New Books in Environmental Studies

An exploration of the concept of cultivation, as conducted on both
the land and the body, which expands our understanding of it as
practice, aesthetic, and ideology.

In Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control (Yale University Press, 2026),
Jeffrey Hoelle traces the imprint of cultivation across the naturally
growing covers of the land and body—plants and hair. The book builds
from research in the agricultural fields and cattle pastures at the edge
of the Amazon rainforest to domestic landscapes and hair salons and
shops in the frontier cities of Brazil and beyond. In spaces where the
tangled forest once stood, clean pastures and ordered rows of crops now
sit on properties with geometric edges. From rural spaces to immaculate
lawns and cemeteries in the city, the imprint leads to the body, where
hair, like plant growth, is cut, trimmed, and otherwise managed.
Seemingly separate domains of agriculture, landscaping, and personal
grooming are governed by a similar aesthetic of control.

This unique pairing of land and body expands our understanding of
cultivation as a practice and as an ideology that operates in frontier
Amazonia—but also closer to home, influencing how we conceptualize and
interpret the covers that grow on and around us, and our imagined
relations with nature in the future. Hoelle argues that we must
understand this system of thought and the overlooked role it plays in
environmental destruction and social inequality.

Jeffrey Hoelle is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His research explores the social, cultural,
and political-economic dimensions of environmental transformation and
deforestation in frontier Amazonia. He is the author of Rainforest Cowboys: The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia (UT Press, 2015)

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of
Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his
scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026),
Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before
the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state
moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to
incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for
economic recovery. Brodie contends that while the Irish state’s
investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed
to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it
instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability
and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations.
Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s
policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites,
Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of
Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct
investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and
comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.
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Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography.

From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Dr. Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized.

Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.

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.
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"Deep Time," a way of understanding the distant past popularized in the late 20th century by the writer John McPhee, changes our perspective on history. When looked at in the context of tectonic movements long-term climate shifts, human affairs can seem small, even insignificant. However, in Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin: Nature and History Over the Last 10,000 Years (U California Press, 2026), Whittier College professor emeritus Bob Marks explains that people still matter, even within the long sweep of deep time. Rather than shrink human affairs down to nothing, deep time helps us contextualize the places where humans live, die, build societies, and destroy one another. Geology, hydrology, and climate change (anthropogenic and otherwise) are all part of the human story, and vice versa, in Marks' telling. The Mono Lake Basin, as a fragile and unforgiving environment that has been peopled for many centuries, is a perfect place to tell this story of environmental change, environmental degredation and, ultimately, hopeful ecoloigical restoration.
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Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific
and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US.

Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped
dietary and agricultural research carried out in the 1920s in British
India, from soil protection initiatives to studies of diet and healthy
living. It also discusses how a selective interpretation of this
research, which focused on the supposed vigor of one community, the
Hunzas, influenced the organic and lifestyles movements that later
emerged in Britain and the US from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Ashok Malhotra is a senior lecturer in British imperial history at Queen's University Belfast.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.
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