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New Books in Environmental Studies

Marshall Poe

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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59 episodes
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#1530
Yesterday · 30 min
A Healthy Union: How States Can Lead on Environmental Health with Susan Kaplan (Island Press, 2025)
In the absence of adequate federal safeguards against pollution and toxic chemicals, state policies are the strongest tools available to create safe, sustainable environments. The good news is, around the country, red states and blue states are taking up the charge. In California, state agencies are partnering with disadvantaged communities to measure air quality, reduce pollution, and advance environmental justice. In Texas, a state law requires every school to cut down on the use of dangerous
#1529
Yesterday · 50 min
Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize with Patrick M. Gallagher (Columbia UP, 2026)
Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras—as the country was known under colonial rule—was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize (Columbia UP, 2026) explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in whic
#1528
Monday · 30 min
All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden with Timothy Mowl (Reaktion, 2026)
Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. In a domain long defined by men, women began to play an active role, influencing Humphry Repton and other designers to realize their visions of pleasure grounds. These gardens became stages for al fresco entertainments,
#1525
Sunday · 42 min
Creatures of Story and Song: Tracing Britain's Lost Species with Lee Raye (Reaktion, 2026)
Lee Raye joins Jana Byars to talk about their new book, Creatures of Story and Song: Tracing Britain's Lost Species (Reaktion, 2026). Discover why a beaver was said to bite off its own testicles, why the baleen of a right whale was prized by medieval knights or why you should give your crush the gift of a great auk. Creatures of Story and Song pieces together evocative legends, poems and historical accounts from a thousand years of history to remember fourteen of Britain’s extinct creatures. Mor
#1526
Sunday · 48 min
Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere with Nsah Mala, Richard Watts and Giulia Champion
Through a postcolonial lens, Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (Liverpool, 2025) explores the various ways in which francophone writers, visual artists and activists are responding to the global climate and environmental crises threatening the Earth today.The volume covers most of the francosphere: Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, South America and Polynesia. As well as discussing a range of environmental issues, from soil erosion to nuclear testing, it also considers ways in whi
#55
Friday · 43 min
A Mellified Redemption? Learning to Live with a Pest Through Spotted Lanternfly Honey
Rosi Song of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective hosts authors Eve Z. Bratman and Anna Purchase in a discussion of their newly published research article on lanternfly honey. Eve and Anna bring a social science perspective to their study of the spotted lanternfly. Noting the spotted lanternfly’s arrival to Pennsylvania a little over a decade ago and its spread in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, they highlight the complexity of insect invasivity, its impacts on local economies and e
#1527
Friday · 31 min
India, China, and Climate Change Governance: Leadership and Responsibility in the Asian Global South with Amit Ranjan and Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska (Routledge, 2026)
Can we expect leadership and responsibility from the Asian Global South in climate change governance? India, China, and Climate Change Governance: Leadership and Responsibility in the Asian Global South (Routledge, 2026) is a new book published by Routledge, edited by scholars from Singapore, Estonia, and Poland, explores this intriguing question by examining not only the domestic challenges Asian countries face in exercising leadership and assuming responsibility, but also the international co
#53
October 1 · 48 min
The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire Across China, India, and Southeast Asia with Iftekhar Iqbal (Stanford UP, 2025)
Six great Asian river systems have their origins in the Tibetan glacial region: the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Red and the Yangtse ('BISMRY'). Together they comprise the largest concentration of fresh water on the planet outside of the polar regions, and they support one third of humanity. In the age of imperialism, Western colonial powers dreamed of harnessing the economic potential of these great rivers, as if an ‘empire of men’ challenged a much older ‘empire of
#52
September 30 · 53 min
The Quake That Drained the Desert with Mary Elizabeth Reynolds (U Nebraska Press, 2026)
On May 3, 1887, an earthquake struck near the U.S.-Mexico border. Forty-three people died in Bavispe, Mexico; sixty miles north in Arizona, buildings swayed and a few collapsed, but no one was killed. Today, every person in southern Arizona lives with the underground aftermath of this earthquake: a drained aquifer. The estimated 7.4 magnitude earthquake created a sixty-two-mile rupture, the longest known surface rupture by a normal fault. The Quake That Drained the Desert (University of Nebra
#54
September 29 · 34 min
Do We Really Need To Choose Between Jobs and the Environment?
Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2026). They discuss how the climate and ecological crisis often confronts workers with the impossible choice between the end of the month and the end of the world, but how this choice between jobs and environment is not as zero-sum as it is usually represented. Lorenzo explains how people living near toxic industries often lose both jobs and the environment, ho
#50
September 26 · 35 min
Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of Environmental Impasse with Laurie Parsons (LSE Press, 2026)
Climate action is at an impasse. Its political opponents are stronger than ever, its advocates powerless. Almost every major government and corporation expresses their commitment to tackling climate change, yet decades of discussion, governance, and action have failed to stop carbon emissions advancing to record annual levels. How has so little been achieved for so long on such an urgent issue? In Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of Environmental Impasse (LSE Press, 2026), Laurie Pars
#51
September 26 · 46 min
Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities with yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (U Virginia Press, 2026)
Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (U Virginia Press, 2026) examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical appro
#49
September 20 · 31 min
Damian White and Nicholas Pevzner, "Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Environmental politics is clearly at an impasse, increasingly foreclosed by a fragmenting elite consensus on climate change, an escalating populist backlash on the right, and a pervasive sense of climate doom on the left. This book considers what new openings might be offered by a labor-centered transition focused on our creative agency and our collective capacities to design new worlds. Whilst political mobilizations and smart policy are vital for making progress on decarbonization, Designing
#48
September 19 · 46 min
Jared D Aldern and Theresa Lynn Gregor, "Landkeeping: Restoring Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Ecological Partnerships" (OSU Press, 2026)
With rising temperatures, longer summers, drought, and more wildfires occurring in the United States and Canada, there is growing interest in the impact and efficacy of Indigenous fire and cultural burning practices. Indigenous communities throughout this region known as Turtle Island have long used fire to manage their homelands. An interdisciplinary anthology that includes extensive Native views, Landkeeping: Restoring Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Ecological Partnerships (OSU Press, 2026) p
#47
September 19 · 37 min
Conor Harrison, "Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market
#1289
September 12 · 1 hr 23 min
Billy Fleming, "Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions" (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026)
What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more. Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate cr
#1288
September 11 · 36 min
Stefan Al, "Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home" (Norton, 2026)
In Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (Norton, 2026), the architect and urban planner Stefan Al asks–– where is a good place to live? His answer In this succinct and eminently readable survey––almost everywhere and nowhere. He begins by showing homo sapiens and their hominid predecessors on the move, spreading across the globe looking for something to eat and a place to sit down. But only in the past ten thousand years after they learned to domesticate animals,
#1286
September 6 · 42 min
Stuart McHardy, "Scotland's Geomythography: Myth, Landscape and the Roots of Culture" (Luath Press, 2025)
What can we learn from our landscape? How can Geomythography help us understand our cultural heritage? What is Geomythography? Geomythography is the interpretation of prehistoric and later societies at specific locales through a combination of oral tradition, place-names, landscape analysis and archaeology. The process is a means of finding new perspectives and interpretations to further the understanding of early and extant cultures, the continuities between them and investigating oral traditi
#1287
September 6 · 38 min
Leah C. Stokes, "The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet" (MIT Press, 2026)
They were perhaps an unlikely trio: professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet (MIT Press, 2026), Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 201
#1285
September 5 · 26 min
Robert Shum, "Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy?: Climate and Energy Politics between Crisis and Decarbonization" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)
Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy?: Climate and Energy Politics between Crisis and Decarbonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) tackles a critical question. Why has the world struggled so much to coordinate policy to address climate change, despite political and scientific consensus? Despite landmark agreements and expanding knowledge, emissions have fallen unevenly and progress has repeatedly stalled or reversed. Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy? explains that failure by focusing on domestic politics: h

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