Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Robert (Bob) McKay, Professor of Contemporary Literature at University of Sheffield (UK), discussed his book Anthropofugal Fictions: Literature, Species Politics and Flight from Humanity (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 11 May 2026. This book traces a radical politics of species across the work of four significant Anglophone authors of the late twentieth century: Brigid Brophy, Alice Walker, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace. Presenting an exciting and original perspective, Robert McKay argues that these literary figures tell anthropofugal stories, in which a tendency towards animals coincides with a desire to flee from humanity. Their writing disavows allegiance to humanity’s various guises and ideals, dismissing human distinctiveness and disturbing human privilege to reimagine life with so-called animals. While deeply grounded in the practice of literary close reading, Anthropofugal Fictions is also a work of philosophy and theory that shows how doubts about species identity lie at the heart of live debates about gender, sexuality, race and ethics. It is a challenging and provocative account of what it means not to be human, and of living amongst animals without species difference as a legitimation of one’s actions.

Brycchan Carey, Professor of Literature, Culture, and History at Northumbria University (UK), discussed his book The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 (Yale University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 23 March 2025 . How did late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a “dread perversion” of nature? Focusing on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travelers’ accounts of West Africa, Brycchan Carey shows that before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. These natural histories were often ambivalent toward slavery, but they increasingly adopted a proslavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a “natural” phenomenon. From the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement.   Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travelers with an interest in natural history, including Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, Griffith Hughes, Samuel Martin, and James Grainger. These environmental writings were used by abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano to build a compelling case that slavery was unnatural, a case that was popularized by abolitionist poets such as Thomas Day, Edward Rushton, Hannah More, and William Cowper.

Josephine Taylor, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin (Ireland), discussed her book The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multispecies Encounters in Extraction Zones (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 16 March 2026. This book brings the emerging field of petrocultures and energy humanities discourse into conversation with the field of animal studies. Taylor examines how fossil fuels have frequently been described as the lifeblood of capitalist modernity, making petroleum appear as something intrinsic to human life. Through examining works such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, this book highlights the commodification of nonhuman life in the history of energy and, paradoxically, how these nonhuman actors have been unacknowledged and silenced through time.

Kip Hutchins, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College (USA), discussed his book A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia (University of Arizona Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 16 February 2026. As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency.  Hutchins’s ethnographic research, spanning more than a decade, provides a vivid and intimate portrayal of Mongolian life. Musicians use the morin khuur, or ‘horse fiddle,’ to engage with the subjectivities and agencies of nonhuman animals and other beings. This work is a significant contribution to the posthuman turn in social sciences, engaging with theories from prominent scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.  As climate change continues to impact communities worldwide, this book offers a unique perspective on how cultural heritage can be mobilized to address environmental challenges, providing valuable lessons for global efforts to build sustainable and resilient futures. At the intersection of music, environment, and posthumanism, A Song for the Horses shows how Mongolian musicians use cultural traditions to imagine and build toward alternative futures beyond climate change and neoliberalism.

Christopher Jones, associate professor of history at Arizona State University (USA), discussed his book The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 2 February 2026. Most economists believe that growth is the surest path to better lives. This has proven to be one of humanity’s most powerful and dangerous ideas. It shapes policy across the globe, but it fatally undermines the natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. How did we get here? In The Invention of Infinite Growth, environmental historian Christopher F. Jones takes us through two hundred and fifty years of economic thinking to examine the ideal of growth, its powerful influence, and the crippling burdens many decisions made in its name have placed on us all. Jones argues that the pursuit of growth has never reflected its costs, because economists downplay environmental degradation. What’s worse, skyrocketing inequality and diminishing improvements in most people’s well-being mean growth too often delivers too little for too many. Jones urges economists to engage more broadly with other ways of thinking, as well as with citizens and governments to recognize and slow infinite growth’s impact on the real world.  Both accessible and eye-opening, The Invention of Infinite Growth offers hope for the future. Humans have not always believed that economic growth could or should continue, and so it is possible for us to change course. We can still create new ideas about how to promote environmental sustainability, human welfare, and even responsible growth, without killing the planet and ourselves.

Katja Bruisch, Ussher Assistant Professor in Modern Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), discussed her book Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 26 January 2026. This groundbreaking environmental history recounts the story of Russia’s fossil economy from its margins. Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world’s peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.

In our first episode of Season 7, Isabelle Gapp, Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History and Co-Director of The Centre for the North at University of Aberdeen (UK), discussed her book A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (Lund Humphries, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 19 January 2026. A Circumpolar Landscape demonstrates that Canadian and Scandinavian landscape painting reaches far beyond national identity and a preoccupation with Eurocentrism. This study brings together the work of Emily Carr, the Canadian Group of Seven, Anna Boberg, and Gustaf Fjaestad among others, with each chapter highlighting the high level of interactivity between artists and the environment. Simultaneously, this book highlights the lack of awareness of the respective ecosystems in which many of these works were produced. Working around northern hemispheric latitudinal lines, this book considers how a similar ecology and topography - orientated around the themes of forests, wilderness, lakes, mountains, aurorae, and ice – was depicted and is shared across these northern landscapes. This powerful and timely book takes these respective art histories in the direction of the environmental humanities and an ecocritical art history, recognising the broader transnational and ecological framework of the Circumpolar North.

Nathan K. Hensley, Professor of English at Georgetown University (USA), discussed his book Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 December 2025. What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot’s characters in Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done? To answer this question, Hensley shows that nineteenth-century writers and artists devised new ways to understand action—and hope. They rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. They turned away from logical proofs and direct argumentation and instead called on aesthetic technologies like sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches, and vast, multiplot novels, finding scope for action not at the level of the theme or the thesis but in gestures and details. Ranging from J. M. W. Turner’s painterly technique to Emily Brontë’s dreamlike fragments (and reading along the way works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Berryman, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti), Hensley’s study makes an important contribution to Victorian studies and the environmental humanities.

Joanna Allan, Associate Professor in global development at Northumbria University, UK, discussed her book Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara (West Virginia University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 1 December 2025. As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as landgrabs, colonial dispossession, and environmentally destructive practices. Changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help us ensure a globally just wind energy future.  Saharan Winds contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries—how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind—in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.

Dominic Hinde, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, discussed his book Drifting North: Finding a sustainable future in Scotland’s past (Manchester University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 17 November 2025. Past and future collide in this engaging journey through climate change, fossil capitalism and the struggle for a sustainable world. Scotland’s history and future are entangled with climate change and the story of the modern world. This small country on the fringes of northern Europe pioneered fossil capitalism and played a key role in its spread across the planet. It is a living museum of the crisis of the west, of deindustrialisation, stagnation and the struggle to build a better future from the ashes. Journalist and sociologist Dominic Hinde travels from the treeless Highlands to the lowland cities, struggling to balance memories with aspiration. Through this journey he finds that his own sensory turmoil, shaped by recovery from a near fatal accident, mirrors the disarray of the fossil fuel transition – an uncertain passage between what was and what must be. Part memoir, part environmental history, part travelogue, this is a compelling narrative of connections – to place, energy and the possibility of renewal. Through the lens of one country, it asks a vital question: can the lessons of the past help us build a more sustainable future?

Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History at University of Stavanger (Norway) and co-host of the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks, presented her own book Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in conversation with co-host Finn Arne Jørgensen and special co-host Ellen Arnold on Monday, 10 November 2025. While it’s no longer possible to encounter a dodo in the wild, we can still come face-to-face with them in museums. The remains of extinct species—whether taxidermied, skeletal, drawn, or sculpted—stare back at us from display cases.   In this moving meditation on what’s lost and what endures, environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen visits natural history collections worldwide—from Shanghai to Philadelphia, from Edinburgh to Hobart, Australia—to understand the many ways that museums tell stories about extinction. She encounters extinct animals that are framed as cultural artifacts and as rare valuables, that are memorialized with lists, and that are brought to life through augmented reality. She draws our attention to creatures with prominent afterlives—passenger pigeons, giant moas, thylacines—as well as those that are less likely to be discussed or displayed. Throughout, Jørgensen examines the relationship between museums and the natural world, so readers can look more closely at exhibits about extinction, studying the displays for what is there, as well as what is missing. During a period of rapid species loss driven by humanity’s environmental impact, Ghosts Behind Glass asks what we can learn about our world from the presence of the extinct.

Micah Muscolino, professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History at the University of California San Diego (USA), discussed his book Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 27 October 2025. 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 explores how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and how the communities navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews, Micah S. Muscolino demonstrates that for the inhabitants of China’s countryside, conservation programs became part of an extractive mode of accumulation that intensified labor demands and entailed loss of control over resources. Muscolino recounts how changes to the physical environment played out in villages, on farms, and within households. His multitiered investigation uncovers the relationship between the forces of nature, Chinese state policies, and the embodied experiences of rural men and women. The book also highlights the contestations and compromises that the state’s environmental interventions triggered in rural society. By illustrating how state-building and revolution in modern China altered human relationships with the natural world, Muscolino shows that examining everyday interactions with the environment is integral to understanding history from the perspectives of China’s common people. He offers a timely reminder that environmental protection cannot come at the cost of marginalized communities’ dignity, interests, or aspirations.

Marianna Dudley, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanties at University of Bristol (UK), discussed her book Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain (Manchester University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 20 October 2025. There are turbines on the horizon. The blades whirl with metronomic rhythm. With each rotation, wind is transformed into electricity. An energy revolution is underway. Electric wind rewinds to the beginning to explore the rise of wind energy in modern Britain. From the industrial revolution to the aftermath of war, through energy crises and the changing politics of the late twentieth century, we see how energy has shaped a nation – and how a nation is reflected and refracted through energy. Boldly charting Britain through its wildest, windiest places, this book takes us to the edges of land and beyond to think deeply about the role of nature in politics, science and technology. Visionaries and hippies join engineers and entrepreneurs. Traditions and local cultures meet infrastructure and industry in this captivating history. At a time when action on carbon emissions is urgent, Electric wind offers examples, ideas and stories to fuel change going forwards. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in nature, climate change, landscape and the making of modern Britain.

Roy Scranton, Associate Professor and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM) at University of Notre Dame (USA), discussed his book Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 6 October 2025. Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more “progress.” The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We’re incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. Our brains can’t make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s well past time, Roy Scranton argues, to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith in progress. Such unwarranted optimism will only accelerate our collective disintegration. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, history, and politics, as well as film, literature, and personal experience, Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but ultimately hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our unknowable future.

Brad Bolman, Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University (USA), discussed his book Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 29 September 2025. Intrepid, docile, and cloaked in coats of white, black, and tan, beagles were one of the most popular breeds in the United States in the twentieth century. From Snoopy to dog shows, many Americans loved and identified with beagles. But during the same period, as scientists searched for a standard research dog, beagles emerged as something else: an ideal animal for laboratory experimentation.   In Lab Dog, historian Brad Bolman explains how the laboratory dog became a subject of intense focus for twentieth-century scientists and charts the beagle’s surprising trajectory through global science. Following beagles as they moved from eugenics to radiobiology, pharmaceutical testing to Alzheimer’s studies, Lab Dog sheds new light on pivotal stories of twentieth-century science, including the Manhattan Project, tobacco controversies, contraceptive testing, and behavioral genetics research. Bolman shows how these experiments shaped our understanding of dogs as intelligent companions who deserve moral protection and socialization—and in some cases, daily medication. Compelling and accessible, Lab Dog tells the thorny story of the participation of beagles in science, including both their sacrifices and their contributions, and offers a glimpse into the future of animal experimentation.

Jules Skotnes-Brown, Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews (UK), discussed his book Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 15 September 2025. Throughout the twentieth century, rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation and apartheid that brutally oppressed its Black population. At the same time, the countryside was defined by a related settler obsession: the control of animals that farmers, scientists, and state officials considered pests. Elephants rampaged on farmlands, trampling fences, crops, and occasionally humans. Grain-eating birds flocked on plantations, devouring harvests. Bubonic plague crept across the veld in the bodies of burrowing and crop-devouring rodents. In Segregated Species, Jules Skotnes-Brown argues that racial segregation and pest control were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of “native” and “scientific.” Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts. Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Skotnes-Brown demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.

Tina Adcock, assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University (Canada), discussed her book A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North (University of British Columbia Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 September 2025. Exploration has long been pivotal to southern engagements with northern Canada, but it is most often associated with the nineteenth century or earlier. A Cold Colonialism offers the first extended examination of twentieth-century exploration in the Canadian North. Modern exploration helped southerners establish and maintain distinctive kinds of colonial and settler colonial power over northern Indigenous homelands. Who explored the North between 1918 and 1965? What forms did exploration take? What did it mean to explorers and others affected by it? Tina Adcock focuses on four representative explorers with richly documented careers: mining engineer George Douglas, surveyor Guy Blanchet, ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and filmmaker Richard Finnie. Each used exploration to grapple with key, often discomfiting aspects of modernity, including industrialization, urbanization, and the specialization of knowledge. Despite limited experience in and knowledge of the Canadian North, these explorers helped southern militaries, industries, and governments exert control over northern peoples and lands. Each also claimed belonging in and authority over the North, speaking over people who had long resided there and better understood the region. The ways that explorers felt about, thought about, and moved through the North still resonate among southern settlers in Canada today.

Richard Fallon, KE Fellow at University of Nottingham and Postdoctoral Researcher in Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum (UK), discussed his book Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of Geology and Palaeontology (Oxford University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 1 September 2025. By the mid-nineteenth century, geologists and palaeontologists had reconstructed an authoritative narrative of Earth’s deep history, from the planet’s molten origins to the rise of humanity. Many figures in transatlantic science across subsequent decades, however, had problems with this narrative: it was too secular, inhuman, and evolutionary, or controlled too exclusively by elite scientists. Speaking from palaeoscience’s unevenly professionalized and controversy-racked borderlines, Christian fundamentalists, charismatic psychics, and respected scholars alike voiced their objections. Until now, no study has brought their work together for detailed comparative analysis. Spanning from the 1860s to the interwar decades, Contesting Earth’s History examines the fascinating history of five significant examples of fringe or ‘borderline’ palaeoscience: old- and young-earth creationism, hollow-earth theory, clairvoyant time travel, and sunken-continent catastrophism. Innovatively combining methods from literature and science studies with the history of science, this book attends not just to the conceptual content of these strange sciences, but also to their proponents’ communication of truth claims through diverse genres ranging from the scientific textbook to the epic poem. Close attention to the hitherto overlooked textual forms and literary strategies of ‘pseudoscience’ throws into relief competing conceptions of science’s audiences, methods, and forms of evidence. The authors examined in this book attempted to shift the balance of scientific power, creating textual spaces where exclusive hierarchies of expertise could be levelled away. Hijacking geologists’ and palaeontologists’ long-standing efforts at making the prehistoric past visible, these authors encouraged readers to gaze into time’s abyss with bold new eyes.

Rebecca K. Wright, Assistant Professor in History at Northumbria University (UK), discussed her book Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 12 May 2025. In Moral Energy in America, Rebecca K. Wright offers an illuminating exploration of how the concept of energy shaped American thought, culture, and politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This essential history traces how politicians, sociologists, geographers, urban planners, economists, and intellectuals adopted the idea of energy to bolster their social programs and visions of the future through distinctive energy imaginaries. Energy was not a stable concept in the period, and it appealed to writers and advocates across the political and cultural spectrum. While medical practitioners and social workers interwove energy into discussions of race, immigration, youth, and crime, mainstream political campaigns appealed to the public by drawing energy into political rhetoric. Wright positions energy at the heart of key intellectual debates of the period, such as the Bourne-Dewey confrontation over America’s role in World War I and the rise of technocratic ideas that envisioned energy as a new metric for societal progress. In a thirty-year era that shook the foundations of American democracy—a period punctuated by the Great Depression, the rise of communism and fascism abroad, two world wars, and the atomic bomb—energy became a key metaphor through which to understand major transformations in American society. Wright demonstrates how energy’s many meanings transcended material and scientific definitions to influence everything from racial theories to economic policies, and ultimately played a pivotal role in molding the American moral landscape.

John Kinder, director of American Studies and professor of history at Oklahoma State University (USA), discussed his book World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 5 May 2025. As Europe lurched into war in 1939, zookeepers started killing their animals. On September 1, as German forces invaded Poland, Warsaw began with its reptiles. Two days later, workers at the London Zoo launched a similar spree, dispatching six alligators, seven iguanas, sixteen southern anacondas, six Indian fruit bats, a fishing cat, a binturong, a Siberian tiger, five magpies, an Alexandrine parakeet, two bullfrogs, three lion cubs, a cheetah, four wolves, and a manatee over the next few months. Zoos worldwide did the same. The reasons were many, but the pattern was clear: The war that was about to kill so many people started by killing so many animals. Why? And how did zoos, nevertheless, not just survive the war but play a key role in how people did, too? A harrowing yet surprisingly uplifting chronicle, Kinder’s World War Zoos traces how zoos survived the deadliest decades of global history, from the Great Depression, through the terrors of World War II, to the dawn of the Cold War. More than anything before or since, World War II represented an existential threat to the world’s zoological institutions. Some zoos were bombed; others bore the indignities of foreign occupation. Even zoos that were spared had to wrestle with questions rarely asked in public: What should they do when supplies ran low? Which animals should be killed to protect the lives of others? And how could zoos justify keeping dangerous animals that might escape and run wild during an aerial attack? Zoos in wartime reveal the shared vulnerabilities of humans and animals during periods of social unrest and environmental peril. World War II–era zoos offered people ways to think about and grapple with imprisonment, powerlessness, and degradation. Viewed today, the story of zoos during World War II can be read as an allegory of twenty-first-century crises, as the effects of climate change threaten all life across the planet. A one-of-a-kind history, World War Zoos is the story of how the world’s zoos survived the deadliest conflict of the twentieth century—and what was lost along the way.

Pollyanna Rhee, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA), discussed her book Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 28 April 2025. A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what role did the history of Santa Barbara itself play in this? As Pollyanna Rhee shows, the city’s past and demographics were essential to the portrayal of the oil spill as momentous. Moreover, well-off and influential Santa Barbarans were positioned to “domesticate” the larger environmental movement by embodying the argument that individual homes and families—not society as a whole—needed protection from environmental abuses. This soon would put environmental rhetoric and power to fundamentally conservative—not radical—ends.

Josh Nygren, Associate Professor of history at the University of Central Missouri (USA), discussed his book The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 7 April 2025. In the twentieth century, natural resource conservation emerged as a vital force in US politics, laying the groundwork for present-day sustainability. Merging environmental, agricultural, and political history, Joshua Nygren examines the political economy and ecology of agricultural conservation through the lens of the “conservation-industrial complex.” This evolving public-private network—which united the US Department of Agriculture, Congress, local and national organizations, and the agricultural industry—guided soil and water conservation in rural America for much of the century. Contrary to the classic tales of US environmental politics and the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, this book emphasizes continuity. Nygren demonstrates how the conservation policies, programs, and partnerships of the 1930s and 1940s persisted through the age of environmentalism, and how their defining traits anticipated those typically associated with late twentieth-century political culture. The conservation-industrial complex promoted a development-oriented brand of conservation that aided the rise of large-scale, capital-intensive agriculture which continues today. It also reshaped the physical and political landscapes of the country, leading to impressive conservation victories and spectacular failures by privileging some environments, degrading others, and intensifying farm depopulation. In the name of environmental protection, agricultural conservation made rural America less equal.

Christian Long, media studies scholar at University of Queensland (Australia), discussed his book Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968–2021 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 31 March 2025, at the special start time of 11am Central European time (7pm AEST in Queensland). Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism, giving the audience a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds. In this book, Christian B. Long argues that if the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world, the presence of infrastructure, whether old or retrofitted or new, offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future. Film imaginings of energy, transportation, water, waste, and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.

Sasha Gora, cultural historian and Project Director of “Off the Menu” at University of Augsburg (Germany), discussed her book Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 24 March 2025. Culinary Claims explores the complex relationships between wild plants and introduced animals, Indigenous foodways, and Canadian regulations. Blending food studies with environmental history, the book examines how cuisines reflect social and political issues related to cultural representation, restaurants, and food sovereignty. L. Sasha Gora chronicles the rise of Indigenous restaurants and their influence on Canadian food culture, engaging with questions about how shifts in appetite reflect broader shifts in imaginations of local environments and identities. Drawing on a diverse range of sources – from recipes and menus to artworks and television shows – the book discusses both historical and contemporary representations of Indigenous foodways and how they are changing amid the relocalization of food systems. Culinary Claims tells a new story of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, emphasizing the critical role that restaurants play in Canada’s cultural landscape. It investigates how food shapes our understanding of place and the politics that underpin this relationship. Ultimately, the book asks, What insights can historians gain from restaurants – and their legacies – as reflections of Indigenous and settler negotiations over cultural claims to land?

Gina Caison, Associate Professor of Southern Literature at Georgia State University (USA), presented Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance (Duke University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 17 March 2025. In Erosion, Gina Caison traces how American authors and photographers have grappled with soil erosion as a material reality that shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and environment. Examining canonical American texts and photography, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Octavia Butler’s Parable series, John Audubon’s Louisiana writings, and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Caison shows how concerns over erosion reveal anxieties of disappearance that are based in the legacies of settler colonialism. Soil loss not only occupies a complex metaphorical place in the narrative of American identity; it becomes central to preserving the white settler colonial state through Indigenous dispossession and erasure. At the same time, Caison examines how Indigenous texts and art such as Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs, Karenne Wood’s poetry, and Monique Verdin’s photography challenge colonial narratives of the continent by outlining the material stakes of soil loss for their own communities. From California to Oklahoma to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Caison ultimately demonstrates that concerns over erosion reverberate into issues of climate change, land ownership, Indigenous sovereignty, race, and cultural and national identity.

Kylie Crane, Professor of British and American Cultural Studies at University of Rostock (Germany), will discuss her book Concrete and Plastic: Thinking Through Materiality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 3 March 2025. Plastic and concrete are two of the most ubiquitous materials of the modern age. This open access book traces inventions, inventories and interventions of these materials as they pervade our day-to-day lives across various forms. By proposing we think of the ways materials configure ‘future artefacts’, and by recognizing the various ways in which materials shape our encounters with the world, the book explores the productive tensions implicit in, and between, concrete and plastic. Drawing ona wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, poems, souvenirs, advertisements, policy documents, environmental art, wrapping,and (popular) science writing, the book attends to all kinds of cultural artefacts to trace imaginative entanglements with disparate others in the Anthropocene.

Anne Berg, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), will discuss her book Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 17 February 2025. Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones—the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. As World War II dragged on, rescued loot—much of it waste—clogged transport routes and piled up in warehouses across Europe. Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Fostering cooperation between the administration, the party, the German Army, the SS, and industry, resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors. Throughout Nazi occupied-Europe, Jews, POWs, concentration camp inmates, and enemy civilians were forced to recycle the loot, discards, and debris of the Nazi race war. In the end, the materials that were fully exploited and the people who had been bled dry were cast aside, buried, burned, or left to rot. Nonetheless, waste reclamation did not have the power to win the war. Illuminating how the Nazis inverted the economy of value, rescuing discards and murdering people, Empire of Rags and Bones offers an original perspective on genocide, racial ideology, and World War II.

Ángeles Picone, Assistant Professor of History at Boston College (USA), discussed her book Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 10 February 2025. In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as “desert,” through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape. Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive—and sometimes conflicting—meanings to space and national identity.

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, Research Scholar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), discused his book Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 27 January 2025. Wilko is our first “second book appearance” on the book talk series (which also shows how long we’ve been doing these talks!). News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.   Sea Level provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity’s impact on the earth. With Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence—it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.   A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, curator and Research Fellow in Art and Design at University of New South Wales (Australia), kicked off a new year of the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talks with a discussion of The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (Routledge, 2024) on Monday, 20 January 2025. This book challenges conventional notions of the Anthropocene and champions the Hydrocene: the Age of Water. It presents the Hydrocene as a disruptive, conceptual epoch and curatorial theory, emphasising water's pivotal role in the climate crisis and contemporary art. The Hydrocene is a wet ontological shift in eco-aesthetics which redefines our approach to water, transcending anthropocentric, neo-colonial and environmentally destructive ways of relating to water. As the most fundamental of elements, water has become increasingly politicised, threatened and challenged by the climate crisis. In response, The Hydrocene articulates and embodies the distinctive ways contemporary artists relate and engage with water, offering valuable lessons towards climate action. Through five compelling case studies across swamp, river, ocean, fog and ice, this book binds feminist environmental humanities theories with the practices of eco-visionary artists. Focusing on Nordic and Oceanic water-based artworks, it demonstrates how art can disrupt established human–water dynamics. By engaging hydrofeminist, care-based and planetary thinking, The Hydrocene learns from the knowledge and agency of water itself within the tide of art going into the blue. The Hydrocene urgently highlights the transformative power of eco-visionary artists in reshaping human–water relations. At the confluence of contemporary art, curatorial theory, climate concerns and environmental humanities, this book is essential reading for researchers, curators, artists, students and those seeking to reconsider their connection with water and advocate for climate justice amid the ongoing natural-cultural water crisis.

Lisa Yin Han, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College (USA), discussed her book Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) on the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 16 December 2024. Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future. Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities. From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?

Jamie Jones, Assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), discussed her book Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 9 December 2024. Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil’s popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence. Jones shows just how instrumental whaling was to the very idea of “energy” in American culture and how it came to mean a fusion of labor, production, and the circulation of power. She argues that dying industries exert real force on environmental perceptions and cultural imaginations. Analyzing a vast archive that includes novels, periodicals, artifacts from whaling ships, tourist attractions, and even whale carcasses, Jones explores the histories of race, labor, and energy consumption in the nineteenth-century United States through the lens of the whaling industry’s legacy. In terms of how they view power, Americans are, she argues, still living in the shadow of the whale.

Elena Kochetkova, Associate Professor in Modern European Economic History at University of Bergen, Norway, joined the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series to discuss her book The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (The MIT Press, 2024) on Monday, 2 December 2024. In The Green Power of Socialism, Elena Kochetkova examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests. The book explores evolving Soviet policies of wood consumption, discussing how professionals working in the forestry industry of the Soviet state viewed the present and future of forests by considering them both a natural resource and a trove of industrial material. When faced with the prospect of wood shortages, these specialists came to develop new industry-ecology paradigms. Kochetkova looks at the materiality of Soviet industry through forests and wood to show how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project. The Green Power of Socialism also discusses how post-Soviet industry has abandoned these socialist practices and the idea of nature as a complicated ecosystem that provides a crucial service to society. Emphasizing the technological and environmental impacts of the Cold War, Kochetkova critically reconsiders two explanatory models that have become dominant in the historiography of Soviet approaches to nature over the last decades—ecocide and environmentalism. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, the book invites readers to reevaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry. In so doing, it contributes a fresh perspective on the activities of socialist experts and their view of nature, shedding light on Soviet state industrial and environmental policy and its continuing legacy in the present day.

Joseph Seeley, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia (USA), discussed his book Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmetnal humanities book talk series on Monday, 25 November 2024. Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu’s seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Joseph A. Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors also spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan’s wider political and economic power. Drawing on archival sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Seeley tells the story of the river and the imperial border haphazardly imposed on its surface from 1905 to 1945 to show how rivers and other nonhuman actors play an active role in border creation and maintenance. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons.

Rachel Gross, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver (USA), discussed her book Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America (Yale University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talks series on Monday, 18 November 2024. No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation’s economic output.   Rachel S. Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.

Sandra Swart, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, discussed her book The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past (Jacana Media, 2023) in the Greenhouse book talk series on Monday, 11 November 2024. The animals in this landmark book – elephants, hippos, okapi, lions, jackals, cows, sheep, horses, white ants, quagga, Nazi cattle, police dogs and baboons – are chosen strategically to highlight different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in an astonishing book, one that takes animals seriously. The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. This pioneering work shows what human-animal history can do, not only to help us better understand our place in the world, but to make our world – however slightly – a better place.

Judith Rauscher, assistant professor (Juniorprofessorin) of American Literature and Culture at the University of Cologne, discussed her book Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry (Transcript, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk on Monday, 28 October 2024. American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

Sarah Dimick, assistant professor of English at Northwestern University (USA), discussed her book Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 21 October 2024. As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific. In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis.

Sonja Pieck, Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College (USA), discussed her book Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain (The MIT Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 30 September 2024. The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany’s largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies by Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War’s end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once-militarized border between East and West Germany into an extensive protected area. Yet as forests, meadows, and wetlands replace fences, minefields, and guard towers, ecological recovery must reckon with the pain of the borderlands’ brutal past. The lessons gained by conservationists here, Pieck argues, have profound practical and ethical implications far beyond Germany. Can conservation help heal both ecological and societal wounds? How might conservation honor difficult socioecological pasts? Deeply researched and evocatively written, this beautiful, interdisciplinary investigation into the legacy of war and nature’s resurgence blends environmental history, ethics, geography, and politics with ecology and memory studies. Amid our rampant biodiversity crisis, Mnemonic Ecologies shows why conservation must include humanized landscapes in its purview, thus helping to craft a new conservation ethos that is collaborative, empathetic, and more sensitive to the connections between humans and the places they inhabit.

Jamie Wang, Research Assistant Professor at the Education University of Hong Kong, presented her book Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (The MIT Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 23 September 2024.. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore. Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic global city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites, from the futuristic, authoritarian Supertree Grove, positioned as a technologically sustainable solution to a velocity-charged and singular urban transportation system, to highly protected nature reserves and to the cemeteries, where graves and memories continue to be exhumed and erased to make way for development. Wang also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, Wang ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments.

Michael Lobel, Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY (USA), discussed his new book Van Gogh and the End of Nature (Yale University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talks on Monday, 16 September 2024. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. Michael Lobel upends this commonplace view by showing how Van Gogh’s pictures are inseparable from the modern industrial era in which the artist lived—from its factories and polluted skies to its coal mines and gasworks—and how his art drew upon waste and pollution for its subjects and even for the very materials out of which it was made. Lobel underscores how Van Gogh’s engagement with the environmental realities of his time provides repeated forewarnings of the threats of climate change and ecological destruction we face today.   Van Gogh and the End of Nature offers a radical revisioning of nearly the full span of the artist’s career, considering Van Gogh’s artistic process, his choice of materials, and some of his most beloved and iconic pictures. Merging a timely sense of environmental urgency with bold new readings of the work of one of the world’s most acclaimed artists, this book weaves together detailed historical research and perceptive analysis into an illuminating portrait of an artist and his changing world.

John MacNeill Miller, Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College (USA), presented his book The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science (University of Virginia Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 9 September 2024. The Ecological Plot traces the roots of this most mainstream branch of science back to an unexpected source: narrative storytelling. Weaving together the histories of different disciplines, John MacNeill Miller shows how pioneering thinkers drew on a shared set of literary techniques to imagine how different species could work together as a single, interdependent community, redefining the way we conceptualize the natural world. Beginning with a series of revolutionary exchanges between the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus, the writer Harriet Martineau, and the naturalist Charles Darwin, The Ecological Plot identifies the foundations of modern notions of ecology, economics, and realist fiction, maps how they evolved through the works of Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and shows how they resurfaced in the works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson a century later. Miller’s book reveals why our most sophisticated efforts to explain humanity’s relationship to nature have been segregated into different disciplines and makes an argument for the importance of bringing these separate ways of understanding the world back together as a crucial step toward solving the environmental, economic, and ethical problems of the present.

Elsa Devienne, Assistant Professor of Humanities at Northumbria University (UK), discussed her book Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 2 September 2024. The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city’s crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA’s engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. They cleaned up and enlarged the beaches–up to three times their original size–and destroyed old piers and barracks to make room for brand-new accommodations, parking lots, and freeways. The members of this powerful “beach lobby” reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared “white flight” from the coast. In doing so, they established Southern California as the national reference point for shoreline planning and coastal access. As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Despite their artificial origins, LA’s beaches have proved remarkably resilient. The drastic human interventions into nature brought social and economic benefits to the region without long-term detrimental consequences on the environment. Yet the ongoing climate crisis and rapid sea level rise will eventually force the city to reckon with its past building. Sand Rush not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California. Featuring a foreword by Jenny Price, it recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world’s greatest coastal metropolises.

Dan Vandersommers, Assistant Professor of History at University of Dayton, USA, discussed his book Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive (University Press of Kansas, 2023) on the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 26 August 2024. Founded amid the urban commotion of Washington, DC, before the dawn of the twentieth century, the National Zoological Park opened to “preserve, teach, and conduct research about the animal world.” Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo is a study of this important cultural landmark from 1887 to 1920. Centered on the animals themselves, each chapter looks from a different angle at the influential science of popular zoology in order to shed new light on the complex, entangled relationships between humans and animals. Daniel Vandersommers’s goal is twofold. First, through narrative, he shows how zoo animals always ran away from the zoo. This is meant literally—animals escaped frequently—but even more so, figuratively. Living, breathing, historical zoo animals ran away from their cultural constructions, and these constructions ran away from the living bodies they were made to represent. The author shows that the resulting gaps produced by runaway animals contain concealed, distorted, and erased histories worthy of uncovering. Second, Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo demonstrates how the popular zoology fostered by the National Zoo shaped every aspect of American science, culture, and conservation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between the 1880s and World War I, as intellectuals debated Darwinism and scientists institutionalized the laboratory, zoological parks suddenly appeared at the heart of nearly every major American city, captivating tens of millions of visitors. Vandersommers follows stories previously hidden within the National Zoo in order to help us reconsider the place of zoos and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century.

Kathleen (Kate) Murphy, Associate Dean for Student Success and Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University (USA), discussed her book Captivity’s Collections: Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talks on Monday, 10 June 2024. Cashews from Africa’s Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, shells from Jamaica—in the eighteenth century, these specimens from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard inhumane British slaving vessels. Kathleen S. Murphy argues that the era’s explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of individuals, objects, and ideas through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, seeds, preserved animals and insects, and other specimens were gathered by British slave ship surgeons, mariners, and traders at slaving factories in West Africa, in ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the British South Sea Company’s trading factories in Spanish America. The specimens were displayed in British museums and herbaria, depicted in published natural histories, and discussed in the halls of scientific societies. Grounded in extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Captivity’s Collections mines scientific treatises, slaving companies’ records, naturalists’ correspondence, and museum catalogs to recover in rich detail the scope of the slave trade’s collecting operations. The book reveals the scientific and natural historical profit derived from these activities and the crucial role of specimens gathered along the routes of the slave trade on emerging ideas in natural history.

Ellen F. Arnold, Senior Lecturer at Ohio State University (USA), discussed her book Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, c.300-1100 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 3 June 2024. Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100 CE. Hagiographical material, poetry, charters, chronicles, and historiographical works are explored to examine the medieval environmental imaginations about rivers, and how storytelling and memory are connected to lived experiences in riverscapes. She argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval communities to understand and respond to ecological and socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about the shared religious past to hopes about the future.

Ruth Morgan, Associate Professor at the Australian National University, discussed her book Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (Bloomsbury, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 27 May 2024. Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, this book reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organizations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnational environmental consciousness, it asks how this wider historical context has shaped international responses to the greatest threat to humankind to date. Thinking beyond the science of climate change to the way it is received and responded to, Ruth Morgan shows how climate science has been mobilised in the political sphere, paying particular attention to the North-South dynamics of climate diplomacy. The privileging of climate science and the mobilisation of climate scepticism are explored to consider how they have undermined efforts to remedy this planetary problem. Studying climate change and international history in tandem, this book explains the origins of the debates around this environmental emergency, the response of political leaders attempting to address the threat, and the barriers to creating an international regime to resolve the climate crisis.

Matthew Holmes, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stavanger, discussed his book The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics (University of Pittsburg Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 13 May 2024. The global triumph of Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion, thanks to the existence of graft hybrids. These chimeral plants and animals are created by grafting tissue from one organism to another with the goal of passing the newly hybridized genetic material on to their offspring. But prevailing genetic theory insisted that heredity was confined to the sex cells and there was no inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime. Under sustained attacks from geneticists, scientific belief in the existence of graft hybrids slowly began to decline. Yet ordinary horticulturalists and breeders continued to believe in the power of grafting. Matthew Holmes tells the story of these organisms—which include multicolored chickens and black nightshades that grew tomatoes—and their enduring influence on twentieth-century biology. Their creators sought a goal as ambitious as the wildest dreams of genetic engineering today: to smash the barriers between species and freely exchange genes between organisms. The Graft Hybrid presents a greater understanding of the controversial history of graft hybrids, offering a crucial intervention in the history of genetics and the future of biological science.

Carolyn Fornoff, assistant professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University, joined the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk to discuss her book Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbuilt University Press, 2024) on 6 May 2024 . During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico’s present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art’s evidentiary role—its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage—author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or “subjunctive aesthetics.” In English, the subjunctive is a grammatical mode that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible. In the Spanish language, it is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Each chapter of Subjunctive Aesthetics takes up one of these modalities to examine how Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be.

Jason Heppler, historian and the senior developer at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media of George Mason University, discussed his book Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 29 April 2024. In the half century after World War II, California’s Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation’s most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the question Jason A. Heppler explores in this book. A revealing look at the significance of nature in social, cultural, and economic conceptions of place, the book is also a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability. Between 1950 and 1990, business and community leaders pursued a new vision of the landscape stretching from Palo Alto to San Jose—a vision that melded the bucolic naturalism of orchards, pleasant weather, and green spaces with the metropolitan promise of modern industry, government-funded research, and technology. Heppler describes the success of a new, clean, future-facing economy, coupled with a pleasant, green environment, in drawing people to Silicon Valley. And in this overwhelming success, he also locates the rapidly emerging faults created by competing ideas about forming these idyllic communities—specifically, widespread environmental degradation and increasing social stratification. Cities organized around high-tech industries, suburban growth, and urban expansion were, as Heppler shows, crucibles for empowering elites, worsening human health, and spreading pollution. What do “nature” and “place” mean, and who gets to define these terms? Key to Heppler’s work is the idea that these questions reflect and determine what, and who, matters in any conversation about the environment. Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism vividly traces that idea through the linked histories of Silicon Valley and environmentalism in the West.