New Books in Environmental Studies

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018), Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey discuss the genealogy of garbage and how it grew in quantity and changed in consistency in liberalising India. The book also provides us with an exhaustive birds eye view of the technological, socio-political and administrative challenges faced by those who work for a cleaner India. Ian Cook is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest and also the host of Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures. Juli Perczel is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France.  Focusing on the years in and around 1668, Sahlins shows how deeply the king, the court, and the anatomists, artists and writers around it thought with and through animals as Louis XIV redefined royal authority along the lines of absolutism.  Through brilliant analyses of the Royal Menagerie and artistic and scientific studies of domestic and exotic fauna, Sahlins demonstrates how absolutism constituted a radical shift in worldview, not only regarding human animals, but the natural world as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The plight of today’s coal miners has gained significant attention in recent U.S. politics. As coal mining practices and technologies change in the United States, coal miners face job reductions, but their futures are wrapped up in broader national questions surrounding global trade, the environment, mechanization, and deindustrialization. In his new book, Augustana College professor Brian James Leech examines a previous moment of technological change in American mining history that created social, economic, and environmental disruption. In the early to mid-twentieth century, open-pit mining became more common in hard-rock mining in the western United States. The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2018), examines this transition from underground to open-pit mining in Butte, Montana. Open-pit mining required more space, but fewer, lower-skilled workers. Whole communities were relocated, while new environmental hazards developed. The book explores the social and environmental consequences of the transition as well as discussing how the company and surrounding communities reacted to the changes. Finally, The City That Ate Itself also discusses the closing of the Berkeley pit, the largest open-pit in Butte, and its legacy. In this episode of the podcast, Leech discusses open-pit mining in Butte within the context of the United States’ long and complicated history with mining. He explains when and why open-pit mining came to Butte and how the local community reacted. In the discussion, he explains how new technology changed mining and miners’ lives. Further, he answers questions about the effects of the very visible industrial mining space expanding in Butte. We also discuss Leech’s use of oral history interviews as sources, nostalgia for earlier mining days, and the relevance of this history to today’s political discussions about industrial mining jobs. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds beautifully. His book, called Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2016), tells the important and dramatic story of how the creation and development of a regional energy system linked Southwestern metropolitan and rural spaces. The book, Needham writes, “constructs a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.” Needham shows how that system produced and concealed geographic inequality. Post-World War II Southwest cities depended on abundant cheap energy, namely coal, and the primary source was far away in the Navajo lands. In addition to fueling the rapid metropolitan development, those lands also absorbed the majority of the energy system’s pollution. In other words, while city-dwellers and suburbanites consumed cheap energy, the Navajo bore the brunt of the ecological costs. The book would be of interest to urban historians, environmental historians, Native American studies scholars, historians of technology, and anyone wanting to engage in discussions of inequality and ecology. 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

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly recesses of American cities in the 19th century. In the decades on either side of the fulcrum between “miasma theory” and the modern germ theory of disease, Americans typically linked smell with healthfulness, or lack thereof. In places like Chicago, New York and Boston, as industrializing businesses generated ever-greater amounts of noxious fumes, medical professionals, policymakers and ordinary people employed various techniques to follow stenches to their source–not always accurately. In a fascinating urban history that centers around the “invisible sense,” Kiechle examines not only what 19th-century cities smelled like, but how people’s thinking about smells changed and how that knowledge came to change their urban environments. This book is a highly creative and unusual glimpse into a realm of environmental history that is rarely accessible to modern observers. Sean Munger is a historian, author, podcaster and speaker. He has his own historical podcast, Second Decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain. Using the concept of a “food regime” as a theoretical frame, Magnan identifies three broad periods of stability in the relationship between Canadian wheat and British bread: a “UK-centered” food regime from about 1870 to 1914, a “mercantile-industrial” food regime from 1945 to 1972, and a “corporate” or “corporate-environmental” food regime from 1995 to the present. Separating these three periods are two periods of instability, the first including the two World Wars and the second beginning with the simultaneous oil crisis and entry of the Soviet Union into the global wheat trade in the 1970s. Through these phases of relative stability and instability, Magnan traces the institutions that linked the cold, dry Canadian prairies to the cities of Britain, including banks and food processing companies, with particular focus on the Canadian Wheat Board from 1935 until its dissolution in 2012. André Magnan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina. His research and teaching interests include the sociology of agrifood systems, globalization and development, and sociological theory. Magnan has two principle areas of research. First, he has examined the history and politics of grain marketing on the Canadian prairies, with a focus on the rise and fall of the Canadian Wheat Board, one of Canada’s most important agricultural institutions. His second area of research focus is the financialization of agrifood systems. Here Dr. Magnan has examined changing patterns of farm structure and ownership in Canada and Australia, documenting how financial investors of different stripes are buying farmland on a large scale. Part of a multi-year study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, this research aims to understand how new patterns of farmland ownership could affect family farmers, rural communities, and the agricultural industry. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art & Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century (University of Kentucky Press, 2013) is the result of multiple research methodologies including extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival investigation, and rhetorical analysis. The book’s introduction includes a history of tobacco production in the United States along with a summary of changes in attitudes towards the product over time – the most significant shift coming in the wake of the 1964 Surgeon General’s report confirming its detrimental health effects.  Thereafter, the book is divided into three parts. Part One offers a detailed description of the work involved in raising the eponymous crop as well as how that process has changed over time. Part Two, titled “The Shifting Meanings of Tobacco,” is based upon Ferrell’s study of the representation of tobacco – or its non-representation – in the Kentucky Department of Agriculture newsletters from the 1940s up until the time of her fieldwork (c. 2007); here Ferrell shows how the state’s response to tobacco’s fluctuating fortunes played out in rhetorical decisions made manifest on the page.  For example, recent depictions of tobacco farming suggest it has been relegated to part of Kentucky’s heritage rather than its present, despite the state still being home to thousands of tobacco farms.  In the third part of the book, Ferrell combines her ethnographic research with her study of rhetoric to consider what it means to be a tobacco farmer in Kentucky in the 21st century; whereas claiming such an identity in the past might well engender pride and respect, it has become stigmatized and therefore more likely to provoke disdain at best. Partly as a result, recent decades have seen the development of the complex concept of tobacco nostalgia, characteristics of which include mourning the “golden age of the tobacco man”. In addition, Ferrell investigates why “just growing something else” is by no means as simple an endeavor as it sounds. Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century has been widely-acclaimed.  For example, in his review for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Jeffery A. Duvall described Ferrell’s monograph as “an illuminating account of how burley tobacco, once a proud symbol of the economic strength and cultural heritage of the commonwealth, has in recent years been scrubbed from the consciousness and public image of Kentucky, and the impact this has had upon tobacco farmers in the state.”  In addition, Burley received the 2014 Wayland D. Hand Award (awarded by the American Folklore Society to the best book to combine historical and folkloristic methods and materials). Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered. Historian Anna Zeide, in Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), carefully traces how canners convinced a nation of consumers who ate little but seasonal, fresh food to dare to crack open an opaque container of unknown origins and put its contents into their bodies. The feat required reshaping everything from federal regulatory practices and the makeup of academic faculties to the way food was advertised and the genetic composition of peas. When the canning industry has seen its hard-won reputation for providing a wholesome staple of American pantries come under attack from consumer groups and environmentalists starting in the 1960s and 70s, it has doubled down on its techniques of obfuscation, brand burnishing, and regulatory capture. For those endeavoring to reform the American food system, the book is a sobering presentation of just what they are up against. Anna Zeide is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. 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

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature and frequency of material supplies needed to maintain a navy at sea. Unlike the relatively self-sufficient sailing ship, steam-powered vessels had an almost insatiable appetite for coal, requiring resupply much more frequently. Further, not just any coal would do: after extensive tests on the quality of coals from across the globe, engineers found that Welsh steam coal was the essential fuel for Britain’s steam-powered navy, and there were precious few suitable alternatives. These facts, then, shaped the construction and maintenance of a system of fossil-fuel infrastructure that spanned the globe. Gray rounds his analysis out by following coal’s journey from mines, through depots and coaling stations, in lighters, and then into ships holds. He identifies coaling stations as unique imperial spaces, in which naval personnel, administrators, and local inhabitants crossed paths. He considers the innumerable hands and backs that groaned under the weight of tons of black rocks, including indigenous laborers and British sailors. Throughout, he demonstrates conclusively the utter centrality of coal to the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, and hence to the British Empire. Steven Gray is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Naval History at the University of Portsmouth. He studies imperial, maritime, transnational, global and transoceanic history, with particular interest in the material infrastructures of global networks, and how these facilitated the mobility of goods, people, militaries and empires. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art and Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018), is a fine-grained examination of the local reaction to the most serious accident in the history of U.S. nuclear energy. It is also a sweeping study of the construction of arguments for and against nuclear energy and atomic weapons from the end of the World War II to the present. Zaretsky follows that debate through a transformative six-year debate in central Pennsylvania, where conservative activists launched protests that drew heavily from the examples of environmentalism, the antiwar movement, second-wave feminism, the black freedom struggle, and black and women’s health activism. Yet rather than pushing them to the left, their fight with pronuclear forces in industry and government made them more conservative. They articulated an ethnonationalist argument about a threatened nation betrayed by its leaders and illustrated it with ecological images of the damaged bodies of mothers, babies, and the unborn. This “biotic nationalism” helped conservatives paint a convincing picture of the America of the 1970s and 1980s and remains potent today, as visible in the “Crippled America” described by Donald Trump. Natasha Zaretsky is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of American Decline, 1968-1980 (UNC Press, 2007) and co-editor of Major Problems in U.S. History Since 1945 (4th ed., Cengage, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Women’s History, The New Republic, and elsewhere. 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