New Books In Environmental Studies

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Jessica Smith, Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Department and Dean’s Fellow for Earth and Society Programs of the Colorado School of Mines, about her work on engineering and public accountability in energy and mining industries. The pair discuss Smith’s long-held interests in mining and extractive industries, including her roots in coal country; her book, Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility (MIT Press, 2021); her current work on the social and community dimensions of carbon sequestration projects; and many asides about what it takes to study the social dimensions of engineering, including in humanities and social sciences cultures that contain many negative stereotypes of engineers. 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 a special episode that features a conversation between Sonia Bussu and Hans Asenbaum on democracy, capitalism, climate and the practices and prospects of participatory, deliberative and more-than-human democracy to transform their relationship. Can we rethink democracy beyond the liberal-democratic institutions that were created as part of the bargain for fossil-fuel-driven, Western-centric economic growth? What does and could democratic participation look like? What does it mean to include the non-human in our understanding of democracy? Sonia Bussu is Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Birmingham. She researches participatory democracy and in her work she uses participatory and creative methods for research and public engagement. She has led on projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy, youth employment policies, as well as coproduction of research on health and social care integration, and leadership styles within collaborative governance. She is scie

Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, in Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (Lund Humphries, 2023) Dr. Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous environmental history of the period; how their depictions of nature differ from those made by men; and what women’s choices of motifs can tell us about their lives and their relationships to nature. Embroidering the Landscape situates these pastoral and georgic needleworks (c. 1740-1775) at the intersection of environmental and social histories, interpreting them through ecocritical and social lenses. Dr. Pappas’ investigation draws out connections between women’s depicted landscapes and environmental and cultural histo

This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters’ own files, Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America (Island Press, 2025) traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devastation of human lives. We learn that PFAS, the ‘forever chemicals’ found in everyday products, from cooking pans to mascara, are coursing through the veins of 97% of Americans. We witness the pain of families who lost sisters and daughters, cousins and neighbors, after PFAS leached into their drinking water. We discover evidence that the makers of forever chemicals may have known for decades about the deadly risks of their products—because their own scientists have been documenting these dangers since the 1960s. And we see the failure of our government, time after time, to provide basic protections to its citizens.

Why do multinational mining corporations use participation to undermine resistance? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter on a global scale? Why are there so many different global standards in mining? Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations (Manchester UP, 2024) develops a new critical political economy approach to studying extractive accumulation, drawing on three detailed Indonesian cases to explain how participatory mechanisms continuously reshape and are reshaped by community-corporate conflict. Findings highlight feedback between local social relations, conflict, transnational activism, crises of legitimacy and global governance. The author argues that corporate social responsibility, community development, 'gender-mainstreaming' and environmental monitoring are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor mere greenwashing strategies. Rather, participation is a mechanism to undermine resistance and create social relatio

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains — “that

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024) critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for

In The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World (Green Writers Press, 2025), a former Bronx Zoo zoologist and award-winning nature writer, Ted Levin, spent Covid rediscovering his valley and the joys of watching the season pass, day by day by day. The book is a chronicle of his rediscovery of the Thetford, Vermont hillside on which he lived and a recounting of the daily joys of observing home ground as Levin (like many of us) was forced by Covid to stay home for nearly two years. In the end, he sold his home and moved to Hurricane Hill in Hartford, Vermont, which ends the narrative, although he continues the same routine. Ted has been a Naturalist at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and then was a teaching zoologist at the Bronx Zoo in New York.  After studying Ornithology in graduate school, he served as a Naturalist at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich VT … and also was on the faculty of New England College in Henniker, NH. This book, is the latest in a long list of his books an

In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), his vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. In only five years, it may have become the most influential work of climate fiction ever—perhaps right up there with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its thoroughly shocking ability to jump into the political fray. Flanked by Novel Dialogue’s John Plotz, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asks him to reflect on the book’s impact. He bru

The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'sustainability' of human societies. The term's common usage can be traced back to the advent of the Earth Summit in 1992 when 'sustainable development' was broadly embraced by the international community as an ostensibly win-win proposition for economic development, social inclusion, and ecological conservation. Yet both the natural science underpinnings and the social implications of a quest for sustainability have been diffuse. There is a need for a coherent Sustainability: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2024) begins by introducing the concept of sustainability and how it has developed. The central chapters consider four key concepts crucial to sustainability: a) material and energy flows in consumption and production; b) technological interventions for a sustainable society; c) tipping points, and resilience in natural and social systems; and d) renewabilit

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture. Clapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesse

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape. In Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) Dr. María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, in Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design. Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Dr. Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gasp

In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves beyond simplistic understandings of societal turbulence or even disaster, arguing that crises have come to mean something very specific. Where previous analyses have treated economic and ecological crises as separate phenomena, Holgersen reveals their profound interconnection within capitalism's contradictions. Central to the book is the idea that both economic and climate crises are crises of capitalism specifically, and the powers that be are not willing to acknowledge it.  Holgersen delves into today’s economic and ecological crises to demonstrate that they are not exceptions to an otherwise functioning system but integral to its operation. It is naive to see these upheavals as opportunities for reform or revolution. They are the bedrock of the status quo. Fortunately, the vicious circle sustaining capitalism is not founded on an iron law. Our historical mission i

Each day, every single person in the United States, all 324 million, discards about five pounds of waste. Be it a bottle that gets placed in a recycling bin or a piece of paper crumpled and tossed into the waste bin, every bit of the daily 1.6 billion pounds cast-off has a story. Everyone's Trash: One Man Against 1.6 Billion Pounds (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2024) is full of those stories. It will wake you up and give you hope. As the author, Duncan Watson, says, "More people in America recycle than vote. Recycling is more popular than Democracy!" Watson began his personal trash journey in his pre-teens as an attendant at a small municipal recycling center in Northern California. After a brief stint as a child voice actor for Charlie Brown, he spent several years wandering the resource management desert looking for a better paying gig. He has been a restaurateur in his family’s restaurant, and done a number of other stints in the hospitality arena. He has worked at the US EPA, and for the last 30 + years w

On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. Tuomas is joining me to talk about his recently published book, Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier (Helsinki UP, 2024) Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea. It provides elaborate, rich ethnography to make sense of how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labor, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created. The book is the result of hard work: for years Tuomas Tammisto has gained rich empirical research to detail how indigenous Mengen peop

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood (U Minnesota Press, 2025), exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant--of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics--she brings readers into the daily rhythms and intimacies of scientific research and political negotiation. Grounded in her experiences as a climate scientist, an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, and a constant juggler of the many roles and responsibilities of professional moms, Henderson's eclectic, unconventional essays range from observations, confessions, and meditations on lab and fieldwork to a packing list for a trip to the State Capitol and a lactation diary. Readers are invited on voyages

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. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular. Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium by First Nation people in northern Canada, and continuing with the racialist culture of uranium enrichment in the Atomic City of Oak Ridge, in For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering (Anthem Press, 2025) Dr. Peder Anker offers alternative perspectives. It’s a story of how the bikini swimwear came to fetishise the nuclear bombardment of the Bikini Atoll with its celebration of ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’. Our current global warming fears also harbour back to ordinary citizens wondering if atom

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 communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason L. Newton provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape. Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment. Cutov

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: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska Thomas Lynch takes those stories from two places - Australia and the arid American West - to compare how colonial stories have impacted land use practices. By placing Australian and American texts side by side, Lynch tracks the similar ways that settler colonialism played out across two deserts, while also highlighting important differences given the important ecological and social divergences between the two continents. Outback and Out West is also a book about material use. Rather than remaining in the realm of theory, Lynch places himself in the places he writes about, seeing first hand how settler colonial narratives have changed the land, and imploring readers to take concrete, identifiable, actions to nudge arid ecolo