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  • Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert

    Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert
    2024/11/27
    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) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Dr. Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. Our guest is: Dr. Sunaura Taylor, who is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners: A conversation about Sitting Pretty Pandemic Perspectives The Killer Whale Journals The Well-Gardened Mind Endless Forms Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    1 時間 9 分
  • Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

    Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)
    2024/11/26
    In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building. American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and steel, which are even worse for the planet. Wood is often the most sustainable material for building, but we need to protect diverse forests as much as we desperately need more houses. Donahue addresses this modern conundrum by documenting his experiences building a timber frame home from the wood growing on his family farm, practicing “worst first” forestry. Through the stories of the trees he used (sugar maple, black cherry, black birch, and hemlock), and some he didn’t (white pine and red oak), the book also explores the history of Americans’ relationship with their forests. Donahue provides a new interpretation of the connection between American houses and local woodlands. He delves into how this bond was broken by the rise of a market economy of industrial resource extraction and addresses the challenge of restoring a more enduring relationship. Ultimately, this book provides a blueprint and a stewardship plan for how to live more responsibly with the woods, offering a sustainable approach to both forestry and building centered on tightly connected ecological and social values. Brian Donahue is Emeritus Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University and co-owner of Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, Massachusetts. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    52 分
  • Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

    Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
    2024/11/23
    In Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024), Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay enact a dialogue between cinema, philosophy, and ecocriticism to tarry with the question of ecological catastrophe. Taking as one of their conceptual points of departure Freud’s writing on negation, the authors elaborate a concept of ‘negative life’ to contest current approaches to ecocriticism predicated upon ideas of entanglement, presence, and connection. In their book, Swarbrick and Tremblay engage critically with a broad body of films—including Kelly Reichardt, Julian Pölsler, Mahesh Mathai, and Paul Schrader—and a range of conceptual paradigms (from antisocial queer theory and psychoanalytic thought to object-oriented ontology and theories of melodrama) to unsettle many of ecocriticism’s foundational assumptions. In this interview, we unpack some of the core themes and organising principles of the book and discuss the nature of collaborative writing. Jules O’Dwyer is Teaching Associate in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    59 分
  • An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

    An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)
    2024/11/21
    Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    34 分
  • Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)

    Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)
    2024/11/08
    From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time. In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (MIT Press, 2024), Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself. With a storyteller’s gift for character, suspense, and detail, Stern crafts a high-stakes narrative that illuminates the strategy, policy, politics, and diplomacy that made Paris possible. Introducing readers to a vivid cast of characters, including Xie Zenhua, Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Bo Lidegaard, chief strategist for Denmark’s Prime Minster, and Indian minister Jairam Ramesh, Stern, who worked alongside President Barack Obama and Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, depicts the pitfalls and challenges overcome, the shifting alliances, the last-minute maneuvering, and the ultimate historic success. The book concludes with a final chapter that describes key developments since 2015 and the author’s reflections on what needs to be done going forward to contain the climate threat. A unique peek behind the curtain of one of the most important international agreements of our time, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement is a vital and fascinating read for anyone who cares about the future of our one shared home. Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society, concentrating on climate change. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State, where he was President Barack Obama's chief climate negotiator. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    1 時間 16 分
  • Adam Hanieh, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market" (Verso, 2024)

    Adam Hanieh, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market" (Verso, 2024)
    2024/11/02
    Oil is everywhere. It’s in our cars, it’s in the fertilizer used to grow our food, and it’s in the plastics used to produce and transport our consumer goods, to name just a few prominent uses. How did oil come to occupy its central position in the world economy? How did corporate power shape the uptake, pricing, and distribution of oil and petrochemicals? And how have changes in oil markets affected broader trends in the global economy? In Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso, 2024), my guest Adam Hanieh tackles all of these questions by tracing the history and diverse geographies of oil. His narratives weaves together links between oil, geopolitics, high finance, the evolution of corporate organization, and the environment. Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is previous books are Lineages of Revolt (2013) and Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the political economy of the contemporary Middle East (2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    1 時間 34 分
  • Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning, "Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

    Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning, "Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future" (Brandeis UP, 2023)
    2024/11/01
    "Climate change is the biggest crisis of humankind. We can’t watch other people drive our future right against the wall.” This is a quote by Luisa Neubauer – the most famous German climate activist. As global climate change forecasts become more drastic and fear is spreading, young activists, like Luisa and Alexander, are taking the floor. Both are young, full of courage and zest for action, they want to infect us with their strength to oppose climate change and to take responsibility for the future of our planet. What does the future hold? When it comes to the climate, the predictions are pretty precise by now. And just as frightening. In this book, Luisa Neubauer, the best-known German climate activist, and the sociologist Alexander Repenning create the history of our future. For humankind is at a crossroads. If we don’t change course now, we’ll eliminate ourselves. Politicians, entrepreneurs, citizens, everyone must take action. But how? One thing is undisputed: There is no planet B. Everyone must inform and organize oneself to save the future. Neubauer and Repenning present solutions that are ready to be implemented and must finally be put into practice. But they also demonstrate the attitude with which we must deal with this exceptional situation: undaunted but level-headed. And unyielding towards those who determine our future. Because the last chance for a positive end to the climate crisis is NOW. Luisa Neubauer became known through the Fridays for Future movement in Germany. She is one of the main organizers of the weekly large demonstrations and has been committed to climate protection since before FFF. She is also a member of the Alliance 90/The Greens party the Green Youth. Alexander Repenning a sociologist who has supported the FFF movement from the beginning. He is also involved in other organizations, such as the Right Livelihood Foundation. He is committed to bringing science and politics back into harmony. Cody Bio: Cody Skahan is a graduate of the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow, and current PhD student at the University of Oxford as a recipient of a Grand Union ESRC doctoral training partnership. His work focuses on the interactions of youth, Indigenous Peoples, and others in the Arctic in regard to environmentalism, particularly in consideration to their diverse and interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures available wherever you get podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    47 分
  • Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    2024/10/29
    As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific. In Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia UP, 2024), Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis. Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    55 分