New Books in Environmental Studies

From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American 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

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest. Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas C. Kawa‘s Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests (University of Texas Press, 2016) examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, Kawa highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control–a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explores how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to use tourism and landscape planning to reshape East Germans’ definition of their homeland. He also demonstrates the messy boundaries between state and society, in which East Germans refused to change patterns of pre-World War II nature activities such as hiking and camping; conservationists and the regime found common ground on concepts of landscape management; and environmentalism resulted in a fundamental break between society and the state. The People’s Landscape contributes to our understanding of East Germany’s environmental history as well as to our understanding of the nuances of the relationship between state and society under dictatorships. Scott Moranda is Associate Director of History at SUNY Cortland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study. The global industrial food system grew out of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. In 1914, that system became a weapon of war. For combatant states, maintaining (and disrupting) food supply chains emerged as a major military-strategic objective. Today, all states are caught up in the global food system, but Germany in the twentieth-century provides a unique place to observe its fascinating and often distressing historical permutations, because the country’s history condenses so many modern forms of state (imperial, fascist, socialist, liberal-democratic), not to mention global crises and political caesurae–the World Wars, the rise of National Socialism and its defeat, the country’s division and reunification. Professor Weinreb’s ambitious, wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study also offers a wealth of perspectives on such topics as food aid, school lunches, obesity, the condition of hunger, and gendered labor, among many others. Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century Europe, on the history and politics of food, European environmental history, and on the Holocaust. Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainage would improve the value of the lands in the region, the locals resisted such efforts to disrupt their ways of life through a variety of legal and extralegal means. In response the crown moved from efforts to develop consensus for the plans to asserting royal authority in environmental management in order to start the projects, beginning by the 1620s the first of a series of efforts that over the course of the next half-century drained many of the fens in the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility, once America’s largest producer of plutonium for atomic weapons, including the Nagasaki bomb. The U.S. government spends around $2 billion a year on cleanup efforts at Hanford, which have been the sole focus at the site since its reactors were shut down at the end of the Cold War. Melvin R. Adams was one of the first environmental engineers hired at Hanford as part of a small team focused on environmental issues. Beginning in 1979, his 24-year career at Hanford progressed alongside increasing government investment in more responsible management of nuclear waste and its disposal. In Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Washington State University Press, 2016) Adams recounts engineering efforts to mitigate and control radioactive contamination and offers amusing anecdotes of the characters tasked with cleaning up the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. He also captures the paradox of Hanford, an artifact of the atomic age surrounded (and sometimes invaded by) wild terrain, natural beauty, and flourishing biodiversity. Atomic Geography offers personal and poetic insight into a complex, contested landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The history of humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relationship with the other. In The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Susanna Forrest looks at the various roles horses have played in the development of human civilization and how, in turn, these roles have shaped and determined the lives of horses. Beginning with the evolutionary journey of horses, she describes how the widespread impact of their domestication has virtually eliminated truly wild horses from existence. This domestication was driven by the enormous utility of horses for humans, who used them as a source of energy, as a means of transportation, as tools of war, and as food. In the process they became a unit of measure, a source of wealth, and a symbol for writers and artists of aspects of humanity itself. As Forrest demonstrates through her own investigative travels, the roles of humans and horses in each others’ lives remains visible today, from American farms to Chinese polo clubs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields all reshaped the American landscape and people. In the gulf between growing wealth and the ills of an urbanizing nation, the spirit of Progressivism emerged. Promising a return to democracy and a check on concentrated wealth, Progressives confronted this changing relationship to the environment–not only in the countryside but also in dense industrial cities and leafy suburbs. Drawing on extensive work in urban history and Progressive politics, Benjamin Heber Johnson’s Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (Yale University Press, 2017) weaves together environmental history, material culture, and politics to reveal the successes and failures of the conservation movement and its lasting legacy. By following the efforts of a broad range of people and groups–women’s clubs, labor advocates, architects, and politicians–Escaping the Dark, Gray City shows how conservation embodied the ideals of Progressivism, ultimately becoming one of its most important legacies. Benjamin Heber Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago, and author of Revolution in Texas and Bordertown. He lives in Chicago. Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). You can find her at http://www.loriaflores.com or hanging around Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country who, like her parents, wanted to return to the land. Her subjects are Judy and Larry (her parents), the place they moved to, and the community they helped found. One of many interesting discoveries in this book is the fact that the back to the land movement took place around the country, within the same demographic, and during the same two-to three-year period in the 1970s. The causes? One was the growing concern with pollution described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Another, which deserves fuller examination, is the apocalyptic mood stemming from the atomic threat of the 1960s. Baby boomers remember, with no small amount of incredulity, schoolroom bomb practice (“How would going under my desk protect me?”). The answers that adults had were not reassuring, or they were naive. The younger generation felt imperiled, and adults were responsible. Cities weren’t safe either. By returning to the land, a person could face an uncertain future in a community of like-minded people, in home they had built themselves and that expressed their values. So move this group did, but not all to become hippies. Some formed communes that rejected middle class baggage (monogamy, capitalism, child rearing). Others had advanced degrees, found professional work, and considered themselves “square.” Live in a rural setting and you adopt rural culture: community barn raising (even if it is a geodesic dome), self-generated work (Christmas trees farms, organic produce), shared resources. The author shows that the effects of these communities since the 1970s have permeated throughout American culture. A new kind of fresh food market like Whole Foods and community food co-ops got their starts in such settings. So did recycling (a mainstay of farming culture). Whatever the circumstances that brought them into being, the results have reached far beyond their boundaries and continue to expand our lives. Kate Daloz’s essays have been published in periodicals such as American Scholar. She is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and a consultant at the College Writing Center, Baruch College, CUNY.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford University Press, 2017) traces the history of Qing nature and its environments and institutions by focusing on three case studies from the archival record: the destruction of Manchurian pearl mussels, the rush for wild mushrooms in Mongolia, and the collapse of fur-bearing animal populations in the borderlands with Russia. This is a fascinating story for readers interested in environmental history and the Qing empire alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies