New Books in Environmental Studies

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries. Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship. An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the daily lives. Casey Walsh‘s Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) fills this hole by with a compelling history of bathing, the use of mineral and hot springs, and water politics in central Mexico from Aztec rule to the 21st century.  Through Spanish colonialism, state efforts to police bathing, and capitalist initiatives to appropriate aqueous commons, healing waters have become increasingly commodified and entrapped in infrastructure.  However, as Walsh demonstrates with close attention to popular understandings of health and water, and the efforts of subaltern communities to maintain access and rights to local resources, water continues to be open to alternative, intimate interpretations of its value, powers, and uses.  Rather than a uniform, abstract resource, water is also a plural, heterogeneous substance; appreciating this heterogeneity may help address the water crises of the 21st century. Virtuous Waters is freely available in electronic format here. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century.  Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the Midwest, where the prairie, plowed into “Amber Waves of Grain,” came to signify all the promises of settler colonialism. The Profit of the Earth explains the creation of this arrangement by excavating the ways that farmers, settlers, and, bureaucrats learned about the earth and its possibilities as they sought a living, a profit, tax income, or national progress. In this way, Fullilove demonstrates that the advent of the American style of agriculture grew out of the co-optation and reworking of local forms of rural knowledge. Courtney Fullilove is an Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico. Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In her new book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the University of Melbourne, explores the long history of Australia’s climate, centuries before official weather records began.  As the world’s climate continues to change, Australians will especially feel the more extreme climate impact their lives, economy, and environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Mackay’s life began humbly, immigrating as a child from an impoverished Irish household to New York City where he worked selling newspapers in the streets. Within four decades, he was a stakeholder in one of the wealthiest precious metal strikes in the history of the American West, and by the end of his life was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s fascinating story in The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West (Scribner, 2018). Crouch’s book is about more than Mackay’s rags to riches tale, however. The Bonanza King is also a portrait of Virginia City, Nevada, as it grew from dusty mining camp to mountain boomtown before falling again into relative obscurity. Mackay and Virginia City together encapsulate how the mineral economy of the Great Basin could create and destroy seemingly on a whim, and The Bonanza King is a rollicking retelling of how the man and the place were inseparably linked during the heady days of the Gilded Age West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). But how do climate scientists reach these conclusions? In Philosophy and Climate Science (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Eric Winsberg presents the elements of climate science in an accessible but rigorous framework that emphasizes their relation to a variety of key debates in the philosophy of science: the relation between evidence and theory, the nature and uses of models and simulations, the types of probability involved, the role of values in science, and others. Winsberg, who is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, both explains how climate scientists try to understand the chaotic and complex system that is the earth’s atmosphere, and uses climate science as an extended case study of how scientific knowledge is created and debated before it is used to inform public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writes Darren Frederick Speece in Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (University of Washington Press, 2017). The book is an exhaustive study of the California timber industry and the environmentalists who used a wide range of tactics, from sit ins and sabotage to courtroom battles, to protect redwood ecosystems. Speece takes a bottom up approach to this history, telling the story from the perspective of the myriad individuals on both sides of the battle who shaped Pacific Coast environmental politics in the mid to late twentieth century. Defending Giants argues that historians of environmentalism have focused too much on birds-eye, national-level politics and have missed the important front line work performed by rural activists, who often put their lives on the line in protection of forests at risk of disappearing forever. Defending Giants is also available as an audio book from University Press Audio Books. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Environmentalists often talk like revolutionaries but agitate like reformers. But however moderate its tactics, environmentalism has led Americans to questions rarely asked: Is economic growth necessary? Must individual freedom and democracy be paramount? Can human reason save us? And, especially, are nature and humanity of equal worth? These questions haunted mainstream groups aiming to gain popular support. They have also animated fringe groups, especially in the American West, which are frequently criticized, lampooned, or dismissed. But these are questions that need our attention, says historian Keith M. Woodhouse, author of the important new intellectual and political history of environmentalism’s most radical lines of thought and the people who have fought hardest for them: The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). Woodhouse mines the writings of EarthFirst! and other groups and finds that their insistence on a moral equivalence between humans and nature has, as critics charged, led them to dismiss social and economic inequality and sometimes permitted racist and fascist musings. Yet they also had a demonstrable influence on the Sierra Club and other mainstream groups. And, even more importantly, they persistently foregrounded the importance of humility, doubt, and even pessimism, which he argues environmentalism abandons at its peril. 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

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caffea arabica migrated first to the Arabian Peninsula (which accounts for its being incorrectly named arabica instead of ethiopica), then traveled further to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and beyond, is a fascinating tale. This local plant becomes a global necessity; a tropical variety evolves into the cash crop of Central America, a monoculture of short plants crowded into straight rows. But on its home ground, coffee doesn’t play by these rules. Ethiopians consume 50 percent of their production domestically. “Coffee is our bread.” As it was embraced in the West in the early 1600s, it was regularly condemned by religious leaders in every country. Coffee houses brought people of different classes together, creating conversation and the exchange of ideas. This was dangerous. Not in Ethiopia. The coffee-drinking habit defines Ethiopian culture. Everyone drinks it, all day in small clay cups, and always with others, never alone. It is the definition of community. “Coffee is our bread.” By contrast, the North American bond with the morning cup of joe (Chock Full o’Nuts, Maxwell House) is undergoing a evolution into a pricey “boutique drink” (started by Seattle’s Starbucks and Berkeley’s Peet’s). Four or five dollars for a cup of coffee? But coffee is first a plant, so agriculture is destiny. Due to its genetic vulnerability (Koehler reveals a historical lack of coordination in international research among the coffee-growing nations), it could too easily become the Irish potato of the twenty-first century. Coffee leaf rust, caused by a fungus, is one of its greatest threats. This fungus brought the discovery of the variety Robusta (Caffea canephora) by Dutch growers in Java in the late nineteenth century. Robusta is the wunderkind of instant coffee due to its stronger flavor and higher caffeine content compared to Arabica. Robusta’s tropical durability made it the crop of choice in Central America, but coffee leaf rust has followed it there. When a crop fails, the grower is ruined. Sometimes the only option is to migrate elsewhere. The other enemy is climate change. Increase the growing temperatures by two degrees and production is affected. This also hits water availability for crop irrigation. And then there is man. Will UNESCO’s designation of World Heritage Site protect the Kafa Forest from rampant deforestation? And why did the poet Arthur Rimbaud end his days as a coffee planter in Yemen? Will you now ponder these uncertainties as you sip your doubleshot iced latte macchiato? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies