New Books in Environmental Studies

Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) that brings together multiple perspectives on Russian and Soviet environmental history. Starting with the story of two dams built 150 years apart, Breyfogle discusses both continuity and change in how Russian and Soviet citizens and its various governments viewed the environment. The focus of the volume is contextualizing and “de-exceptionalizing” Russia and the USSR by placing Russian and Soviet environmental history in a global context as well as demonstrating how the environment can profoundly impact the course of human history.  Listen in as we discuss both the tragedies and triumphs of Russian and Soviet environmental policies, ecology and conservation, such as dam building, collectivization, industrialization, eco-tourism and the rise of the Soviet environmental movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018) is an absorbing look at the multiple and changing ways that waste—of resources, possessions, time, money, etc.—has been conceptualized in Japan since 1945. More than a history of garbage and waste disposal, Waste is a look at the aspirations and discontents of a rapidly changing society in which waste has been everything from an existential threat to a critical part of the “bright,” good life of the affluent and aspirational middle classes. Siniawer is attentive to the socioeconomic contexts of waste, from the poverty of the first postwar decade to the boom years of the 1960s, from the traumatic oil shocks of the 1970s to the roaring and opulent bubble years of the 1980s, and then into the post-bubble reckoning with waste in a slow-growth era and beyond. The book ranges widely, beginning with early postwar admonitions against waste, following the development of an ideology (and economy) of leisure and “affluence of the heart,” and tracing both the rise of ecological consciousness and Japan’s progressive recycling and solid waste management systems and the coming of the post-2000 decluttering movement. Peppered throughout with delightful and illustrative examples from period sources and always conscious of historical continuities and discontinuities, Waste is not just a story about waste consciousness in postwar Japan, but a story about the ways that we make meaning in our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) Dr. Rosalind Fredericks illuminates the history of state-citizen relations and economic and political restructuring in Dakar by focusing on the city’s complex history of garbage collection in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from activist clean-up movements to NGO-led development projects to massive sanitation worker strikes. She pays particular attention to the themes of generation, gender, and religion in her analysis of the ways in which people become integrated into the infrastructural life of the city; in so doing, she invites us to expand our understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. This fascinating book will be useful not only for anthropologists, cultural geographers, and scholars of West Africa, but also for anyone interested in the emerging interdisciplinary fields of new materialism and discard studies.Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural, Perrin Selcer shows just how recent its origins actually are. In his innovative new book, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth(Columbia University Press, 2018), Selcer investigates how cosmopolitan scientists in the post-WWII era attempted and failed to build a social-democratic world community, but, in the process, constructed the category of the “global environment.” Also in that process, they cobbled together a transnational community of experts and a global knowledge infrastructure in specialized UN bodies, such as Unesco and the Food and Agriculture Organization, that helped make the global environment knowable. The book will interest a broad range of scholars, including historians of global institutions, environmental studies scholars, historians of science, and anyone that wants to historicize the categories that are closest to us.Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th-century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other related questions, discussing both why and how the Chinese state has today managed to make itself so forcefully present so far from the country's heartlands.Kinzley's fascinating new resource-centric perspective on the state incorporation of Xinjiang retrains our eyes on the material and physical dimensions to politics, showing how treasured items from oil to tungsten have attained a totemic political role as “a critical but largely overlooked factor in shaping the region’s connections to China, regional neighbours and indeed the world” (p.7). Deftly handling its multilingual and multi-perspectival scholarship, 'Natural Resources and the New Frontier' accounts for how successive ‘layers’ left by state and non-state actors - Chinese and Russian as well as British - have institutionalised the presence of outside actors in Xinjiang over time. These dynamics, Kinzley shows, also underlie much of the discord evident between Han Chinese immigrants and indigenous Turkic groups in this troubled region today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

None of the climate news that we’re getting is good right now, especially now that a number of governments are reversing or failing to meet commitments they made as part of the Paris Climate Accord. One of the challenges facing human societies and the planet is the issue of aridification. As freshwater is depleted and unsustainable agricultural practices place more stress on soil than can be supported, an increasing amount of land is being lost to erosion, a process that will only become worsen as the planet heats up in the coming decades. Despite plentiful information and awareness, most of the solutions that have been offered up have failed to meaningfully stop the damage being done to the planet.In Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2018), Hannah Holleman  looks at the Dust Bowl as one of the first manmade global environmental catastrophes. She begins by noting its manmade dimensions and the underlying forces that helped to create it as well as similar catastrophes across the globe. The underlying forces of imperialism and white supremacy fed the seizure of land from indigenous populations everywhere. White policymakers were aware of the environmental damage that was being wrought, but were unwilling to revise their behavior in a way that would undermine property or profit, which shaped both the New Deal and contemporary responses to climate change such as the Paris Climate Accord. To avoid further catastrophe, people all over the world must seek more radical solutions."The Dust Bowl continues to haunt, inspire, and teach us — but as this book shows, we have missed its most profound and far-reaching implications. Unearthing a wealth of new sources, and pulling together disparate analytical threads, Holleman tells a story of global ecological crisis — then and now — rooted in global systems of domination and extraction. A tour de force of engaged scholarship from an exhilarating new voice."—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes EverythingZeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming.  Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse.  With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for sustainability.  Instead, they propose an ethos of co-existence that is receptive to how different societies and cultures interpret catastrophe.  A pluralistic approach to the Anthropocene, they suggest, may allow us to achieve environmental sustainability while honoring human dignity and justice.Amanda Lynch is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.Siri Veland is Senior Researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying website for educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state. James Morton Turner is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. His first book was the award-winning The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Washington Press, 2012). Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. His previous books includes Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013), Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wing, 2005), and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land. Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies