Shows / New Books in Environmental Studies
New Books in Environmental Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Anna Farro Henderson, "Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)
The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)
What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Royce Kurmelovs, "Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil" (U Queensland Press, 2024)
A riveting expose of the global oil industry' s multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australian…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Book Chat: "A Taiwanese Eco-Literature Reader" with Ian Rowen
In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-literature…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Genevieve Guenther, "The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of our economy…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)
Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied to an…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Sally Coulthard, "A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects" (HarperCollins UK, 2024)
For most of human history, we were rural folk. Our daily lives were bound up with working the land, living within the rhythm of the seasons. We poured our…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Joseph A. Seeley, "Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime border of…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthetic…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Jade S. Sasser, "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question" (U California Press, 2024)
Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rapidly…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Leigh Ann Henion, "Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark" (Algonquin, 2024)
“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)
Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Gary Griggs, "California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State" (U California Press, 2024)
California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Nir Arielli, "The Dead Sea: A 10,000 Year History" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Andrew Boyd, "I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor" (New Society, 2023)
Andrew Boyd is a humorist and long-time veteran of creative campaigns for social change. He led the decade-long satirical media campaign “Billionaires for…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
David N. Livingstone, "The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet and may…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Marcia Bjornerud, "Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks" (Flatiron Books, 2024)
Today I talked to Marcia Bjornerud about Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (Flatiron Books, 2024). Rocks are the record of our creative…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024)
From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen, monks…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Omar Dahbour, "Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis" (Routledge, 2024)
Part of what makes the challenges that collectively are called the “environmental crisis” so difficult is that the vocabulary we deploy in thinking and…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, "Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene" (Routledge, 2024)
Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2024) presents an innovative and imaginative reading of…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores
Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Ethan Tapper, "How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World" (Broadleaf Books, 2024)
For more than a decade, Ethan Tapper has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the worlds of forestry, conservation, and ecosystem…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)
A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Debra J. Davidson, "Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency" (Routledge, 2024)
Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)
In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
"Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations" (Fernwood Publishing, 2024)
We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
William A. Selby, "The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next" (Heyday Books, 2024)
Often stereotyped as the land of unflaggingly perfect weather, California has a world-renowned reputation for sunny blue skies and infinitely even-keeled…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Helen Louise Cowie, "Animals in World History" (Routledge, 2024)
Animals in World History (Routledge, 2024) by Dr. Helen Cowie provides a concise synthesis of human-animal relations over time, charting shifting attitudes…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" (Yale UP, 2024)
From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world. By the…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Peter Hill, "River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Peter Hill has been working as a resource manager with a specialty in stream restoration for over two decades, first for Washington DC and then as a consultant…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Dario Fazzi, "Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement" (Columbia UP, 2023)
The U.S. government, military, and industry once saw ocean incineration as the safest and most efficient way to dispose of hazardous chemical waste. Beginning…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Melanie Dennis Unrau, "The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)
Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industries and…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century
From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
David Strayer, "Beyond the Sea: The Hidden Life in Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
Beyond the Sea: The Hidden Life in Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024) is an exciting foray into Earth's inland waters, the remarkable…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Willingness for climate action in South Korea and Finland: A cross-cultural comparison
Climate change is among the most significant challenges facing modern society, and it impacts everyone across the world. How do people in different…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Negative Life
Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay talk about negative life, which names the misalignment of individual and species survival, as a condition of thought…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Brandon Keim, "Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World" (Norton, 2024)
What does the science of animal intelligence mean for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us? Honeybees deliberate democratically. Rats…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)
Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to landfill…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Veronica Strang, "Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis" (Reaktion, 2023)
Jana Byars talks to Veronica Strang about her new book Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis (Reaktion, 2023). Looking to the vast…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. We are…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)
To most of us, weeds can seem nothing more than intruders in gardens, farms and city streets. But the idea of the weed is a slippery one, constantly changing…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)
Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Stephanie Rutherford, "Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)
A wolf’s howl is felt in the body. Frightening and compelling, incomprehensible or entirely knowable, it is a sound that may be heard as threat or invitation…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Joanna Allan, "Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara" (WVU Press, 2024)
As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024)
The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of planetary…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to another--from…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program for…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)
To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as…
- New Books in Environmental Studies
Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert
Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a…