New Books in Environmental Studies

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned University of Cambridge political theorist John Dunn about what the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our alarming low levels of collective political judgement.Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Time cannot be measured in so many coffee spoons, or that is what editors, Dr. Bethany Wiggin, Dr. Carolyn Fornoff, and Dr. Patricia Eunji Kim argue in Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Bearing the marks of radical hope and constructive pessimism, Timescales resembles something-like a twenty-first century manifesto. By Writing, righting, and rioting across pages and disciplines, Timescales enters an entangled plurality of temporal streams with spacial scales that push back against discrete, linear time and atemporal perceptions of Nature. The book’s eight chapters are punctuated by three etudes and a coda, brilliantly organized around Western, classical music theory that embraces heterogeneous scales, variations, and changing tempos to explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. In this creative, intellectual space, the text works to acknowledge that contemporary environmental problems cannot be solved in the same language that created them. Instead, practices and performances require thinking beyond the page necessitating perseverance, reliability, open-mindedness, fairness, and flexibility. By connecting critique in this time of great derangement, Timescales takes an imperative risk creating arts-driven, experimental research with necessarily uncertain outcomes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

John Linstrom talks about the ecosphere, a way of understanding the world deriving principally from the work of ecologist and philosopher Stan Rowe. We also refer briefly to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, crown shyness in trees, Aldo Leopold’s idea of a ‘land community’, Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance and knowledge humility.John Linstrom is a 7th year Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of English, New York University., and series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for the Comstock Publishing Associates imprint of Cornell University Press.The image for this episode is that of red-blue-and-green sea anemones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.Restoration has been a touchstone of United States environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? In Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022), Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for Scientific American, Slate, Environmental History, Environmental Humanities, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and other publications.Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. She is also the creator and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive.In New Rome: The Empire in the East (Harvard UP, 2022), Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically-minded interpretation of antiquity's end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire's densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular "barbarian" invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not.Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire's transformation into Byzantium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Andy Hoffman, the dynamic and innovative business professor at the University of Michigan, about what the pandemic has brought to light to effectively address our many pressing global problems.Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled 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. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021) 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, 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.Interviewer Byline: Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

“An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are the greatest climate risks for the region and where are we in terms of adapting to them? And why are the concepts of maladaptation and climate resilient development important as we focus our attention on urgent climate action?This episode delves into these issues. It also discusses the significance of including references to climate justice, colonialism and indigenous knowledge in the report, to future international climate action.This episode was recorded on 14 March 2022 and covers the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the 6th Assessment Report, published on 28 February 2022.Professor Chow (@winstontlchow) is Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Singapore Management University and an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Lead Author. His research interests include ​​urban vulnerability to climate change, urban heat island science, impacts and mitigation, and sustainability in urban climatology.Quynh Le Vo (@voquynhle) works as the climate campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth Finland. She received a NIAS-SUPRA scholarship in 2021 while writing her master’s thesis on the Asian Development Bank’s climate adaptation projects in Southeast Asia.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

This episode we speak with Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022). Her new book examines the lives of Marind people in West Papua as they are transformed by Indonesian colonialism. These transformations are epitomized in Marind relations to two species of trees: Sago palm, a source of subsistence which is profoundly meaningful to them, and oil palm, an introduced species grown in mono-crop plantations which are destroying Marind lands. While it would be easy to vilify the oil palm as a nefarious symbol of colonialism, Chao chooses the subtler route of describing Marind ambivalence about oil palm, which they see as both the stuff of nightmares and a kidnapped species pressed into use against them by the capitalism and the state. Both pitiful and threatening, oil palm complicate multispecies ethnography, which has not yet fully come to grips with the fact that relationships between species can be violent and exploitative. In this podcast, Sophie talks with Alex Golub about the history of her research, the argument of the book, and changing definitions of 'theory' and 'ethnography' in contemporary anthropology.For more on Sophie and her work, see her website morethanhumanworlds.comAlex Golub is a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies