New Books in Environmental Studies

An ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic measures to rein in unfettered capitalism and the American habit of overconsumption, lest we deplete our common resources. That argument made Garrett Hardin one of the most influential and celebrated environmentalists to ever live. Yet, he had a tragic view of the world that turned his green dream into a green nightmare. This is the final episode of Cited Podcast's new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). There were a number of works that we pulled from to help us understand this story. If you want to learn more about conservative ecological thought, the population panic, and related themes, we recommend that you read: by Richard Hames and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Eco-Fascism: Climate Change and the Far Right; from Jason Oakes, Garret Hardin's Tragic Sense of Life, a short article on the the ecological models that influenced Hardin; and finally, Thomas Robertson's excellent survey of the population panic of the mid-60s to late-70s, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

R. Jisung Park is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds appointments in the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School of Business.It's hard not to feel anxious about the problem of climate change, especially if we think of it as an impending planetary catastrophe. In Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World (Princeton UP, 2025), R. Jisung Park encourages us to view climate change through a different lens: one that focuses less on the possibility of mass climate extinction in a theoretical future, and more on the everyday implications of climate change here and now.Drawing on a wealth of new data and cutting-edge economics, Park shows how climate change headlines often miss some of the most important costs. When wildfires blaze, what happens to people downwind of the smoke? When natural disasters destroy buildings and bridges, what happens to educational outcomes? Park explains how climate change operates as the silent accumulation of a thousand tiny conflagrations: imperceptibly elevated health risks spread across billions of people; pennies off the dollar of productivity; fewer opportunities for upward mobility.By investigating how the physical phenomenon of climate change interacts with social and economic institutions, Park illustrates how climate change already affects everyone, and may act as an amplifier of inequality. Wealthier households and corporations may adapt quickly, but, without targeted interventions, less advantaged communities may not.Viewing climate change as a slow and unequal burn comes with an important silver lining. It puts dollars and cents behind the case for aggressive emissions cuts and helps identify concrete steps that can be taken to better manage its adverse effects. We can begin to overcome our climate anxiety, Park shows us, when we begin to tackle these problems locally. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, Oxford University Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Based on two years of extensive fieldwork, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (Cornell UP, 2023) examines ecological policies in the People's Republic of China to show how campaigns of scientifically based environmental protection transform nature and society. While many point to China's ecological civilization programs as a new paradigm for global environmental governance, Jesse Rodenbiker argues that ecological redlining extends the reach of the authoritarian state. Although Chinese urban sustainability initiatives have driven millions of citizens from their land and housing, Rodenbiker shows that these migrants are not passive subjects of state policy. Instead, they creatively navigate resettlement processes in pursuit of their own benefit. However, their resistance is limited by varied forms of state-backed infrastructural violence. Through extensive fieldwork with scientists, urban planners, and everyday citizens in southwestern China, Ecological States exposes the ways in which the scientific logics and practices fundamental to China's green urbanization have solidified state power and contributed to dispossession and social inequality. Ecological States is freely available with support from the Henry Luce Foundation. The link to the book is Ecological States by Jesse Rodenbiker,Foreword by Albert L. Park | Paperback | Cornell University Press. Jesse Rodenbiker is Assistant Professor in the Geography department at Rutgers University. He is a human-environment geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist focusing on environmental governance, urbanization, and social inequality in China and globally. His email address is jesse.rodenbiker@rutgers.edu. 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 ecological anthropology. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Animals speak. Plants do too. Seas and mountains are not a mute background to human actions, but have interests and agency. Many more-than-human beings are political actors. All of us are part of a web of relations in which we affect others and are affected by them. To counter the current ecological destruction and find more just ways to co-exist, humans need new ways of doing politics with other earth beings. In Multispecies Assemblies (Vine Press, 2025), Dutch philosopher Eva Meijer develops such a new political model: the multispecies assembly. Multispecies assemblies are a form of direct democracy in which some beings speak for themselves and others are represented. Living differently as humans is possible, but we must begin to listen to others, and learn from them. Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer-songwriter. They write novels, philosophical essays, academic texts, poems and columns, and their work has been translated into over twenty languages. Recurring themes are language including silence, madness, nonhuman animals, and politics. Meijer also works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, writes essays and columns for Dutch newspapers, and is a member of the Multispecies Collective. Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Animals are staging a revolution—they're just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2022) threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how animals will push back. Animal Revolution is a passionate, provocative, cogent call for us to do so. Ron Broglio reveals how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. We can try to frame such disruptions as environmental intervention or through the lens of philosophy or biopolitics, but regardless the animals persist beyond our comprehension in reminding us that we too are part of an animal world. Animals see our technologies and machines as invasive beings and, in a nonlinguistic but nonetheless intensive mode of communicating with us, resist our attempts to control them and diminish their habitats. In doing so, they expose the environmental injustices and vulnerabilities in our systems. A witty, informative, and captivating work—at the juncture of posthumanism, animal studies, phenomenology, and environmental studies—Broglio reminds us of our inadequacy as humans, not our exceptionalism. Ron Broglio is professor of English, director of Desert Humanities, and associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. He is author or editor of several books, including Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life and Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art. Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

A former journalist and environmental campaigner named Pan Yue rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, championing the concept of “ecological civilization.” This green dream combines elements of traditional Chinese culture with eco-Marxism, suggesting a radical reorientation of humanity's relationship to the natural world. Is the idea a serious alternative to sustainable development, as the CCP claims? Or is it just a cynical cover for eco-authoritarianism? We speak with Beijing-based journalist and environmentalist Ma Tianjie, author of In Search of Green China (2025) This is the fourth episode of Cited Podcast's new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Dr. Lily Hseuh is trained as an economist and public policy scholar, and is an associate professor in Economics and Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs, at Arizona State University. Her research bridges the fields of economics, public policy, and management to investigate how the environment and the global commons are managed and the ways in which behaviors of firms and organizations are shaped by multiple forces from markets to government policies. During her tenure at ASU, she has been a two-time recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as receiving the Professor of Impact award Her work been featured in major news outlets, including the Financial Times, Fortune, and PBS News Hour, and recently, she was awarded an American Fellowship by the American Association of University Women. She earned her PhD in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington, and before her just published book, she has been asked to contribute a chapter to a number of other publications and has over 20 peer-reviewed articles in such areas as:  Private And Public Interactions And Global Climate Change, Rights-Based Management And Ocean And Marine Resources, Sustainability And State And Local Governments, Participatory Governance And Social Equity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Most economists believe that growth is the surest path to better lives. This has proven to be one of humanity's most powerful and dangerous ideas. It shapes policy across the globe, but it fatally undermines the natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. How did we get here and what might be next?In The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Forgot About the Natural World (Simon and Schuster, 2025), environmental historian Christopher F. Jones takes us through two hundred and fifty years of economic thinking to examine the ideal of growth, its powerful influence, and the crippling burdens many decisions made in its name have placed on us all. Jones argues that the pursuit of growth has never reflected its costs, because economists downplay environmental degradation. What's worse, skyrocketing inequality and diminishing improvements in most people's well-being mean growth too often delivers too little for too many. Jones urges economists to engage more broadly with other ways of thinking, as well as with citizens and governments to recognize and slow infinite growth's impact on the real world. Both accessible and eye-opening, The Invention of Infinite Growth offers hope for the future. Humans have not always believed that economic growth could or should continue, and so it is possible for us to change course. We can still create new ideas about how to promote environmental sustainability, human welfare, and even responsible growth, without killing the planet and ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree—and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature.Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple's storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello fruitery. Kumar shows how—if we follow untamed paths—the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild. Our guest is: Priyanka Kumar, who is the author of Conversations with Birds, and The Light Between Apple Trees. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra magazine. She holds an MFA, and has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California. Her feature documentary, The Song of the Little Road, is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and her awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor's Award, an International Center for Jefferson Studies Fellowship, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and freelance editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show's newsletter. Playlist for listeners: Big Box USA In The Garden Behind the Moon Disabled Ecologies Endless Forms The Well-Gardened Mind Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

A vital account of the state of the Arctic today--emphasising the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds examine the state of the Arctic today, showing how the region is becoming a space of experimentation for everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global--from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

How did India's landmark Forest Rights Act come into being? And what difference has it made to the lives of historically marginalized forest-dwelling communities? These questions are at the heart of Anand Vaidya's new monograph Future of the forest: Struggles over land and law in India that we discuss in this episode. Future of the forest offers a compelling account of the making, implementation, and partial unravelling of the Forest Rights Act, and traces the complex ways in which collective action and mobilization have shaped the use and impact of this potentially revolutionary legislation. Anand P. Vaidya is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Prof Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. His formal training is in Political Science and has worked as a special correspondent with a leading news outlet in India and received 12 national and international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism. additionally he has also been the Director Amnesty International and South Asia of Climate Parliament. His scholarly has focused on environmental politics and discourses in India and explored crucial intersections of ecology, caste, political ideology and the development rhetoric.  Abhilasha Jain is an anthropologist with an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MPhil in Gender Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently working as an independent researcher focusing on climate justice, digital infrastructure and digital rights for children/youth.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water champions the Hydrocene and presents it as disruptive, conceptual epoch and curatorial theory, emphasising water's pivotal role in the climate crisis and contemporary art. Essential reading for researchers, curators, artists, students of contemporary art, curatorial theory, climate concerns and environmental humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Now, Dr. Elizabeth Sawin has dedicated her career to the theory and practice of creating change in complex systems. In 2021, she founded and is currently the Director of the Multi-solving Institute. This interview discusses her book Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World (Island Press, 2024) After studying many successful efforts around the world, where people created systems-change by building connections across silos, she developed the Multi-Solving approach to more effectively address equity, climate change health, well-being, and economic vitality as integrated issues. Prior to her current position, Beth co-founded the think tank Climate Interactive to develop tools and project possible futures for grappling with the complexity of the climate system. In this regard, she led efforts to integrate measures of equity, health, and well-being into decision-support computer simulations. Beth writes and speaks about multi-solving and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences. She has over 40 publications, both in scientific journals, as well as more populous literature, such as: Non-Profit Quarterly, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Daily Climate, U. S. News, as well as… in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Beth graduated from Dartmouth College with majors in Biology and Chemistry and subsequently received her PhD in Neuro-Biology from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The world needs to adapt to climate change – but how? What are the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community? Sink or Swim: How the world needs to adapt to a changing climate (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Susannah Fisher reveals all.Heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding caused by climate change are already impacting people and nature. Adaptation until now has been incremental with governments and institutions tinkering around the edges of current systems. This will not be enough.Sink Or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate (Bloomsbury, 2025) explores the hard choices that lie ahead concerning how people earn a living, the way governments manage relationships between countries, and how communities accommodate the movement of people. Should people be encouraged to move away from the coast? How can global food supplies be managed when parts of the world are hit by simultaneous droughts? How can conflict be handled when there isn't enough water?Drawing on cutting edge research, interviews with experts, and practical examples from across the world, Dr. Fisher tells the story of the tough choices on adaptation that lie ahead, and looks at ways we can still have a liveable planet later in this century and beyond. Will we choose to sink or swim? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

How can activists strike a balance between fighting for a cause and sustaining relationships with family, friends, and neighbors? In this episode John Mathias joins host Elena Sobrino to talk about Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala (2024, University of California Press). Uncommon Cause follows environmental justice activists in Kerala, India, as they seek out, avoid, or strive to overcome conflicts between their causes and their community ties. John Mathias finds two contrasting approaches, each offering distinct possibilities for an activist life. One set of activists repudiates community ties and resists normative pressures; for them, environmental justice becomes a way of transcending all local identities and affiliations, even humanity itself. Other activists seek to ground their activism in community belonging, to fight for their own people. Each approach produces its own dilemmas and offers its own insights into ethical tensions we all face between taking a stand and standing with others. In sharing Kerala activists' diverse stories, Uncommon Cause offers a fresh perspective on environmental ethics, showing that environmentalism, even as it looks beyond merely human concerns, is still fundamentally about how we relate to other people. Elena Sobrino is an anthropologist studying the emotions and politics of environmental crises and currently working on a book about the Flint water crisis. She is a lecturer in the Science and Technology Studies program at Tufts University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The story behind Dr. Gerta Keller's world-shattering scientific discovery that dinosaur extinction was NOT caused by asteroid impact, but rather by volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula, a discovery that highlights today's existential threat of greenhouse gasses and climate change—and one that sparked an all-out war waged by the scientific establishment.Part scientific detective story, part personal odyssey, The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs (Diversion Books, 2025) is the definitive account of a radical theory that has reshaped how we understand our planet's past and, as we face the possibility of a sixth extinction, how we might survive its future.For decades, the dominant theory held that an asteroid impact caused the dinosaurs' extinction. But Princeton Geologist Dr. Gerta Keller followed the evidence to the truth: Deccan volcanism, a series of massive volcanic eruptions in India, triggered a long-term climate catastrophe and Earth's fifth mass extinction. Her findings upended the field and ignited a bitter feud in modern science—what became known as the “Dinosaur Wars.”Raised in poverty on a Swiss farm and told she could never be a scientist, Keller defied expectations, earning her PhD at Stanford and battling her way into the highest ranks of Geology, eventually becoming a Professor of Paleontology and Geology at Princeton University. Her refusal to back down in the face of ridicule, sabotage, and sexism makes her story as thrilling as her science, which offers urgent insight into today's climate crisis: Sustained planetary upheaval—not a single cataclysmic event—can plunge the planet into an age of death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When we think about the way that Southeast Asian rulers governed their kingdoms, we usually think of the relationship between the rulers and the people. But as Katheryn Dyt shows in her new book, The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (University of Hawaii Press, 2025), royal governance in the Kingdom of Vietnam depended on a highly detailed knowledge of the weather and the natural environment. Kings took a deep, personal interest in the weather, even writing poetry in an attempt to influence it. The Vietnamese royal bureaucracy had a ‘Bureau for the Observation of the Sky' to advise the king on portentous signs and omens which might help him interpret the will of Heaven. This premodern understanding of the natural world was influenced both by classical Chinese learning, as well as by an empirical understanding of Vietnam's distinct climate and landscape. This highly original book connects Vietnam's precolonial political history with an understanding of the natural environment seen through the eyes of Vietnamese kings and royal officials.Kathryn Dyt is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the History department at SOAS, University of London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation.  Yet, in Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke UP, 2025), Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations.  Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks? Works mentioned in the episode: Darcie Bernhardt, an Inuvialuk/Gwichin artist from Tuktuyaaqtuuq whose work is on the cover of Jen Rose Smith's book, Ice Geographies. “The Arctic is Not White” by asinnajaq in Inuit Art Quarterly, 35 (4), Winter 2022. Borealis, by Aisha Sabatini Sloan Jen Rose Smith is an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and Geography at the University of Washington. She is a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity.  Chrystel Oloukoï is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. Their upcoming manuscript, black nocturnal explores imaginations of the night in Lagos and the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland (Indiana University Press, 2019), Árni Heimir Ingólfsson provides a striking account of the dramatic career of Iceland's iconic composer. Leifs (1899–1968) was the first Icelander to devote himself fully to composition at a time when a local music scene was only beginning to take form. He was a fervent nationalist in his art, fashioning an idiosyncratic and uncompromising 'Icelandic' sound from traditions of vernacular music with the aim to legitimize Iceland as an independent, culturally empowered nation. In addition to exploring Leifs's career, Ingólfsson provides detailed descriptions of Leifs's major works and their cultural contexts. Leifs's music was inspired by the Icelandic landscape and includes auditory depictions of volcanos, geysers, and waterfalls. The raw quality of his orchestral music is frequently enhanced by an expansive percussion section, including anvils, stones, sirens, bells, ships' chains, shotguns, and cannons. Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Leifs's music has been rediscovered in recent years and hailed as a singular and deeply original contribution to twentieth-century music. Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland enriches our understanding and appreciation of Leifs and his music by exploring the political, literary and environmental contexts that influenced his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) is an in-depth analysis into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires. In the fight against climate change, lithium's role in reducing emissions by powering green economies is a mixed blessing. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork in Chile, Nevada, and Portugal, Riofrancos explores the environmental and social costs of the global race to expand lithium mining amid supply chain concerns. With haunting descriptions of vulnerable ecosystems, she examines how mining harms landscapes, provokes protest, takes center stage in national politics, and links countries on the peripheries of the world economy to huge corporations, commodity markets, and powerful investors. Riofrancos traces the history of global extraction from colonial conquest, to the 1970s energy crisis, to the still uncertain green future. While an unregulated mining boom could inflict irreversible harm, Riofrancos offers compelling ideas about how to harmonize climate action with social justice. Across the world's extractive frontiers, we encounter the most brutal aspects of capitalism—but also witness inspiring visions for our planetary future. Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and the Strategic Co-Director of the Climate Community Institute Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition' was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Harper, 2025) forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian at the CNRS and the EHESS. He works on the history of the contemporary environmental crisis. He is currently working on the history of energy and material symbioses in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: 1. The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton2. Fin du monde et petits fours by Édouard Morena3. Accumuler du béton, tracer des routes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and lighting the dark. In the coalfields and beyond, in Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal (University of California Press, 2025) Bob Wyss describes how this magical elixir sparked the Industrial Revolution, powered railroads, and built urban skylines, while providing home comforts for families. Coal's history and heritage are fundamental to understanding its legacy of threats to America's well-being. As industry developed so did clashes between powerful tycoons, coal miners, and innocent families. Exploitation and avarice led to victimization, deadly violence, and ultimately the American labor movement. More recently coal has endangered American lives and safety, brought on by two centuries of carbon combustion, and here the threat remains unresolved. This is coal's most enduring legacy, and Black Gold is pivotal in helping us understand how we got to this point. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field. His work bounds the world of philosophy and psychology, focusing upon both individual human behavior and the manifestation of the collective behavior in the social context. He is the author and/or editor of over 30 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto, Canada and has had appointments as Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Faculty member in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, NY and the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, CA Jon has received numerous awards for his scholarship including 4 Gradiva Awards, for his work that advances the field of psychoanalysis. And in 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

This is the second episode of Cited Podcast's new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). An Albertan oil man and a socialist policy wonk from Saskatchewan banded together to think up “eco-development,” a precursor to today's sustainable development. This unlikely duo forged a global consensus at the United Nations, effectively codifying the reigning orthodoxy of liberal environmental governance. They told us that capitalism and sustainability are indeed compatible. Might that be the most utopian of all green dreams? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans, to the grass for the cattle – or perhaps the soya – that produced the milk, plants are an indispensable part of our everyday life. Beginning with some of the earliest uses of plants, in 50 Plants that Changed the World (Bodleian, 2025) Dr. Stephen Harris takes us on an exciting journey through history, identifying fifty plants that have been key to the development of the western world, discussing trade, imperialism, politics, medicine, travel and chemistry along the way. There are plants here that have changed landscapes, fomented wars and fuelled slavery. Others have been the trigger for technological advances, expanded medical knowledge or simply made our lives more pleasant. Plants have provided paper and ink, chemicals that could kill or cure, vital sustenance and stimulants. Some, such as barley, have been staples from earliest times; others, such as oil palm, are newcomers to western industry. We remain dependent on plants for our food, our fuel and our medicines. As the wide-ranging and engaging stories in this beautifully illustrated book demonstrate, their effects on our lives continue to be profound and often unpredictable. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Spike Bucklow joins Jana Byars to talk about The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful book defies genre. It is a journey through nature's yearly cycle, blending science, history and poetic reflection.The Year takes us on a journey exploring how nature transforms across twelve months, each chapter focusing on a specific month's natural events, from spring's beginning through to winter's end. It opens with an overview of our evolving understanding of time and nature, from ancient astronomy to the present, and concludes with a chapter on the impact of climate change. Spike Bucklow draws on both modern ecological studies and historical naturalists such as Aristotle, Gilbert White, Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. Poetic reflections from Ovid, Shakespeare, John Clare and William Wordsworth enrich the narrative, giving further insights into nature's changes. Blending modern science with traditional wisdom, The Year provides a positive perspective on ecological, global and personal change, appealing to those interested in ecology, astrology and the history of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

This is the first episode of Cited Podcast's new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). In the 1970s, Gerard O'Neill drew up detailed plans for large space colonies. The Princeton physicist claimed that these colonies could beam limitless energy back down to Earth, solving all our environmental problems. As climate change accelerates, O'Neill's once-forgotten green dream has become influential again; many of today's corporate space evangelists refer to themselves as “Jerry's Kids.” For solutions to Earth's problems, should we look to the stars? Plus, in the back half, we talk to Mary-Jane Rubenstein about the religious and colonial language of the early space evangelists, and why that language persists into the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India's south-west coastline. In An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950 (Cambridge UP, 2024) Devika Shankar probes this complicated relationship between crisis and development through a focus on a port development project executed in Cochin in the first quarter of the twentieth century amidst significant political and ecological uncertainty. While ecological concerns were triggered by increasing coastal erosion, a political crisis was precipitated by a neighbouring princely state's unprecedented attempt to extend its sovereignty over the British port. This integrative environmental, legal, and political history brings together the history of British India and the princely states to show how these anxieties ultimately paved the way for an ambitious port development project in the final years of colonial rule. In the process it deepens our understanding of environmental transformations and development in modern South Asia and the uneven nature of colonial sovereignty. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth century. From uranium extraction to nuclear testing, Australia's lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development. The continent was subject to rampant nuclear colonialism. However, this history is not just one of imposition. Aboriginal communities, bearing the brunt of these processes, have persistently resisted, reclaiming their rights to Country and demanding reparations.As Dr. Jessica Urwin shows in Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia (U of Washington Press, 2025 & Melbourne University Press, 2026), extraction, weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal have caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and cultural harm to Aboriginal communities and lands. Yet Indigenous peoples all over the world have not only survived nuclear colonialism but challenged it time and time again. Tracking the colonial mechanisms Australia used to pursue a nuclear industry, Dr. Urwin simultaneously highlights how Aboriginal peoples refused and reshaped those same mechanisms over time. A groundbreaking book, Contaminated Country reveals how Australia's deep nuclear past has been entangled with colonialism locally, nationally, and internationally. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order (Manchester UP, 2022) examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers - the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organizations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2022) tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism—a mode that shares much with magical realism but that is approached through an ecopoetic lens, specifically working an interspecies kind of magic, situating readers in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book promotes a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis. It restores our capacity for wonder together with our sensitive intelligence. Liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews as it calls attention to the soundscapes, odorscapes, feelscapes, and landscapes of the world. This monograph offers an original transdisciplinary and cross-Atlantic take on ecopoetics as it straddles the two academic worlds and sparks a conversation between artworks, theories, and studies emerging from the English-speaking world as well as from Francophone contexts. Entangling the materiality of language back within the flesh of the world, this book and the texts under study provide insight into the fundamentally sympoietic dimension of ecopoiesis. People interested in ecopoetics can check out the website run by Béné Meillon here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination (Reaktion, 2025), nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen set out in search of sounds beautiful and loathsome, melodious and disturbing, healing, strange and intimate. The phenomena of sound may be fleeting and evanescent, but the memory of it can open a window into the soul, deepening our connections with time, the environment and each other. From the edge of the solar system to the crackle of arctic sea ice, from the ancient oracle site of Dodona to the singing pillars of Hampi, each of these 36 essays explores stories of sound through the lens of history, science and culture, stylishly blending fantastical facts and unique anecdotes to create a compelling narrative. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful corporate meat packers in Chicago seized the economic order through the tools of modern capitalism (scientific management, standardization, labor suppression). These capitalists expanded the supply chains to far-flung consumers in New York and around the globe. But as meat became a staple of the American diet, and measure of progress, consumers cared more about the price and taste than the violence to people, animals, and environment behind the scenes. “America made modern beef” Specht writes, “at the same time that beef made America modern.” Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press. The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized. Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press. The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized. Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Plantation Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam's plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region's landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race. Maan Barua is University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge and author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Maan is an environmental and urban geographer whose research focuses on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. 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 ecological anthropology. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it's climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don't know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty – where we cannot predict what may happen – is essential and, as the book explores, this is much more than just managing risk. But how is this done, and what can we learn from different contexts about responding to and living with uncertainty? Indeed, what might it mean to live from uncertainty? Drawing on experiences from across the world, the chapters in Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World (Polity, 2024) explore finance and banking, technology regulation, critical infrastructures, pandemics, natural disasters and climate change. Each chapter contrasts an approach centred on risk and control, where we assume we know about and can manage the future, with one that is more flexible, responding to uncertainty.The book argues that we need to adjust our modernist, controlling view and to develop new approaches, including some reclaimed and adapted from previous times or different cultures. This requires a radical rethinking of policies, institutions and practices for successfully navigating uncertainties in an increasingly turbulent world. Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies