Recurring tropes about fragmented communities living on frontier forestlands living in Southeast Asia are that they are either guardians of flora and fauna their destroyers. In much analysis gravitating to one or other position in this dichotomy the role of organised religion is absent. But as Faizah Zakaria shows in The Camphor Tree and the Elepha…

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Ar…

As consumers become increasingly aware of the animal agriculture industry’s cruelty and environmental devastation, clever industry marketers are adapting with alternative “humane” and “sustainable” labeling and marketing campaigns. In the absence of accurate information, it has never been more important to educate consumers on the realities behind …

This is part #3 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast mini-series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the last episode of the (ir)Rational Alaskans, Riki Ott, Linden O’Toole, and thousands of other Alaskan fishers won over $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In our finale,…

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, mor…

In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises how international courts and tribunals may respond procedurally to an ever-growing list of environmental disputes. In a time of environmental crisis, she lays crucial groundwork for strengthening the app…

This is part #2 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Last episode, the spill devastates Cordova, Alaska. In this second part, 12 Angry Alaskans, a jury of ordinary Alaskans picks up our story. They muddle through the most devastating, and most complicated, environmental di…

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility. And yet,…

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs. Displacement has been trea…

After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists…

Bringing together philosophy, jurisprudence, and a deep concern for the environment, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change offers an inspiring and generative way of thinking about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. In particular, Thomas Kearns and Kathleen Dean Moore provide readers with insight into t…

Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social…

How is Yosemite National Park a microcosm for our warming, fire-driven, world? Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne answers that question in Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park (U Arizona Press, 2023). Pyne frames the fire history of Yosemite National Park around a three day hike he and a tea…

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with the land, waters, forests and wildlife. Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400–1850 (Birlinn, 2024) by Dr. Richard D. Or…

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, Hannah Freed-Thall's Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia University Press, 2023) makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and …

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fi…

Operating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World (Penn State University Press, 2019) presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and mo…

Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geographic Society — and the one responsible for the idea to plant Japanese cherry trees in Washington DC. Her fascinating life is expertly told by Diana Parsell in Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journali…

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborho…

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure. For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical force…

Kristin J. Jacobson In her new book, The American Adrenaline Narrative (University of Georgia Press), Kristin Jacobson considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives…

Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and…

American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford UP, 2024) explores the impact of climate change on early modern radical religious groups during the height of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Focusing on the life and legacy of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), an enormously influential but comprehensivel…

In Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (NUS Press, 2024), historian Tim Barnard and his colleagues offer an edited volume of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into the development of Singapore as a modern, urban nat…

Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in whic…

In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts…

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalisation. Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) by Dr. John Soluri upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesti…

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances…

In this episode we are joined by Thomas Hendriks, an anthropologist studying capitalism and resource extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hendriks' work is amongst the most innovative in the anthropological study of capitalism, drawing upon queer theory, feminist ethnography, and phenomenology to make sense of cutting down large trees in…

The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lam…

In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mi…

Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern Univer…

It's the Cricket Episode! Featuring one of the most egregious decisions ever made in this definitely not real court. Like, listening back, I'm like "how did you even think that that would be the right conclusion to draw" like who even thinks that?! Like seriously! Man, F this S.

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-…

At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024) takes readers on a journey from California tidepools to Antarctic poles, showcasing myriad efforts to research and protect marine environments. Through insightful interviews, oceanographer Tessa Hill and science journalist Eric Simons offer a compelling exploration of …

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and…

If you don't recall the 1976 Denver Olympic Games, it's because they never happened. The Mile-High City won the right to host the winter games and then was forced by Colorado citizens to back away from its successful Olympic bid through a statewide ballot initiative. In The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth (Univer…

Profit ― getting more out of something than you put into it ― is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to disci…

What types of coalitions can deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives? And how can we avoid reproducing unjust distributions of risk and responsibility in urban sustainability efforts? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Arve Hansen, and Manisha Anantharaman discuss these questions by engaging with Anantharaman’s new book Recycling…

In Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Dr. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that intr…

In The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024), Elena Kochetkova examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests. The book explores evolving Soviet policies of wood consumption, discussing how profes…

The Trivial Trial returns in the safest of hands (Judge Jack's), as he sifts through Sebastian's harrowing story, stresses through Raghu's, and delivers one of his "most incredible" (self-proclaimed) deliberations yet. With special thanks to Apple's Jonathan Ive, who catches a sensational number of strays with this episode.…

On July 18th this year, Teresa Barrozo‘s question — What might the Future sound like? — will be opened to global participation. We bring news of World Listening Day, and speak with Teresa about her intervention. We also hear of data archival developments in acoustic ecology. And we speak with Leah Barclay, the editor of Soundscape: The Journal of A…

Heather White brings two decades of environmental advocacy work and national nonprofit leadership to life with her joyful and practical books on tackling eco-anxiety, 60 Days to a Greener Life: Ease Eco-Anxiety through Joyful Daily Action (Harper Horizon, 2024) and One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet (Harper Horizon,…

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green-washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. Tad DeLay's Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (Verso, 2024) draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical the…

An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts. Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusett…

A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) tells the stor…

Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition. The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Chan…

In this episode of International Horizons, Professor Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and Professor in the School of International Service at American University, discusses with RBI Director John Torpey her approach to dealing with the climate crisis. Fisher explains how the climate crisis is really a …

Today’s book is: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024), by Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, which takes readers beneath the waves and along the coasts, to explore how climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. The world’s oceans are changing at a…