New Books in Environmental Studies Marshall Poe

Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth (Seven Stories Press, 2023) is a hopeful and critical resource that makes a convincing and detailed case that there is a path forward to save our environment. Illustrating the power of committed individuals and the necessity for collaborative government and private-sector climate action, the book focuses on three essential areas:


The technological dimension move to 100% clean renewable energy as fast as we possibly can through innovations like clean-steel, "green" cement, and carbon-reuse companies;


The ecological dimension enhance and protect natural ecosystems, forests, and agricultural lands to safely store greenhouse gases and restore soils, transforming how we grow, process, and consume food;


The social dimension update and create new laws, policies and economic measures to recenter human values and reduce environmental and social injustice.


Based on more than 6 years of research, Berger traveled the nation and abroad to interview governors, mayors, ranchers, scientists, engineers, business leaders, energy experts, and financiers as well as carbon farmers, solar and wind innovators, forest protectors, non-profit leaders, and activists.
With real world examples, an explanation of cutting-edge technologies in solar and wind, and political organizing tactics, Solving the Climate Crisis provides a practical road map for how we effectively combat climate change. Replacing the fossil-fuel system with a newly invigorated, modernized, clean-energy economy will produce tens of millions of new jobs and save trillions of dollars. Protecting the climate is thus potentially the greatest economic opportunity of our time.
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Britain is a nation of gardeners; the suburban garden, with its roses and privet hedges, is widely admired and copied across the world. But it is little understood how millions across the nation developed an obsession with their colourful plots of land.
Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain (Reaktion, 2024) by Michael Gilson explores the history of this development and how, despite their stereotype as symbols of dull, middle-class conformity, these new open spaces were seen as a means to bring about social change in the early twentieth century. Gilson restores to the story a remarkable but long-forgotten figure, Richard Sudell, who spent a lifetime ‘evangelising’ that the garden be in the vanguard of progress towards a new egalitarian society with everyday beauty at its centre.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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Antarctica is, and has always been, very much “for sale.” Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavours. Their lectures, narratives, photographs, and films were essentially advertisements for their adventures. At the same time, popular media began to use the newly encountered continent to draw attention to commercial products. These advertisements both trace the commercialization of Antarctica and reveal how commercial settings have shaped the dominant imaginaries of the place.
By contextualising and analysing Antarctic advertisements from the late nineteenth century to the present, Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen identifies five key framings of the South Polar continent: a place for heroes, a place of extremity, a place of purity, a place to protect, and a place that transforms. Demonstrating how these conceptual framings of Antarctica in turn circulate through our culture, Dr. Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen challenges common assumptions about Antarctica’s past and present, encouraging readers to rethink their own relationship with the Far South.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2023) adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.
For a better understanding of this collection and the author, the following books are recommended by translator Dr. Jon Pitt:

Hiromi Ito - Wild Grass on the Riverbank


Hiromi Ito - The Thorn Puller


Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass


Hope Jahren - Lab Girl


Jeanie Shinozuka - Biotic Borders


Banu Subrahmaniam - Ghost Stories for Darwin



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Imagine an environmentalist. Are you picturing a Birkenstock-clad hippie? An office worker who hikes on weekends? A political lobbyist? What about a modern day timber worker? 
This last group is at the center of University of Oregon historian Steven C. Beda's new book, Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country (U Illinois Press, 2023). In Beda's telling, it's timber workers, as lovers of the outdoors who also rely upon healthy forests for their livelihoods, who are often at the forefront of local environmentalism, including organizing at the crossroads of labor and environmental activism. From the late 19th century onwards, timber works imbued the Pacific Northwest with a sense of place inaccessible to upper-class Northern California newcomers who changed the region's cultural and political calculus in the late 20th century. We live in a timber society, Beda argues, and no one knows what that means nearly as much as the workers who turn trees into books like this.
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Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya (University of Toronto Press, 2024) tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism.
The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired wild species; rewilding landscapes with more desirable species to settler ecologists; selectively repeopling wilderness to create seemingly more inclusive wild spaces and capitalize on biocultural diversity; rescuing injured animals and species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extending settler ecologies through landscape approaches to conservation that scale wild spaces.
Settler Ecologies serves as a cautionary tale for future conservation agendas in all settler colonies. While urgent action is needed to halt global biodiversity loss, this book underscores the need to continually question whether the types of nature being preserved advance settler colonial structures or create conditions in which ecologies can otherwise be (re)made and flourish.
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