New Books in Geography

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/geography

How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the connection between prejudice and place in modern America. Existing scholarship suggests that living near Black Americans presents a "threat" to White Americans, which in turn influences White opinions on policies related to race. This book rejects the tendency to position White people as tacit victims and Black people as threatening, instead recasting White Americans as active viewers of their surroundings. This reframing brings a critical focus on power and positionality to scholarship on racial threat, and challenges the neutrality typically assigned to the White perspective. The book first presents ethnographic analysis of Louisiana residents caught in a racialized debate over incorporating a new city in the Baton Rouge area, using interpretive methods to show how race colors White residents' perspective on local geography and politics. Then, the book applies its conceptualization of a White perspective to the quantitative study of prejudice and place, revisiting the classic racialized policy issues of welfare and affirmative action. These analyses emphasize White Americans' diverse beliefs and surroundings but also their common structural position, and how an interest in defending that position shapes the White perspective. This emphasis supports new empirical insights on the behavior of racially tolerant White people, perceptions of the Black middle class, and the consequences of segregation for racial politics. The book also includes discussion of the author's own positionality as a Black woman researcher in conversation with White interview subjects, and the risks of Whiteness studies that leave Black people invisible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+), an innovative, open-source model that estimates global oil and gas emissions. Gordon identifies the oils and gases from every region of the globe–– along with the specific production, processing, and refining activities–– that are the most harmful to the planet, and proposes innovative solutions to reduce their climate footprints.Global climate stabilization cannot afford to wait for oil and gas to run out. No Standard Oil shows how we can take immediate, practical steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the crucial oil and gas sector while making sustainable progress in transitioning to a carbon-free energy future.Deborah Gordon is a senior principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI where she leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Gordon also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the principal investigator for the Oil Climate Project.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/geography

Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. Because of that, the different disciplines that research the human past in South America have tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be studied independently of each other. Objections to that approach have repeatedly been raised, however, warning against imagining too sharp a divide between the people and societies of the Andes and Amazonia when there are clear indications of significant connections and transitions between them.Rethinking the Andes-Amazonia Divide. A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration (UCL Press, 2020) brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. This collaboration has emerged from an innovative program of conferences and symposia conceived to generate discussion and cooperation across the divides between disciplines.Adrian J. PEARCE, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American History at the University College LondonDavid BERESFORD-JONES, fellow of the Heinz Heinen Centre for Advanced Study, University of Bonn, and affiliated researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of CambridgePaul HEGGARTY, senior scientist in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.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/geography

Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022)edited by Ilan KelmanAntarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects that should be more prominent in policy and practice.The authors and artists place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes. Given the diversity and disparity of the influences and changes, the book’s contributions connect to provide a more coherent and encompassing perspective of how society views Antarctica, scientifically and artistically, and what the continent provides and could provide politically, culturally, and environmentally.Offering original research, art, and interpretations of different experiences and explorations of Antarctica, explanations meld with narratives while academic analyses overlap with first-hand experiences of what Antarctica does and does not – could and could not – bring to the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Georges River Blues: Swamps, Mangroves, and Resident Action, 1945-1980 (ANU Press, 2022)by Heather GoodallThe lower Georges River, on Dharawal and Dharug lands, was a place of fishing grounds, swimming holes and picnics in the early twentieth century. But this all changed after World War II, when rapidly expanding industry and increasing population fell heaviest on this river, polluting its waters and destroying its bush.Local people campaigned to defend their river. They battled municipal councils, who were themselves struggling against an explosion of garbage as population and economy changed. In these blues (an Australian term for conflict), it was mangroves and swamps that became the focus of the fight. Mangroves were expanding because of increasing pollution and early climate change. Councils wanted to solve their garbage problems by bulldozing mangroves and bushland, dumping garbage and, eventually, building playing fields. So they attacked mangroves as useless swamps that harboured disease. Residents defended mangroves by mobilising ecological science to show that these plants nurtured immature fish and protected the river’s health.These suburban resident action campaigns have been ignored by histories of the Australian environmental movement, which have instead focused on campaigns to save distant ‘wilderness’ or inner-city built environments. The Georges River environmental conflicts may have been less theatrical, but they were fought out just as bitterly. And local Georges River campaigners – men, women and often children – were just as tenacious. They struggled to ‘keep bushland in our suburbs’, laying the foundation for today’s widespread urban environmental consciousness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility.By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends onreckoning with this past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Cartography has a troubled history as a technology of power. The production and distribution of maps, often understood to be ideological representations that support the interests of their developers, have served as tools of colonization, imperialism, and global development, advancing Western notions of space and place at the expense of indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities. But over the past two decades, these marginalized populations have increasingly turned to participatory mapping practices to develop new, innovative maps that reassert local concepts of place and space, thus harnessing the power of cartography in their struggles for justice. In twelve essays written by community leaders, activists, and scholars, Radical Cartographies: Participatory Mapmaking from Latin America (U Texas Press, 2020) critically explores the ways in which participatory mapping is being used by indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other traditional groups in Latin America to preserve their territories and cultural identities. Through this pioneering volume, Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale fundamentally rethink the role of maps, with significant lessons for marginalized communities across the globe, and launch a unique dialogue about the radical edge of a new social cartography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Michael Méndez: Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement (Yale University Press, 2020)An urgent and timely story of the contentious politics of incorporating environmental justice into global climate change policy. Although the science of climate change is clear, policy decisions about how to respond to its effects remain contentious. Even when such decisions claim to be guided by objective knowledge, they are made and implemented through political institutions and relationships—and all the competing interests and power struggles that this implies. Michael Méndez tells a timely story of people, place, and power in the context of climate change and inequality. He explores the perspectives and influence low‑income people of color bring to their advocacy work on climate change. In California, activist groups have galvanized behind issues such as air pollution, poverty alleviation, and green jobs to advance equitable climate solutions at the local, state, and global levels. Arguing that environmental protection and improving public health are inextricably linked, Mendez contends that we must incorporate local knowledge, culture, and history into policymaking to fully address the global complexities of climate change and the real threats facing our local communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era.Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world.Now, author Megan Kate Nelson examines the larger context of this American moment, illuminating Hayden’s survey as a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war. Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner, 2022) follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation.A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation’s history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States.Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She has written about the Civil War, US western history, and American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Monitor. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa, and she has taught at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. Nelson is the author of Saving Yellowstone, The Three-Cornered War, Ruin Nation, and Trembling Earth. 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/geography