New Books In Environmental Studies

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Yet despite its central place in the life sciences, relatively few geographers employ evolutionary theory in their work. In his new book Evolutionary History:Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Edmund Russell makes a compelling case for why evolution matters for human history. Russell argues that evolution is both important and common. Through a number of case studies, he shows how poaching in Africa led to the evolution of tuskless elephants and intensive fishing fostered the development of smaller salmon and cod. But perhaps more importantly, he shows how anthropogenic, or human shaped, evolution played a pivotal role in two of the fundamental developments of human history: the agricultural and industrial revolutions. His book is a challenge to historians

How up to date are you on the projected impact of climate change on human civilization in the next 100 years? Once you look at latest predictions, quickly come back and listen to this interview with Sally Weintrobe, because she brings a much-needed, yet realistic sense of hope to what most people consider a dire picture. Weintrobe, a practicing psychoanalyst and Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, organized an interdisciplinary conference of psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists, and sociologists to address a burning question: why is knowledge of climate reality being so resisted? (The conference in its entirety is posted online in 6 parts here.) Weintrobe contributed to and edited this book of essays by 23 authors, and it is an important document of current psychoanalytic thinking on the nexus of splitting, denial, reintegration– and love- in the context of how we conceive of nature. How are we split-off from our childlike affection for nature? How does neo-liberal capitalism promot

Robert Cribb and his co-authors Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin have together drawn on the resources of history, literature, film, science, and cultural theory to write Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), an unusual and fascinating story spanning four centuries of human-orangutan encounters in Southeast Asia and beyond. The book tracks these encounters from the jungles of Sumatra in the 17 century through to the cinematic performances of the 20 century, and into contemporary advocacy for animal rights. It shows how humans–particularly Europeans–have been troubled by the orangutan, because it challenges political, juridical and ethical ideas, perceptions and representations of humanness. Wild Man from Borneo is an illuminating and revealing study, which will appeal to general readers as well as specialists. Over 50 illustrations complement the authors’ elegant and detailed written account. In view of the orangutan’s precarious con

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in these new neighborhoods tended to forget this fact, and instead, saw their success in the suburbs as the outcome of private achievements. Over time, such places became the crucible for the growth of neoliberalism. Lifeblood demonstrates the role oil played not only in suburbanization, but in the rightward shift of American politics over the past four decades.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool University Press, 2013) by Tariq Jazeel. The book uses these two sites to explore the ways in which non-secular experiences of nature inscribe Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism into the spaces of everyday life. Skilfully weaving together ethnographic and archival material, the book pushes us to re-read the seemingly secular spaces of modernity in Sri Lanka.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is waste? William Viney‘s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, including literature, sculpture and architecture. The text begins by stressing the importance of time to our understanding of waste, as opposed to more traditional conceptions that are grounded in spatial distinctions. Rather than looking at waste through the dualities of useful or not useful, dirty or clean, William Viney asks us to be attentive to our relationship to objects in time, understanding how they are understood by the many narratives that they may contain, which they may have been party to, and which they may require for us to be able to understand them. The book draws on an emerging but established tradition of work that draws attention to the role of materiality and objects in our understanding of the world. By offering an alternative to the view that waste is the garbage of consumer capitalism, we can see the value of things as their potential, as it

The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2014), Menzies outlines her discovery of a vanished way of life and argues that restoring it would help North Americans recover a deeper sense of self as well as more satisfying social relations with the people around them. It could also help them gain more control over political decisions that affect them in their communities, states and provinces and at the national level. “Commoning–cultivating community and livelihood together on the common land of the Earth,” Menzies writes, “was a way of life for my ancestors and for many other newcomers to North America too. It was a way of understanding and pursuing economics as embedded in life and the labor, human and non-human, that is necessary to sustain it.” She maintains that recl

Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods in Japan. Stolz charts the transformations of an “environmental unconscious” lying at the foundation of modern social and political thought. Bad Water begins by describing the establishment of the autonomous individual as a political unit, tracing the relationship between the Meiji liberal subject and the environment beginning in the 1870s. With the emergence of toxic flows that penetrated the body, and in light of the Ashio Copper Mine incident as Japan’s first experience with industrial-scale pollution, nature and politics were increasingly difficult to keep separated. Stolz looks closely at the work of Tanaka Shōzō – Japan’s famous “first conservationist” – in this context, from Tanaka’s jikiso app

It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Land Art work TheLightning Field, does just this by ranging freely across a wide variety of art works, practices, and attitudes from the formative decades of the environmental movement and of postwar American art. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT Press, 2014) traces the shifts in ecological thinking and artistic practice during this period, and makes a convincing case for an ecological reading of many of its landmark works. What makes this book particularly fun, though, is the sheer strangeness of the works Nisbet discusses, many of them only briefly considered in the critical literature. From Allan Kaprow’s Yard (a gallery environment filled with tires), to psychedelic happenings, Peter Hutchinson’s bread scatter on the edge of a volcano, 2001: A Sp

The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for building a protective shoal or bar offshore. When it’s less stressed, it takes sand and gravel from offshore and stores it back on the beach and in the dunes.” “You talk as though the damn thing were alive,” Cameron said. “I think of it that way,” said Taylor. At the time, Silver Donald Cameron thought of it as a vivid metaphor. But, in his newly revised version of The Living Beach, he argues that it’s true: the beach is alive with the right to be prot

Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout, olive backs spattered with a constellation of black spots. The fish were gorgeous, and, roasted with oil and garlic, would prove delicious. But, having just read Douglas M. Thompson‘s The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish (University Press of New England, 2013), my enjoyment was just a tad diminished by one piece of knowledge: the fish had been stocked. Every year, government fisheries agencies around the country pour tens of millions of hatchery-raised trout into America’s rivers and lakes. These stocked fish generate vast revenues in the form of fishing licenses and gear sales, and they provide innumerable anglers pleasure and the occasional meal. But, as Thompson’s book reveals, the widesp

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World history for eons. Sometimes it’s dry; sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s hot; sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes the air is good; sometimes it’s bad. There are patterns, as John points out, but there’s also a good degree of unpredictability–it is, after all, the weather. What’s happening right now, though, is not in the slightest unpredictable: if we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s going to get hot; if it gets hot, thin

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014), explores the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on the Earth over the last half billion years. Kolbert contrasts these Big Five, as they are known, to the sixth mass extinction event, which we are in the midst of today. This time, instead of a massive asteroid or a sudden glaciation event, humans are the culprit. Travelling with different scientists to remote ecosystems around the world, Kolbert sees evidence of the many ways humans are altering the planet – through climate change, ocean acidification, and the spread of invasive species. By the end of the century, scientists predict we will lose 20 to 50% of all living species. Kolbert also places this current extinction event in the context of human history:

Jon Mooallem‘s book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals In America (Penguin, 2013) is a tour of a few places on the North American continent where animal species are on the very brink of extinction. What emerges is as much a story about creatures clinging on in the Anthropocene as it is a story about humans clinging to their humanity by clinging to disappearing animals. It is a book rich with humor, insight, history, sadness, hope, and the kind of ambiguity that makes you feel like beautiful things are still possible, despite the daily news. Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and he has also contributed to Harper’s, This American Life, Radiolab, The Believer, and Pop-Up Magazine.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries, dreams prophetic and dreams instrumental. In this brilliant new ethnography of a village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, those dreams are woven into the lives and deaths of a bookful of selves (both human and non-human) to help readers reconsider what it means to be a thinking, living being and why it matters to anthropology, science studies, and beyond. In creating this “anthropology beyond the human,” Kohn calls into question our tendency to conflate representation with language, rethinking the relationship between human language and other forms of representation that humans share with other beings. Here, human lives are both emergent from and contiguous with a wider semiotic community of were-jaguars and sphinxes, barking dogs and falling pigs, men and women al

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines”  — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions.” Every generation regards its own environment as natural and healthy, failing to recognize that the status quo is but a pale imitation of what previous generations enjoyed. The term was coined by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist, and it’s most often applied to the collapse of global fisheries. Our oceans are plundered, but our lack of historical context prevents us from noticing. John Waldman is determined to wake us up to what we’ve lost. Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College, is the author of Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations (Lyons Press, 2013), a book that not only elucidates the predicament of plummeting fisheries, but also p

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? In Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2013), Michael J. Hathaway explores these questions in a rich study of Yunnan’s engagement with environmentalism and the World Wildlife Fund. As celebrated in the book’s title, Hathaway introduces the notion of changing “environmental winds” as a tool for understanding the transformative power of social formations in Yunnan and beyond. The narrative emphasizes the agency of many different kinds of actors in the co-creation of environmentalism in Yunnan, from humans to elephants, and pays special attention to the importance of Chinese intellectuals and local Yunnan people in incorporating China into a global conservation circuit. The story ranges from the global 1960s, touching on China’s role in

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public figures with wildly different political orientations. Throughout his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (University of Washington Press, 2013), Brian Allen Drake analyzes the complex relationship between modern conservatism and postwar environmentalism. Through a wide-ranging narrative that fuses together elements of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Drake illuminates the tense nature of a movement that sought to balance an aversion to centralized government power with a desire to protect America’s natural landscape. Brian Allen Drake is a lecturer in the University of Georgia History Department. His previous work has appeared in Environmental History, the Great Plains Quarterly,

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of fou