New Books in Environmental Studies

As many as ten thousand people attempt to illegally cross the border
between the US and Mexico each month, braving deserts, rivers, and other
environmental hazards in the process. But the very illegality of that
crossing has an environmental history, writes Penn State University
assistant professor Mary Mendoza in Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border
(University of North Carolina Press, 2026). It was diseases, microbes,
insects, and animals which, in part, hardened the border from a porous
array of landscapes into the militarized zone seen on the news every
night. However, despite the ecological and political difficulties of
doing so, people continue to cross the border between the two countries,
defying environmental odds and risking death along the way. In Deadly Divide,
Mendoza explains why, underscores the risks involved, and shows how we
got to this point, keeping an eye on the border region's stark landscape
with every step of the way.
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Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data
(University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through
this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global
computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological
development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an
ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and
marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes
the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform
capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote
regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers
that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with
compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses,
Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the
growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking
down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes
visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird
today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of
the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban
space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

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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Stove
improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient”
biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to
find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or
repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a
central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to
use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India (University of Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Meena Khandelwal argues that the supposedly obsolete
chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed
to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the
new is not a failure to embrace new technologies
but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha
is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate
matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and
accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also
depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a
local, do-it-yourself technology.

Dr.
Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with
engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social
theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a
range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and
environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies
(STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research
but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.

Cookstove Chronicles
critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of
the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at
development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior.

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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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Anyone
alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of
species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of
ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or
as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass
extinction?

Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s
not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth
century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of
God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil
evidence to determine
that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a
lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans.
Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to
pervasive, and even inevitable.

Yet Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s
a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans
and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural
process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations
from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die
out from imperial expansion.

Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished
weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking
storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a
human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

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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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio and Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton’s Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In the third panel, Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne discussed the relationship between podcasting and science. Carruth is a professor at Princeton’s Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. At Princeton, she directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads Blue Lab, an environmental media and storytelling studio. Her research and teaching areas include climate storytelling, environmental art and narrative, contemporary food movements and the evolving relationships between technology and environmentalism in American culture. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food.

Horne directs the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her research is focused on performance, documentation, the perception of authority in voice, labor and production in audio and podcasting. Horne was producer for Admissible: Shreds of Evidence, a 13-episode investigative podcast that told the story of shocking misconduct at a Virginia state crime lab. Admissible won the Gold Award for Best Documentary at the Signal Awards; an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association, and the Public Media Award NETA for Best Podcast. Horne was an executive producer at Audible and an executive producer for WNYC’s Radiolab.
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