New Books in Environmental Studies

Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales.

The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies.

Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr.

Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group.

Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action (Bloomsbury, 2024) helps
us reimagine our approach to environmental stewardship critically
interrogating the problems associated with existing legacies of
environmentalism and how we imagine other ways to addressing the multiple planetary crises.

The
authors cast a critical eye on wealthy and influential environmental
groups that committed to anti-racist strategies in the wake of the
racial awakening of 2020. Yet, they continue to embrace false solutions
like carbon markets and biodiversity offsets, which carry deeply
racialized consequences. By tracing the roots of these misplaced
priorities to detrimental modernity steeped in colonialism and
capitalism, the authors call for transformational changes in
human-nature relationships. They distill lessons from the divestment
movement, which has questioned the fossil fuel industry's moral
standing, and food sovereignty activists, who have mobilized global
civil society to hold agribusiness corporations accountable.

In
these extraordinary times, Decolonizing Environmentalism invites
readers to embark on a transformative journey to embrace anti-racist,
emancipatory, and regenerative approaches to environmentalism.

Prakash Kashwan is
an educator, author, and scholar, whose work cuts across the fields of
climate governance, environmental and climate justice, and international
affairs. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Environmental
Studies at Brandeis University. He also holds faculty affiliations with
the Heller School of Social Policy & Management, and Politics
Department at Brandeis. Before moving to Brandeis, he was a tenured
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Connecticut and Co-directed the Economic and Social Rights Research
Program at UConn's Human Rights Institute.

Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King’s College London. Her
research focuses on global environmental politics with a particular
focus on climate and energy security, climate justice grievances,
international orders and questions concerning security and existential
risks in a warming world. She co-directs the Centre for Integrated
Research in Risk and Resilience (CIRRR) and the Environmental Security
Research Group.
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 relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet’s biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation.

Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law (NYU Press, 2026) showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America’s colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change.Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Savage: The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong
(Cornell University Press, 2026) explores the dark side of colonial
modernity through canine eyes, showing the many ways that dogs
involuntarily contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century Hong
Kong. Dr. Catherine S. Chan follows the piecemeal transplantation of
British animal humanitarianism as pedigree dogs accompanied hardening
class differences, dogmeat became a contested racial issue, and dogs
were roped into the long list of undesirables fabricated in the
so-called golden era of reforms following the social disturbances of the
1960s.

Dr.
Chan reveals a fragmented civilizing project that constructed dogs as
dangerous, filthy, and unnecessary nuisances in a burgeoning city,
rationalizing the slaughter of tens of thousands of dogs alongside
paradoxical criticism of the native population for perpetrating animal
cruelty and the promotion of British animal humanitarianism. Departing
from anthropocentric perspectives in understanding the use of
Britishness in the molding of modern cities, Savage
restores the presence and agency of dogs to encourage a rethinking of
the patchiness of British colonial governance and the long-lasting
repercussions that modernity can have on our relationship with animals.

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

In
a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million
years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are
largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one
of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s
an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars,
crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital to a functioning ocean
and the countless coastal communities that make their living from the
sea. Unlike coral reefs, whose similar plight plays out in tropical
waters highly visible to vacationing tourists, kelp forests thrive along
cold-water coastlines far from tourist centers. What will it take to
stop the decline before these underwater playgrounds bursting with
colorful life become vast fields of lifeless urchin barrens?

For readers who know kelp only as tangles on the ocean surface or smelly mounds of seaweed littering beaches, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp (Princeton University Press, 2026) reveals a thriving three-dimensional underwater world of color
and beauty whose loss if allowed to happen will reverberate in
unimaginable ways for both nature and humans. David Helvarg, a veteran
journalist and accomplished scuba diver, takes us on a memorable journey
beneath the waves through kelp’s natural and human history, the
billions of dollars of products and services it contributes to our
global economy, the unwitting human activities that threaten its
survival, and the hopeful movements around the world to restore kelp
habitat. Helvarg introduces us to Indigenous leaders promoting sea otter
reintroduction, out-of-work urchin fisherman,
documentary filmmakers, and ocean scientists all working in an unlikely
collaboration to restore and protect kelp forests while promoting a
growing range of uses for food, medicine, and energy.

Forest
of the Sea is the first book to document what is at stake if we lose
these irreplaceable marine jewels, helping readers to understand how
these natural systems might adapt and survive.

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