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New Books in Environmental Studies

Marshall Poe
New Books in Environmental Studies
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  • Myles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025)
    In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2025), solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar’s extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradicate the constitutive tensions of racial capitalism. As a corrective to this virtual world, Lennon calls for an equitable energy transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: one’s haptic care for their local environment; the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor; and the sublime affect of the sun. Myles Lennon is Dean's Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University. Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP). 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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  • Rachel Killean and Lauren Dempster, "Green Transitional Justice" (Routledge, 2025)
    In this episode, host Alex Batesmith sits down with Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Lauren Dempster to discuss their groundbreaking new book, Green Transitional Justice (Routledge, 2025). The conversation explores the urgent need to rethink transitional justice (TJ) in light of the environmental crises facing post-conflict societies. Dr Killean and Dr Dempster begin by explaining what drew them to the intersection of TJ and environmental harm. Their book emerges from a shared concern that traditional TJ mechanisms—designed to address human rights violations in post-conflict settings—have largely ignored the profound and lasting harms inflicted on Nature. They deliberately use the term “harms against Nature” to signal a shift away from anthropocentric language and to foreground the agency and value of the natural world. The book is structured around four major critiques of the TJ field. First, the authors argue that knowledge production in TJ is shaped by Eurocentric and neocolonial perspectives, often marginalising Indigenous and feminist epistemologies. They advocate for a more inclusive approach that recognises lived experience, interconnectivity, and the importance of naming environmental harm. Second, they critique the dominance of “anthropocentric legalism” in TJ—where legal frameworks and human rights discourses prioritise human victims and overlook ecological damage. This, they argue, limits the field’s ability to respond meaningfully to environmental destruction. The third critique addresses how TJ mechanisms often leave structural inequalities intact. Concepts like “slow violence” and “crimes of the powerful” help illuminate how environmental harms are ongoing and systemic, not just episodic. The authors call for a shift toward transformative environmental justice, drawing on thinkers like Nancy Fraser to propose a model that includes redistribution, recognition, and representation. Finally, the book challenges the neoliberal underpinnings of TJ, particularly its alignment with economic growth and extractivism. Instead, Killean and Dempster explore alternative worldviews—buen vivir, Ubuntu, and ecological swaraj—that offer more holistic, communitarian approaches to justice. In closing, the authors outline six guiding principles for “greening” TJ, including decolonising justice, recognising non-human victimhood, and rejecting neoliberal inevitability. While acknowledging the challenges of such a radical reimagining, they remain hopeful that the field can evolve to meet the intertwined needs of people and planet. Alex Batesmith is an Associate Professor in Legal Professions in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor. His University of Leeds profile page can be found here Bluesky: @batesmith.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/batesmith/ His recent publications include: ‘“Closeted” Cause Lawyers in Authoritarian Cambodia’ (with Kieran McEvoy) Law and Society Review (2025) 1-33 DOI:10.1017/lsr.2025.29 (open access) “Cambodia and the progressivist ‘imaginary’: The limitations of international(ised) criminal tribunals as mechanisms for implementing human rights” in Louisa Ashley and Nicolette Butler (eds), The Incoherence of Human Rights in International Law: Absence, Emergence and Limitations (Routledge, 2024 ISBN13: 978-1-032638-03-4) “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024 ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) 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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  • Judith Scheele, "Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara" (Basic Books, 2025)
    What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home. Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region to the religions, languages, and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this landmark book tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all. Judith Scheele is a social anthropologist with a special interest in the Sahara and neighbouring areas. She has carried out long-term fieldwork in Algeria, Mali and Chad. Her research focuses on exchange, mobility, and local and regional interdependence, with the aim of developing a comparative framework that would allow us to analyse the Sahara as a region, in drawing on its own ethnographic and historical categories. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge by Diana Davis A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 by Bruce Hall Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe by Ruben Andersson 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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  • Kelsea Best, Kayly Ober, Robert A. McLeman, "Migration and Displacement in a Changing Climate" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate change and its implications for voluntary migration, involuntary displacement, and immobility by providing examples from around the world. The chapters use the latest findings from the natural and social sciences to identify key interactions shaping current climate-related migration, displacement, and immobility; predict future changes in those patterns and methods used to model them; summarize key policy and governance instruments available to us to manage the movements of people in a changing climate; and offer directions for future research and opportunities. The book provides insights into how migration responses differ for slow- and rapid-onset climate-related hazards (including sea level rise, drought, flooding, tropical cyclones, wildfires, and others) It contributes to ongoing international discussions on the topic, which in recent years have emerged as key to UNFCCC negotiations and the UN Human Rights tribunal, and the subject of a special white paper commissioned by the White House in 2021 Finally, the book provides the most current synthesis of the state of knowledge in areas of theory, methodology, and policy considerations for climate-related migration and displacement, and will serve as a go-to resource on the subject This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. 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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  • Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)
    The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austin is an exploration of how the rising power and profits of Wall Street underpin the contemporary increases in and inadequate responses to vector-borne disease. Over the past fifty years, insects have transmitted infectious diseases to humans with greater frequency and in more unexpected places. To examine this phenomenon, Dr. Kaup and Dr. Austin take readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda. Through these case studies, the authors illuminate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world. 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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