New Books in Environmental Studies

While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmopolitan position is in truth a provincial one limited to privileged circles in the Global North. In Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019), she instead elucidates how among post-colonial peoples of the Pacific and Caribbean, who are among the first to suffer the uncompromising rise of sea levels, global warming is not so much a rupture of stability as an impending cataclysm that follows a long history of others. With an eclectic array of allegorical artworks -- including sculptures by Dominican artist Tony Capellán, novels by Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber, and poems from Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Kamau Brathwaite -- DeLoughrey traces how island artists make sense of anthropogenic climate change while continuing to critique the legacies of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism. DeLoughrey also highlights subjectivities of relatedness with the earth and its non-human beings that may provide antidotes to the extractive logics that have clogged the skies with CO2. Stressing the ways that global warming and empire are mutually constitutive, DeLoughrey confirms the critical importance of allegorical art and literature from the Global South in interpreting our unfolding crisis.Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 (University of Alabama Press, 2018), David D. Vail re-examines aerial spraying in the North American Grasslands and the political and environmental controversies it provoked. He reveals how aircraft sprayers and practices emerged within the context of local environments and scientific experiments by regional universities and chemical companies. His pragmatic assessment of application technologies provides a nuanced perspective of pesticide use and environmental change.Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @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 can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. Vann talks about Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), with Michitake Aso, an Associate Professor of history at SUNY Albany. This extremely well-researched study of Vietnamese rubber plantations from the colonial origins to their near destruction during the American war opens new insights into the development of contemporary Vietnam. Dr. Aso explains such things as the difference between environmental and ecological history, how rubber plantations symbolized a type of French colonial modernization, the changing nature of French science, and the role of plantations in the First and Second Indochina Wars.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity.Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2019) recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.You can learn more about Lukas Rieppel here, or find him on twitter here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Called "perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature" by the Wall Street Journal, A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea (Algonquin Books, 2019) is an account of Don Kulick's thirty year involvement with a single village in Papua New Guinea, Gapun. In it, Kulick tells the story of language loss in the village, as well as his own experiences of violence during fieldwork in a remarkable, engaging, and clearly-written book designed to engage all readers, not just academics.In this episode of the podcast Don and Alex talk about Papua New Guinea, where they have both done research. Don talks about the difficulty of producing accurate but negative portrayals of the community he worked with and cared about, and the academic politics of these sorts of representations. They talk about long-term fieldwork and how it shapes your career, as well as how Don's portrayal of Gapun people squares with Marilyn Strathern's well-known accounts of Melanesian 'dualism'.Don Kulick is the editor and author of more than a dozen books, including Fat: The Anthropology of Obsession, Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Fieldwork, and Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village. His is currently Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he directs the research program Engaging Vulnerability.Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the editor of a special number of Anthropological Forum on "The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea" 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, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City(Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen.Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall’s words, ‘perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world’. The story of Singapore’s remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known.Stephen Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of South Australia and a Commissioner of the Environment, Resources and Development Court of South Australia. Belinda Yuen is Professorial Research Fellow and Research Director at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When people today visit or imagine Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, they often perceive a cold, remote, and pristine body of water, relatively untouched by industrialization. Yet, Lake Superior has experienced substantial environmental change—including today’s impressive but incomplete ecological recovery—in its existence, especially over the last 150 years. So argues the renowned environmental historian Nancy Langston in her latest book, Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale University Press, 2019). An interdisciplinary scholar to her core, Langston ushers her training in science and history to tell a story of industrial development, ecological change, toxic pollution, and environmental injustice—and yet also one of ecological and human resilience. Much like the topic of her study, Langston moves fluidly across various political jurisdictions, from states and provinces, to national governments and international agreements, to First Nations and tribal territories. In so doing, she gives voice to a host of actors, including indigenous peoples (past and present), corporate executives and technicians in the pulp and paper and mining industries, government regulators and engineers, environmentalists, scientists, environmental justice activists, politicians, union workers, and many others. Sustaining Lake Superior illustrates the promises and limitations of ecological and human resilience, the inseparability of the local from the global, and the ongoing relevance of history for responding some of the most urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice.Nancy Langston is Distinguished Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University.Joshua Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. His research focuses on the intertwined histories of conservation, industry, and the state in the twentieth-century United States. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017) presents a path-breaking approach to the study of the environment and history. In it LeCain argues that humans are inseparable from the material world around them. Living and non-living "things" not only deserve their own histories, according to LeCain, but the history of humans cannot be told without recognition of the autonomy of material things. LeCain’s neo-materialist agenda merges S.T.S. and environmental history, and calls for scholars to consider writing histories of the world in toto.More than just explaining his approach, LeCain employs it in three case studies, one on longhorn cattle in the American west, another on Japanese silkworms, and finally a history of the copper atom. Viewing the material world as inseparable from humans leads LeCain to challenge the idea of the Anthropocene, suggesting that the term gives humans too much credit. People, according to LeCain can do little without the material things that surround them. Current climatic changes were not solely caused by "anthropo," or humans, but the cause lies with humans working with material things like carbon. Moreover humans cannot solve the problem of climate change without utilizing the unique material properties of the living and non-living world in which they are completely and perpetually embedded within. The Matter of History is an important work for the present moment and is sure to shape future discourse on humans and the environment.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 and tweets @Jason_L_Newton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India(University of Washington Press, 2019), anthropologist Dolly Kikon offers a rich account of life in the midst of a landscape defined by multiple overlapping extractive industries and plantation economies, and of the social relations through which a resource frontier comes into being. Examining the foothills at the border between the states of Assam and Nagaland, she describes the histories of tea plantations, oil exploration, and coal mining, the role of mobility and migration, the security apparatuses that has evolved over decades of conflict and militarization, and, most strikingly, the way these forces shape and are manifest in the daily course of life of those inhabiting the region. In this episode of New Books in anthropology, Dolly Kikon and host Jacob Doherty talk about the role of hospitality in constructing resource frontiers, how morom (‘love’) works as an idiom to police ethnic purity and critique the state, the sociality of local markets, and the dreams and fantasies engendered by the carbon economy.Dolly Kikon is a senior lecturer in anthropology and development studies at the Univerity of Melbourne. She is the author of the book Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge, 2019), and, among many others, the article “Fermenting Modernity” (South Asia, 2015).Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in anthropology of development at the University of Edinburgh and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. 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 Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice (Routledge, 2019), Kenneth Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influence from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has now come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment.Olwig is an American-born landscape geographer, specializing in the study of the Scandinavian landscape. He is best known for advocating a "substantive" understanding landscape, one that incorporates legal and other lived significances of landscape, rather than viewing it in a more purely aesthetic way. His writings include Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (2002) and Nature's Ideological Landscape (1984). Olwig is Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture Planning and Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies