New Books in Environmental Studies

In Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), Toshihiro Higuchi presents a history of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, by which the then-nuclear powers, US, USSR, and UK, agreed to cease, among other things, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, largely moving such tests underground (the Chinese and French continued atmospheric tests in subsequent decades). Higuchi examines the development of knowledge about nuclear fallout, the dissemination and often suppression (mostly by governments of the nuclear powers) of that knowledge during the eighteen years book-ended by the 1945 Trinity Test and the signing of the 1963 Treaty. Political Fallout also considers the legacy of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which reduced fallout but was followed by an accelerated arms race and buildup of nuclear arsenals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In 2014, the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy entered the national spotlight after a showdown against federal officials over grazing rights on public lands. Two years later, his sons seized the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and occupied it for forty days with militia and sovereign citizen groups. As journalists rushed to the scene, trying to make sense of the motivations behind their anti-government politics, Betsy Gaines Quammen, a historian working on her history Ph.D., knew something was amiss. She had spent hours at the Bundy home, interviewing them for her dissertation on Mormon settlement in the West. She knew the Bundy’s rooted their politics in their Mormon faith, but their religious attitudes made few popular headlines. In her new book, American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West (Torrey House Press, 2020), Quammen situates the Bundy standoff within the long and convoluted history of Mormon migration into the American West—and provides an exciting new take on religion in modern American politics.Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in United States history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. Twitter: @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Old-growth forests captivate and inspire us. Walking through them can transport us to a time before human domination of the natural world. This is especially the case with old-growth forests in the eastern part of the United States, a region with a long history of profound human disturbances of ecological regimes. Beyond their role as inspiration, old growth serves important ecological functions regionally and globally. These forests also provide several practical services to humans. How do scientists define old-growth forests? How can non-experts identify old forests and understand their importance locally and globally? These are some of the topics covered in Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests (Island Press, 2018) an anthology edited by Andrew Barton and William Keeton.Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests (Island Press, 2018) is a perfect book for readers who want to learn the fundamentals of forest ecology and old growth in the east. Over thirty experts contributed to the book, writing chapters which range from the basics like defining and identifying old growth to more specialized subjects like the biological interactions below the forest floor. A large range of eastern forest types are covered, extending south from the boreal forest in central Canada to the bottomland hardwood forests and pine savannas of the American south. Those interested in human interactions with the forest through time will learn about Native American and Euro-American forestry. There are also chapters covering threats to old growth posed by invasive organisms.This is not exclusively a book about regional environments as the latter chapters of Ecology and Recovery explain how old growth can help mitigate ecological problems in the United States and globally. There are chapters on the services that old growth provides, from improving stream quality to storing carbon. The authors also explain how old growth can be conserved and how forests can be managed to promote old-growth structures and features. The range of topics covered in the book is impressive and its relevance in a time of unprecedented ecological change should be clear.Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings are sexy, but few realize the value in existing buildings and how easy it is to get to “zero energy” or low-energy consumption through deep energy retrofits. Existing buildings can and should be retrofit to reduce environmental impacts that contribute to climate change, while improving human health and productivity for building occupants.In The Power of Existing Buildings: Save Money, Improve Health, and Reduce Environmental Impacts (Island Press, 2019), academic sustainability expert Robert Sroufe, and construction and building experts Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode, explain how to realize the potential of existing buildings and make them perform like new. This step-by-step guide will help readers to: understand where to start a project; develop financial models and realize costs savings; assemble an expert team; and align goals with numerous sustainability programs. The Power of Existing Buildings will challenge you to rethink spaces where people work and play, while determining how existing buildings can save 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

During the early 1970s, a movement of rank-and-file coal miners rose up in Appalachia to challenge mine bosses and stodgy union officials. They sought greater control over the workplace and a broadened vision of industrial power. Calling themselves the “Miners For Democracy,” these reformers gained short-lived control over the union’s top leadership and earned a legacy for militant unionism. But what about coal miners in the expanding coalfields of the American West?In his new book Carbon County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West (University of Utah Press, 2020), Christian Wright recovers the story of western miners who joined the Miners For Democracy and challenged their anti-union employers in Utah’s historic mining communities. These struggles, he says, provide an object lesson for us all about the frontlines of labor and climate justice.Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in United States history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. Twitter: @rydriskelltate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world.As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class (Island Press, 2020) planning and design expert Patrick Condon explains how urban designers can assimilate these interconnected changes into their work.Condon shows how the very things that constrain cities—climate change, migration, financial stress, population change—could actually enable the emergence of a more equitable and resource-efficient city. He provides five rules for urban designers: (1) See the City as a System; (2) Recognize Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages.In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, Condon provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it.Chris Courtney’s The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Emerging out of a 2016 conference, Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek have brought together Environmental History, Latin American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in a single volume that reshapes scholarly understandings of Latin America’s Long Cold War. Rather than emphasize diplomatic, social or cultural histories of conflict, this volume emphasizes the roles of “experts” who cast themselves as apolitical technocrats just working on the ground. Chastain and Lorek’s book argues that experts and the networks in which they traveled significantly shaped geopolitical agendas, local cultures, and were in fact central to the history of the Cold War.The essays in Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) focus on Chile, Mexico, Cuba, and Peru, in order to explore how knowledge circulated regionally as well as locally and globally. Essay topics vary from the space race to the Green Revolution, and from the Santiago Metro to Ubre Blanca, Cuba’s most famous dairy cow. By focusing on itineraries rather than exchanges or knowledge transfers, the contributors emphasize the movement of technology, knowledge, and practice within the global south, and particularly decenter the United States from the Cold War narrative. With summative essays from such luminaries as Gil Joseph on Latin America’s Long Cold War, and Edin Medina and Mark Carey combining STS and Environmental Studies, this work will be of great use to graduate students, teachers, and scholars in all three fields. Other contributors include: Tore Olsson, Mary Roldán, Reinaldo Funes-Monzote, Steven Palmer, Thomas Rath, Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Hugo Palmarola, Mark Healey, Fernando Purcell, Emily Wakild, and Javiera Barandiarán.Andra Chastain is an assistant professor of Latin American and world history at Washington State University Vancouver. Timothy Lorek is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) tells the story of the the Itaipu dam, a massive hydroelectric complex built on the Brazil-Paraguay border in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is structurally and conceptually ambitious, but so readable that it will fit well in both graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms. Blanc uses this story of a single megaproject to open up new questions about dictatorship, democracy, and the environment in Brazil through the analytic of rural visibility. Since Itaipu was the largest dam in the world and a physical embodiment of the military’s geopolitical ambitions, rural protests against the dam became a referendum on a dictatorship itself in ways that made rural Brazilians important political actors.But, as Blanc argues, the dam project not only displaced forty thousand rural inhabitants, it made those inhabitants invisible as members of the national community. Blanc follows the stories of those displaced by this project, asking what the land meant to those who lived on it and ultimately lost it, even as the experience of mobilizing against dictatorship created new social movements that are crucial to understanding Brazil to this day. One of the most important contributions of the book is Blanc’s attention to the differing experiences of landed farmers, landless workers, and indigenous communities who all lived in the shadow of Itaipu. By privileging these stories, Blanc traces a long history of violence and repression in the countryside that the dictatorship heightened, but did not create itself. Before the Flood will be of interest to scholars of the environment, Latin America, and social movements globally.Jacob Blanc is Lecturer in Latin American History at the University of Edinburgh and co-editor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands Between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, published in 2018 by the University of Arizona Press.Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Union College, in Schenectady, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies