato is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University. She is an urban sociologist whose research interests intersect the subfields of social stratification, food and environment justice, culture and consumption, and symbolic interaction. She is the co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (NYU Press, 2020). Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In A Reverence for Rivers: Imagining an Ethic for Running Waters (OSU Press, 2025), Kurt Fausch draws on his experience as a stream ecologist, his interest in Indigenous cultures, and a thoughtful consideration of environmental ethics to explore human values surrounding freshwater ecosystems. Focusing on seven rivers across the globe—from the Salmon River in Oregon to the Sarufutsu River in Japan—he examines the growing ethical dilemmas threatening our rivers, including increasing demands for water, habitat fragmentation, overfishing, and deepening climate change. How do we decide which rivers deserve legal protection? What is our right to water as humans? And how do we foster resilient rivers? Through a combination of scientific expertise and thoughtful observations of the natural world, Fausch translates the science of rivers into accessible language for readers and begins to address these questions. He weaves deep Indigenous histories throughout the book and includes personal visits to tribal lands to explore the traditional values held by several Indigenous groups. Fausch reminds us that our connection to rivers is personal and grounded in specific places, flowing from the stories we carry about our relationships with and responsibilities to these rivers. In a final essay Fausch ponders Aldo Leopold’s statement that “nothing so important as an ethic is ever written,” but instead evolves in the minds of a thinking community. A Reverence for Rivers speaks to both the mind and the heart, offering perspectives so that we might begin to imagine and create an ethic for living with and caring for the running waters on which we rely for so much. Dr. Kurt Fausch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University, where he taught for 35 years. His research collaborations in stream fish ecology and conservation have taken him throughout Colorado and the West, and worldwide, including to Hokkaido in northern Japan. His experiences were chronicled in the PBS documentary RiverWebs, and the 2015 book For the Love of Rivers: A Scientist’s Journey which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the American Fisheries Society and the World Council of Fisheries Societies, and the Leopold Conservation Award from Fly Fishers International. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies