NB Environmental Studies (2024)

06/07/2022

In ANIMAL CARE IN JAPANESE TRADITION: A Short History (Association for Asian Studies, Inc. (AAS)), W. Puck Brecher offers a brief overview of animals in Japanese culture and society from ancient times to the 1950s. Brecher questions common assumptions about the treatment and care of animals in Japan, correcting ahistorical understandings of the human-animal relationship that have gained widespread acceptance.

The subject itself is fascinating in its own right, but learning about it carries an additional benefit: it helps us challenge two pervasive assumptions about Japan. The first is that Japan differs fundamentally from other, particularly Western, nations. This premise reinforces the view that cultural differences carry greater historical importance than similarities. The second assumption is that societal changes connected to Japanese modernization are of greater historical importance than continuities, a notion that foregrounds modern Japan’s departure from its native traditions and its assimilation of Western ones. This volume’s historical overview of Japan’s relationship with animals does not dwell at length on these points, but its discussion of traditional animal care does enable us to revisit and reassess these issues in a new light. It also allows us to scrutinize Japanese tradition and interrogate ahistorical claims about Japan’s culturally endemic “love” and empathy for the natural world. Departing from existing scholarship on the subject, the book discovers theoretical and practical commonalities between “Japanese” and “Western” approaches to animal care and shows how this partially shared tradition facilitated Japanese modernization. Tune in to the author-interview podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/animal-care-in-japanese-tradition

06/07/2022

Focusing on timber in Qing China, Meng Zhang's new book, TIMBER and FORESTRY in QING CHINA: Sustaining the Market (University of Washington Press) traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? This carefully constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on resource management, early modern commercialization, and sustainable development. Learn more on the author-interview podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/timber-and-forestry-in-qing-china

05/07/2022

In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.

THE VALUE of the WHALE: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press) examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, THE VALUE of the WHALE asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value. Author-interview podcast link ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/how-to-value-the-earth

29/06/2022

Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable.

In DISCARD STUDIES: Wasting, Systems, and Power (MIT Press), Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view. Author-interview podcast link 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/discard-studies

16/06/2022

Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they're thriving, these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean's surface burst with color and life. They sustain bountiful ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. Corals themselves are evolutionary marvels that build elaborate limestone formations from their collective skeletons, broker symbiotic relationships with algae, and manufacture their own fluorescent sunblock. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, damage by humans, and a devastating pandemic.

Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. Alarmed by their peril, she traveled the world to discover how to prevent their loss. She met scientists and activists operating in emergency mode, doing everything they can think of to prevent coral reefs from disappearing forever. She was so amazed by the ingenuity of these last-ditch efforts that she joined in rescue missions, unexpected partnerships, and risky experiments, and helped rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties.

LIFE on the ROCKS: Building a Future for Coral Reefs (Riverhead Books) is an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories. Check out the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/life-on-the-rocks

14/06/2022

The air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Nadia Kim in REFUSING DEATH: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford University Press). Kim spent years interviewing environmental justice activists and other residents of LA’s most polluted neighborhoods to show the depths of environmental injustice in America’s second largest city, and how people in these places conceive of and engage in political action. REFUSING DEATH provides a depth of insight into how immigrant communities define themselves, protect their families, and organize to create a more just environment for themselves and for their children. Tune into the author-interview podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/refusing-death-immigrant-women-and-the-fight-for-environmental-justice-in-la

13/06/2022

In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expedition into that mysterious place.

But it was also, says our guest Megan Kate Nelson, part of a larger struggle over the expansion of federal power during Reconstruction. Hayden would be one of the three men who would strive for control of Yellowstone, and the surrounding territory. The others were Jay Cooke, a Philadelphia investment banker raising capital for the Northern Pacific Railroad; and a Lakota leader known to English speakers as Sitting Bull, who was determined to stop the building of the Northern Pacific. These are some of the protagonists of Nelson’s new book SAVING YELLOWSTONE: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner Books). PODCAST LINK ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/saving-yellowstone

03/06/2022

Our guest for this episode is Chris Gratien, author of THE UNSETTLED PLAIN: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press), a new book that examines agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology. Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Learn more on the podcast ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-unsettled-plain-2

02/06/2022

Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A NATURAL HISTORY of the FUTURE: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species (Basic Books), biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life's overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life's future flourishing is not in question. Ours is. Delve deeper on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/a-natural-history-of-the-future

25/05/2022

When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health.

In AN EMPIRE TRANSFORMED: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press), Kate Mulry examines ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, showing how agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. Give the author's NBN interview a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/an-empire-transformed

24/05/2022

An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, CHINESE ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices (Rowman & Littlefield) brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Delve deeper into the volume on the podcast ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/chinese-environmental-ethics

23/05/2022

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It’s all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson.

Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia. Author of numerous books, his latest is OCEANS of GRAIN: How American Wheat Remade the World (Basic Books). Learn more about the book as Nelson joins us on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/oceans-of-grain

23/05/2022

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In GLOBAL BURNING: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford University Press), Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences. Tune in as Darian-Smith joins us on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/global-burning

23/05/2022

LIVES of WEEDS: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Comstock Publishing Inc.) explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through 8 interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient struggle with feral flora, Cardina shows how weeds have shaped—and are shaped by—the way we live in the natural world.

Weeds and attempts to control them drove nomads toward settled communities, encouraged social stratification, caused environmental disruptions, and have motivated the development of GMO crops. They have snared us in social inequality and economic instability, infested social norms of suburbia, caused rage in the American heartland, and played a part in perpetuating pesticide use worldwide. LIVES of WEEDS reveals how the technologies directed against weeds underlie ethical questions about agriculture and the environment, and leaves readers with a deeper understanding of how the weeds around us are entangled in our daily choices. Give Cardina's NBN interview a listen ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/lives-of-weeds

23/05/2022

Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to q***r-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, q***r and trans theory, and environmental justice, UNDERFLOWS: Q***r Trans Ecologies and River Justice (University of Washington Press) explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington. Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, Wölfle Hazard weaves narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented q***r and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Learn more on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/underflows

18/05/2022

Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. WASTE WORLDS Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability (University of California Press) tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion. PODCAST LINK ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/waste-worlds

16/05/2022

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the "affective infrastructures" emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. Learn more about PIPELINE POPULISM: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century (University of Minnesota Press) on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/pipeline-populism

11/05/2022

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works--that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others.

Instead of thinking of the international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Tune in as Colgan discusses PARTIAL HEGEMONY: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press) on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/partial-hegemony

03/05/2022

Jo Guldi's new book tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the 20th century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands.

THE LONG LAND WAR: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale University Press) provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, info rmation technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet. Learn more on the author-interview podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-long-land-war

02/05/2022

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive.

MAKING LIVABLE WORLDS: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press) weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Hilda Lloréns serves as an "ethnographer of home" as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable. Check out her NBN interview ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/making-livable-worlds-1

29/04/2022

In 1997 sixty-two containers fell off the cargo ship Tokio Express after it was hit by a rogue wave off the coast of Cornwall, including one container filled with nearly five million pieces of Lego, much of it sea themed. In the months that followed, beachcombers started to find Lego washed up on beaches across the south west coast. Among the pieces they discovered were octopuses, sea grass, spear guns, life rafts, scuba tanks, cutlasses, flippers and dragons. The pieces are still washing up today. ADRIFT: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea (Unicorn) is a colourfully illustrated and engaging tale, for all ages, of the Lego pieces and the stories behind their continuing discovery by beachcombers and fishermen. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/adrift

29/04/2022

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. BUILDING on BORROWED TIME: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang (University of Minnesota Press) is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life: toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted.

Listen in as Lukas Ley debriefs us on a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it. Podcast link ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/building-on-borrowed-time

28/04/2022

Across the 20th century, Earth's human population increased undeniably quickly, rising from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000. As population grew, it also began to take the blame for some of the world's most serious problems, from global poverty to environmental degradation, and became an object of intervention for governments and nongovernmental organizations. But the links between population, poverty, and pollution were neither obvious nor uncontested.

BUILDING the POPULATION BOMB (Oxford University Press) by Emily Klancher Merchant tells the story of the 20th-century population crisis by examining how scientists, philanthropists, and governments across the globe came to define the rise of the world's human numbers as a problem. Check out the author's NBN interview 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/building-the-population-bomb

27/04/2022

In PLANETARY LONGINGS (Duke University Press), cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. PODCAST LINK ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/planetary-longings

NB Environmental Studies

06/07/2022

06/07/2022

05/07/2022

29/06/2022

16/06/2022

14/06/2022

13/06/2022

03/06/2022

02/06/2022

25/05/2022

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