New Books in Environmental Studies

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

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

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

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

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