New Books in Environmental Studies

Marshall Poe
  • 4.0 (23)
  • Natural Sciences
  • Updated Daily

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

  1. 2d ago

    Leda Elliott, "The Five Seasons Method: A Gentle Path toward Emotional and Spiritual Balance" (Scribner, 2026)

    A gentle yet powerful blend of ancient wisdom and modern wellness that shows how seasonal living can enrich your days. In the Chinese Five Element system, which links nature’s cycles to our emotional, physical, and spiritual selves, there are five seasons: spring, summer, late summer, fall, and winter. You can feel the energy of that fifth season when the air gets cooler, the light turns golden, and we enjoy a few weeks of transition from the active energy of spring and summer to the calming, restorative energy of fall and winter. Leda Elliott grew up in Japan and has long been a student of the dialogue between East and West, between body and spirit. Drawing from decades of experience in holistic practices, Leda has developed a unique method for embracing the lessons we can learn from each season—late summer brings grounding, fall brings release, winter brings stillness, spring brings vision, and summer brings joy. Incorporating rituals, meditations, and exercises attuned to each season’s energy can help us feel more aligned. Things like the foods we eat, the colors we wear, and where we focus our attention can all deepen our sense of connection to ourselves and the world. Leda’s peaceful spirit radiates onto the page in a book offering tips and exercises, personal stories, illustrations, and testimonials from her students. These heartfelt narratives demonstrate how ancient practices can meet the challenges of modern life, providing support for those navigating grief, stress, and fatigue. The Five Seasons Method: A Gentle Path toward Emotional and Spiritual Balance (Scribner, 2026) will help readers of all ages and abilities get their energy back into balance, one breath and one season at a time. Leda Elliott is a Tai Chi Master, Reiki Master, and the creator of The Five Seasons Method, a wellness program that integrates Tai Chi, QiGong, breathwork, and seasonal energy principles to help individuals cultivate balance, vitality, and inner harmony. She trained under legendary Tai Chi Grandmaster Bow Sim Mark and is the owner of A Thousand Cranes Studio, where she offers in-person classes, private coaching, Reiki healing, and global online workshops.  For more information please visit this website. Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and certified mindfulness meditation teacher in Norwood, MA. You can find her on Youtube or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

  2. 3d ago

    Sandeep Vaheesan, "Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping up along the way; rather, he lays them all bare in service of paving an actionable path toward the decarbonization and democratization of power. Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

  3. Aug 18

    Beronda L. Montgomery, "When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy" (Henry Holt & Co.)

    The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy (Henry Holt & Co.), award-winning plant biologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer. Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and 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

  4. Aug 16

    Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys eds., "Media Matters in Landscape Architecture" (Applied Research & Design, 2025)

    Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provides the context for many of the chapters in that the media and methods employed are designed to capture phenomena that are not directly visible to human perception, and where there is a high degree of uncertainty or changeability due to dynamic material conditions. Co-editors Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys bring together authors from a wide range of disciplines—landscape architecture, media studies, science and technology studies, history of science, engineering, ecology, and architecture—to examine how the creation and use of data, images, and models act as the mediums through which a particular understanding of “environment” or “landscape” arises. This framing of environmental media emphasizes the relationships among various design media and the specific material and social environments within which they operate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

  5. Aug 15

    Sophie Chao, "Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger" (Duke UP, 2025)

    In Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke UP, 2025), Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself to be a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being—one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating. In centering Indigenous feminist theories of hunger, Chao offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth. She also considers how Indigenous theories invite anthropologists to reimagine the ethics and politics of ethnographic writing and the responsibilities, hesitations, and compromises that shape anthropological commitments in and beyond the field. Dr Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, and coeditor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both also published by Duke University Press. Land of Famished Beings won the 2026 ASAA Mid-Career Book Prize. Her latest book Plantations: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence (Cambridge UP, 2026), came out in June. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

  6. Aug 12

    Jarvis C. McInnis, "Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

  7. Aug 11

    William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads. The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline. A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay. 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

  8. Aug 9

    Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul, "Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)

    Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest (U Nebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century. 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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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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