Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Hosted by Dolly & Finn Arne Jørgensen
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The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

  1. K. G. Hutchins - A Song for the Horses

    FEB 16

    K. G. Hutchins - A Song for the Horses

    Kip Hutchins, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College (USA), discussed his book A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia (University of Arizona Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 16 February 2026. As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency.  Hutchins’s ethnographic research, spanning more than a decade, provides a vivid and intimate portrayal of Mongolian life. Musicians use the morin khuur, or ‘horse fiddle,’ to engage with the subjectivities and agencies of nonhuman animals and other beings. This work is a significant contribution to the posthuman turn in social sciences, engaging with theories from prominent scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.  As climate change continues to impact communities worldwide, this book offers a unique perspective on how cultural heritage can be mobilized to address environmental challenges, providing valuable lessons for global efforts to build sustainable and resilient futures. At the intersection of music, environment, and posthumanism, A Song for the Horses shows how Mongolian musicians use cultural traditions to imagine and build toward alternative futures beyond climate change and neoliberalism.

    57 min
  2. Christopher Jones - The Invention of Infinite Growth

    FEB 2

    Christopher Jones - The Invention of Infinite Growth

    Christopher Jones, associate professor of history at Arizona State University (USA), discussed his book The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 2 February 2026. Most economists believe that growth is the surest path to better lives. This has proven to be one of humanity’s most powerful and dangerous ideas. It shapes policy across the globe, but it fatally undermines the natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. How did we get here? In The Invention of Infinite Growth, environmental historian Christopher F. Jones takes us through two hundred and fifty years of economic thinking to examine the ideal of growth, its powerful influence, and the crippling burdens many decisions made in its name have placed on us all. Jones argues that the pursuit of growth has never reflected its costs, because economists downplay environmental degradation. What’s worse, skyrocketing inequality and diminishing improvements in most people’s well-being mean growth too often delivers too little for too many. Jones urges economists to engage more broadly with other ways of thinking, as well as with citizens and governments to recognize and slow infinite growth’s impact on the real world.  Both accessible and eye-opening, The Invention of Infinite Growth offers hope for the future. Humans have not always believed that economic growth could or should continue, and so it is possible for us to change course. We can still create new ideas about how to promote environmental sustainability, human welfare, and even responsible growth, without killing the planet and ourselves.

    56 min
  3. Katja Bruisch - Burning Swamps

    JAN 26

    Katja Bruisch - Burning Swamps

    Katja Bruisch, Ussher Assistant Professor in Modern Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), discussed her book Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 26 January 2026. This groundbreaking environmental history recounts the story of Russia’s fossil economy from its margins. Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world’s peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.

    54 min
  4. Isabelle Gapp - A Circumpolar North

    JAN 19

    Isabelle Gapp - A Circumpolar North

    In our first episode of Season 7, Isabelle Gapp, Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History and Co-Director of The Centre for the North at University of Aberdeen (UK), discussed her book A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (Lund Humphries, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 19 January 2026. A Circumpolar Landscape demonstrates that Canadian and Scandinavian landscape painting reaches far beyond national identity and a preoccupation with Eurocentrism. This study brings together the work of Emily Carr, the Canadian Group of Seven, Anna Boberg, and Gustaf Fjaestad among others, with each chapter highlighting the high level of interactivity between artists and the environment. Simultaneously, this book highlights the lack of awareness of the respective ecosystems in which many of these works were produced. Working around northern hemispheric latitudinal lines, this book considers how a similar ecology and topography - orientated around the themes of forests, wilderness, lakes, mountains, aurorae, and ice – was depicted and is shared across these northern landscapes. This powerful and timely book takes these respective art histories in the direction of the environmental humanities and an ecocritical art history, recognising the broader transnational and ecological framework of the Circumpolar North.

    58 min
  5. Nathan K. Hensley – Action Without Hope

    12/08/2025

    Nathan K. Hensley – Action Without Hope

    Nathan K. Hensley, Professor of English at Georgetown University (USA), discussed his book Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 December 2025. What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot’s characters in Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done? To answer this question, Hensley shows that nineteenth-century writers and artists devised new ways to understand action—and hope. They rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. They turned away from logical proofs and direct argumentation and instead called on aesthetic technologies like sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches, and vast, multiplot novels, finding scope for action not at the level of the theme or the thesis but in gestures and details. Ranging from J. M. W. Turner’s painterly technique to Emily Brontë’s dreamlike fragments (and reading along the way works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Berryman, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti), Hensley’s study makes an important contribution to Victorian studies and the environmental humanities.

    55 min

  6. 12/01/2025

    Joanna Allan – Saharan Winds

    Joanna Allan, Associate Professor in global development at Northumbria University, UK, discussed her book Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara (West Virginia University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 1 December 2025. As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as landgrabs, colonial dispossession, and environmentally destructive practices. Changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help us ensure a globally just wind energy future.  Saharan Winds contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries—how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind—in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.

    56 min
  7. Dominic Hinde – Drifting North

    11/17/2025

    Dominic Hinde – Drifting North

    Dominic Hinde, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, discussed his book Drifting North: Finding a sustainable future in Scotland’s past (Manchester University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 17 November 2025. Past and future collide in this engaging journey through climate change, fossil capitalism and the struggle for a sustainable world. Scotland’s history and future are entangled with climate change and the story of the modern world. This small country on the fringes of northern Europe pioneered fossil capitalism and played a key role in its spread across the planet. It is a living museum of the crisis of the west, of deindustrialisation, stagnation and the struggle to build a better future from the ashes. Journalist and sociologist Dominic Hinde travels from the treeless Highlands to the lowland cities, struggling to balance memories with aspiration. Through this journey he finds that his own sensory turmoil, shaped by recovery from a near fatal accident, mirrors the disarray of the fossil fuel transition – an uncertain passage between what was and what must be. Part memoir, part environmental history, part travelogue, this is a compelling narrative of connections – to place, energy and the possibility of renewal. Through the lens of one country, it asks a vital question: can the lessons of the past help us build a more sustainable future?

    55 min
  8. Dolly Jørgensen – Ghosts Behind Glass

    11/10/2025

    Dolly Jørgensen – Ghosts Behind Glass

    Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History at University of Stavanger (Norway) and co-host of the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks, presented her own book Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in conversation with co-host Finn Arne Jørgensen and special co-host Ellen Arnold on Monday, 10 November 2025. While it’s no longer possible to encounter a dodo in the wild, we can still come face-to-face with them in museums. The remains of extinct species—whether taxidermied, skeletal, drawn, or sculpted—stare back at us from display cases.   In this moving meditation on what’s lost and what endures, environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen visits natural history collections worldwide—from Shanghai to Philadelphia, from Edinburgh to Hobart, Australia—to understand the many ways that museums tell stories about extinction. She encounters extinct animals that are framed as cultural artifacts and as rare valuables, that are memorialized with lists, and that are brought to life through augmented reality. She draws our attention to creatures with prominent afterlives—passenger pigeons, giant moas, thylacines—as well as those that are less likely to be discussed or displayed. Throughout, Jørgensen examines the relationship between museums and the natural world, so readers can look more closely at exhibits about extinction, studying the displays for what is there, as well as what is missing. During a period of rapid species loss driven by humanity’s environmental impact, Ghosts Behind Glass asks what we can learn about our world from the presence of the extinct.

    1 hr
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About

The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

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