New Books in Environmental Studies

The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market-driven price model and the embrace of wind and solar hookups to the grid.
Drawing from case studies such as catastrophic Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2021 and in-depth interviews with people working in the electricity and financial sectors, Dr. Conor Harrison reveals how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Today’s financial firms, he shows, are engaged in the electricity industry beyond matters of investment: they own electricity generation infrastructure, trade electricity on markets, capture federal renewable energy tax credits, and advise on electricity firm operating strategy.
Looking beyond technology and policy, Dr. Harrison interrogates what it means to have powerful financial institutions as the primary agents of change in the fraught and ongoing energy transition. A timely and invaluable contribution to the fields of geography, environmental studies, and the energy social sciences, Brokers of Power is a cautionary account delving into the complexities surrounding the push for decarbonization.
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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With rising temperatures, longer summers, drought, and more wildfires occurring in the United States and Canada, there is growing interest in the impact and efficacy of Indigenous fire and cultural burning practices. Indigenous communities throughout this region known as Turtle Island have long used fire to manage their homelands. An interdisciplinary anthology that includes extensive Native views, Landkeeping: Restoring Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Ecological Partnerships (OSU Press, 2026) provides engaging perspectives on the role of Indigenous fire and its importance to our ecological health, cultural continuity, and land-based kinship.
Indigenous-identified and non-Indigenous allies and researchers in ecology, natural resource management, forestry, ethnobotany, and Native American/Indigenous Studies demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge offers sustainable, relational approaches to land care and resilience. Each chapter builds on the idea that fire stewardship is a manifestation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)—a system of knowledge that is rooted in place, transmitted through oral traditions and embodied practices, and guided by values such as reciprocity, responsibility, and interdependence with more-than-humans. By recognizing that fire is part of a larger cosmology, Landkeeping contributors share how fire stewardship is a path toward ecological balance, cultural revitalization, and just climate futures.

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What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more.

Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute.
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In Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (Norton, 2026), the architect and urban planner Stefan Al asks–– where is a good place to live? His answer In this succinct and eminently readable survey­­­––almost everywhere and nowhere. He begins by showing homo sapiens and their hominid predecessors on the move, spreading across the globe looking for something to eat and a place to sit down. But only in the past ten thousand years after they learned to domesticate animals, cultivate the soil and store grain, could human beings abandon their migratory ways and settle into what we call villages, towns and cities. The author celebrates the ingenuity which made such settlements possible–– the humble brick of mud and straw, sewer and water systems and in the end, electricity and the engines that allow us to live in towers, suburbia or the great beyond. And thanks to powerful heating and cooling systems we can live comfortably (if we have the money) just about anywhere. But Professor Al also points out that “permanent settlement,” ancient or modern, has often so degraded the necessary resources of field and forest and life-sustaining water and air, that even the comfortably settled sometimes have been forced to move to higher, better or safer ground. In truth, wherever you live, you are likely to some degree degrading the environment. But Professor Al, neither a scold nor doomsayer, concludes that if we attend to the useful lessons of past building practices and town planning while drawing on new technology, we should be able to muddle through–– constructing sustainable communities and places where we may live permanently–– more or less!

This episode is hosted by James Wunsch
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They were perhaps an unlikely trio: professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet (MIT Press, 2026), Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018, to the bill’s near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021, to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU with her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too. Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made. Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That’s the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.
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