Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Hosted by Dolly & Finn Arne Jørgensen
  • 0.0 (0)
  • EDUCATION
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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. 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
  2. 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
  3. Joanna Allan – Saharan Winds

    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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. Micah Muscolino – Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People

    10/27/2025

    Micah Muscolino – Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People

    Micah Muscolino, professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History at the University of California San Diego (USA), discussed his book Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 27 October 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 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, Micah S. 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. 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, 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.

    58 min
  7. Marianna Dudley – Electric Wind

    10/20/2025

    Marianna Dudley – Electric Wind

    Marianna Dudley, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanties at University of Bristol (UK), discussed her book Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain (Manchester University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 20 October 2025. There are turbines on the horizon. The blades whirl with metronomic rhythm. With each rotation, wind is transformed into electricity. An energy revolution is underway. Electric wind rewinds to the beginning to explore the rise of wind energy in modern Britain. From the industrial revolution to the aftermath of war, through energy crises and the changing politics of the late twentieth century, we see how energy has shaped a nation – and how a nation is reflected and refracted through energy. Boldly charting Britain through its wildest, windiest places, this book takes us to the edges of land and beyond to think deeply about the role of nature in politics, science and technology. Visionaries and hippies join engineers and entrepreneurs. Traditions and local cultures meet infrastructure and industry in this captivating history. At a time when action on carbon emissions is urgent, Electric wind offers examples, ideas and stories to fuel change going forwards. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in nature, climate change, landscape and the making of modern Britain.

    1 hr
  8. Roy Scranton – Impasse

    10/06/2025

    Roy Scranton – Impasse

    Roy Scranton, Associate Professor and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM) at University of Notre Dame (USA), discussed his book Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 6 October 2025. Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more “progress.” The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We’re incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. Our brains can’t make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s well past time, Roy Scranton argues, to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith in progress. Such unwarranted optimism will only accelerate our collective disintegration. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, history, and politics, as well as film, literature, and personal experience, Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but ultimately hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our unknowable future.

    56 min
See All (189)

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.

Information