New Books in Environmental Studies

To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global...

"The Coast has been battered for years by decisions made by those who don’t live there and don’t have any connection to the place. It started early." Based on his investigative Newsroom series, Aaron Smale’s Tairāwhiti...

In 1975 workers at Life Science Products, a small makeshift pesticide factory in Hopewell, Virginia, became ill after exposure to Kepone, the brand name for the pesticide chlordecone. They made the poison under contract...

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains...

It’s no secret that the Paris Agreement and voluntary efforts to address climate change are failing. Governments have spent three decades crafting international rules to manage the climate crisis yet have made little...

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and...

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value (Lexington Books, 2022). Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good...

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and...

In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination...

Thomas Princen explores issues of social and ecological sustainability at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. He works on principles for sustainability, overconsumption, the...

Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more...

From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People...

Eucalypts, iconic to Australia, have shaped art, science and landscapes worldwide. With around nine hundred species, from towering giants to compact mallees, these trees inspire awe and curiosity. Their hardwood has...

Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022) edited by Ilan Kelman Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and...

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls...

Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022) edited by Ilan Kelman Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and...

In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationship between the Indian State, forest-dwelling communities, and forest...

Jemma Deer’s Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) invites the reader to take a moment and to ponder on the way of reading. In her book, the author challenges the...

In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest Rights Act 2006, a law enacted to secure the largest...

A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens borne by rich and poor countries. Climate change is increasingly...

In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers...

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh...

In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers...

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action...

Charles Watkins joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Trees Ancient and Modern (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful new book explores the relationship between trees and people and reveals how people have used...