Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Hosted by Dolly & Finn Arne Jørgensen
Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

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 were 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. Tore Størvold – Dissonant Landscapes

    04/09/2023

    Tore Størvold – Dissonant Landscapes

    Tore Størvold, Associate Professor of Music at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, discussed his book Dissonant Landscapes: Music, Nature, and the Performance of Iceland (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 4 September 2023. During the past three decades, Iceland has attained a strong presence in the world through its musical culture, with images of the nation being packaged and shipped out in melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. What ‘Iceland’ means for people, both at home and abroad, is conditioned by music and its ability to animate notions of nature and nationality. In six chapters that range from discussions of indie rock ballads to ‘Nordic noir’ television music, Dissonant Landscapes describes the capacity of musical expression to transform ideas about nature and nationality on the northern edges of Europe.

    56 phút
  2. Bethany Brookshire – Pests

    28/08/2023

    Bethany Brookshire – Pests

    Writer Bethany Brookshire discussed her book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (HarperCollins, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 28 August 2023 . A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don’t expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It’s no longer an animal. It’s a pest. At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It’s not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It’s about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It’s a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest? In many cases, it’s entirely a question of perspective. Bethany Brookshire’s deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves.

    58 phút
  3. Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart – Cooling the Tropics

    19/06/2023

    Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart – Cooling the Tropics

    Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University (USA), discussed Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 19 June 2023. Beginning in the mid-1800s, Americans hauled frozen pond water, then glacial ice, and then ice machines to Hawaiʻi—all in an effort to reshape the islands in the service of Western pleasure and profit. Marketed as “essential” for white occupants of the nineteenth-century Pacific, ice quickly permeated the foodscape through advancements in freezing and refrigeration technologies. In Cooling the Tropics Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi to show how the interlinked concepts of freshness and refreshment mark colonial relationships to the tropics. From chilled drinks and sweets to machinery, she shows how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. By outlining how ice shaped Hawaiʻi’s food system in accordance with racial and environmental imaginaries, Hobart demonstrates that thermal technologies can—and must—be attended to in struggles for food sovereignty and political self-determination in Hawaiʻi and beyond.

    57 phút
  4. Christina Gerhardt – Sea Change

    12/06/2023

    Christina Gerhardt – Sea Change

    Christina Gerhardt, Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and Senior Fellow at the University of California Berkeley (USA), discussed Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 12 June 2023. Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us—and make us see—island nations in a warming world. Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Indigenous and Black voices and the work of communities taking action for local and global climate justice. At once serious and playful, well-researched and lavishly designed, Sea Change is a stunning exploration of the climate and our world’s coastlines. Full of immersive storytelling, scientific expertise, and rallying cries from island populations that shout with hope—”We are not drowning! We are fighting!”—this atlas will galvanize readers in the fight against climate change and the choices we all face.

    59 phút
  5. Charlotte Wrigley – Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood

    05/06/2023

    Charlotte Wrigley – Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood

    Charlotte Wrigley, postdoctoral fellow at the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, University of Stavanger (Norway), presented her book Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 5 June 2023. Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet and, from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too. Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity—and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction. Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost, emphasizing how much more it is than just frozen ground.

    55 phút
  6. Katrin Kleemann – A Mist Connection

    22/05/2023

    Katrin Kleemann – A Mist Connection

    Katrin Kleemann, postdoctoral researcher at the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (Germany), launched her book A Mist Connection: An Environmental History of the Laki Eruption of 1783 and Its Legacy (De Gruyter, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 22 May 2023. In the summer of 1783, an unusual dry fog descended upon large parts of the northern hemisphere. The fog brought with it bloodred sunsets, a foul sulfuric odor, and a host of other peculiar weather events. Inspired by the Enlightenment, many naturalists attempted to find reasonable explanations for these occurrences. Between 8 June 1783 and 7 February 1784, a 27-kilometer-long fissure volcano erupted in the Icelandic highlands. It produced the largest volume of lava released by any volcanic eruption on planet Earth in the last millennium. In Iceland, the eruption led to the death of one-fifth of the population. The jetstream carried its volcanic gases further afield to Europe and beyond, where they settled as a fog, the origin of which puzzled naturalists and laypersons. A Mist Connection is an environmental history that documents the Laki eruption and its consequences for Iceland and the wider world. The book combines methods of historical disaster research, climate history, global history, history of science, and geology in an interdisciplinary approach. Icelandic flood lava eruptions of this scale have a statistical recurrence period of 200 to 500 years; it is crucial to understand their nature so that we can prepare for the next one. An eruption of this magnitude would surely be disastrous for our modern, globalized, and interconnected world.

    58 phút
  7. Matthew Eisler – Age of Auto Electric

    15/05/2023

    Matthew Eisler – Age of Auto Electric

    Matthew Eisler, Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (UK), discussed his book Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car (MIT Press, 2022) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 15 May 2023. Electric cars were once as numerous as internal combustion engine cars before all but vanishing from American roads around World War I. Now, we are in the midst of an electric vehicle revival, and the goal for a sustainable car seems to be within reach. In Age of Auto Electric, Matthew N. Eisler shows that the halting development of the electric car in the intervening decades was a consequence of tensions between environmental, energy, and economic policy imperatives that informed a protracted reappraisal of the automobile system. These factors drove the electric vehicle revival, argues Eisler, hastening automaking’s transformation into a science-based industry in the process. Challenging the common assumption that the electric vehicle revival is due to the development of better batteries, Age of Auto Electric instead focuses on changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions, energy and environmental policies, systems of energy conversion and industrial production, and innovation practices that affected the prevalence and popularity of electric vehicles in recent decades. Eisler describes a world in transition from legacy to alternative energy-conversion systems and the promises, compromises, new problems, and unintended consequences that enterprise has entailed.

    57 phút
  8. Amy Kohout – Taking the Field

    08/05/2023

    Amy Kohout – Taking the Field

    Amy Kohout, associate professor of history at Colorado College (USA), discussed her book Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 May 2023. In the late nineteenth century, at a time when Americans were becoming more removed from nature than ever before, U.S. soldiers were uniquely positioned to understand and construct nature’s ongoing significance for their work and for the nation as a whole. American ideas and debates about nature evolved alongside discussions about the meaning of frontiers, about what kind of empire the United States should have, and about what it meant to be modern or to make “progress.” Soldiers stationed in the field were at the center of these debates, and military action in the expanding empire brought new environments into play. In Taking the Field Amy Kohout draws on the experiences of U.S. soldiers in both the Indian Wars and the Philippine-American War to explore the interconnected ideas about nature and empire circulating at the time. By tracking the variety of ways American soldiers interacted with the natural world, Kohout argues that soldiers, through their words and their work, shaped Progressive Era ideas about both American and Philippine environments. Studying soldiers on multiple frontiers allows Kohout to inject a transnational perspective into the environmental history of the Progressive Era, and an environmental perspective into the period’s transnational history. Kohout shows us how soldiers—through their writing, their labor, and all that they collected—played a critical role in shaping American ideas about both nature and empire, ideas that persist to the present.

    59 phút
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Giới Thiệu

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 were 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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