New Books in Environmental Studies

• Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2025)

  From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (U Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Micah Muscolino explores how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and how the communities navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews, Dr. Muscolino demonstrates that for the inhabitants of China’s countryside, conservation programs became part of an extractive mode of accumulation that intensified labor demands and entailed loss of control over resources.Dr. Muscolino recounts how changes to the physical environment played out in villages, on farms, and within households. His multitiered investigation uncovers the relationship between the forces of nature, Chinese state policies, and the embodied experiences of rural men and women. The book also highlights the contestations and compromises that the state’s environmental interventions triggered in rural society. By illustrating how state-building and revolution in modern China altered human relationships with the natural world, Dr. Muscolino shows that examining everyday interactions with the environment is integral to understanding history from the perspectives of China’s common people. He offers a timely reminder that environmental protection cannot come at the cost of marginalized communities’ dignity, interests, or aspirations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your 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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• Stephen D. Hopper, "Eucalyptus" (Reaktion, 2025)

  Eucalypts, iconic to Australia, have shaped art, science and landscapes worldwide. With around nine hundred species, from towering giants to compact mallees, these trees inspire awe and curiosity. Their hardwood has driven industries, sparked protests and even toppled governments. Their aromatic leaves hold healing properties yet fuel devastating wildfires.Eucalyptus (Reaktion, 2025) by Professor Stephen Hopper blends Aboriginal knowledge and Western science to uncover the rich natural history, biology and conservation of eucalypts. It explores their evolution, cultural significance and surprising roles in modern life, offering insights into sustainable ways to coexist with these remarkable trees. Featuring stunning photographs from fifty years of fieldwork, this is the first comprehensive review of Aboriginal eucalypt wisdom, paired with cutting-edge scientific discoveries. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your 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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• Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)

  Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic’s materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic’s saturation. 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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• Ilan Kelman, "Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries" (UCL Press, 2022)

  Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022) edited by Ilan Kelman Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects that should be more prominent in policy and practice. The authors and artists place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes. Given the diversity and disparity of the influences and changes, the book’s contributions connect to provide a more coherent and encompassing perspective of how society views Antarctica, scientifically and artistically, and what the continent provides and could provide politically, culturally, and environmentally. Offering original research, art, and interpretations of different experiences and explorations of Antarctica, explanations meld with narratives while academic analyses overlap with first-hand experiences of what Antarctica does and does not – could and could not – bring to the world. 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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• Arpitha Kodiveri, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests" (Melbourne UP, 2024)

  In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationship between the Indian State, forest-dwelling communities, and forest conservation regimes. The book builds on years of fieldwork across the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha, and Karnataka with forest-dwelling communities, Adivasi and Dalit activists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, to tell a turbulent story of battling for environmental justice. Kodiveri traces the continuing rhetorics of conservation and sovereignty in the forest practices of the colonial and the postcolonial Indian State, the entanglements between the climate crisis, resource extractivism, and eco-casteism, and credits the forest-dwelling communities for finding courageous and creative ways of securing their access and stewardship of forest resources. Governing Forests hopes for the possibility of “healing of historical antagonisms” between conservationists and forest dwellers through a co-productive model Kodiveri calls “negotiated sovereignty”, a governance paradigm rooted in a jurisprudence of care and repair. Arpitha Kodiveri is an environmental law and justice scholar and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College. Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email:[email protected] 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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