Episodios

  • Vojta Hybl, "Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell" (Frances Lincoln, 2026)
    Mar 30 2026
    What is that rock you’ve just picked up? Which minerals is it made of, what’s unique about it and what can it reveal about Earth’s deeper story?Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell (Frances Lincoln, 2026) gives you the tools to answer these questions. Geologist and science illustrator Vojta Hybl guides you through more than 100 rock types, explaining how they form, what they look like and the geological processes they represent.This authoritative yet accessible guide includes clear explanations of igneous, volcaniclastic, sedimentary, metamorphic and anthropic rocks. It also discusses practical tips for spotting and identifying rocks, including detailed specimen illustrations that highlight key features for easy recognition. Alongside practical identification advice, Rocks invites you to see the ground beneath your feet in a new way, connecting everyday stones to billions of years of planetary change.Whether you’re a curious walker, an outdoor enthusiast or simply fascinated by the natural world, this book will transform how you experience landscapes and help you read the stories written in stone. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    37 m
  • Nikita Kaur Simpson, "Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas" (Duke UP, 2026)
    Mar 29 2026
    In Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.” This “tension” takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; “Future tension” accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families. Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how “tension” acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    50 m
  • Becca Voelcker, "Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction" (U California Press, 2025)
    Mar 21 2026
    Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from filmed landscape-portraits of women in Los Angeles, Orkney, and the Navajo Nation to Indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia. Proposing "land cinema" as an urgent genre for our time, this book reveals how images and ideas produced half a century ago sowed the seeds for climate justice movements today. Becca Voelcker is Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    1 h y 10 m
  • Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China
    Mar 20 2026
    What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountains in southwestern China, a region that was incorporated into the nascent people’s republic of China from 1953 onwards, with immense consequences for Blang communities and ecologies. Our guest Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström disentangles how the arrival of the state disrupted long-standing relations between Blang communities and the local mountain gods, making the land sick. And what Blang people can teach us about tackling the ongoing climate crisis. Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström is a guest researcher at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is a social anthropologist working at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    28 m
  • Charles G. Curtin, "Place-Based Solutions: The Power of Regenerative Thinking in the Face of Crisis" (JHU Press, 2026)
    Mar 19 2026
    Place-Based Solutions (JHU Press, 2026) offers a bold and practical response, charting a path toward what Charles G. Curtin calls "prosilience"—the capacity not just to endure crises, but to leap forward through them. With over thirty years of collaborative, on-the-ground experience in conservation and climate adaptation. This book emphasizes the power of small and mid-sized organizations to catalyze meaningful change, using real-world examples to illustrate how lasting impact depends on aligning ethics, equity, institutional design, and the ability to learn over time. Curtin encourages readers to shift their focus from the pre-crisis status quo to preparing for—and thriving in—novel futures. This is the third of a series of books that Charles has authored to explore and test frameworks for addressing social and ecological change. His previous two books, The Science of Open Spaces and Complex Ecology: Foundational perspectives on Dynamic Approaches to Ecology and Conservation. Charles has a Master's in Land Management and a doctorate in Zoology. And he completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Climate Change Adaptation. His current work develops carbon-negative, place-based conservation strategies addressing fire and drought in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, with companion projects focused on sustaining intact Panamanian cloud forests. He now lives near Taos, New Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    46 m
  • Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, "The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late" (Verso Books, 2025)
    Mar 18 2026
    A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling authors of Overshoot The world is crossing the 1.5°C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2°C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by re­moving CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe; they come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? Or will any such round­about measures simply make things worse?The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late (Verso Books, 2025)maps the new front lines in the struggle for a liveable planet and insists on the climate revolution long overdue. In the end, no technology can absolve us of responsibility for our planet and each other. Cody Skahan is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford as a recipient of a Grand Union ESRC doctoral training partnership. His work focuses on the intersections of people, the environment, and technology. Currently, he is focusing on the emergence of carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal, as well as running a series of public engagement workshops across the UK and the Arctic around the topic of geoengineering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    53 m
  • Joseph Weiss, "Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada" (UNC Press, 2026)
    Mar 17 2026
    Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state and local officials, school curriculum changes, and a recently christened national holiday. However, Joseph Weiss argues, these state-driven initiatives reinforce Indigenous subordination to the settler state. This incisive study of the varied responses from both Indigenous Nations and individuals illuminates how reconciliation is implicated in ongoing colonial erasure.Critically engaging with a variety of fields, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss captures the multiple scales at which these contested dynamics unfold and explores their underlying technologies of erasure. Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada (UNC Press, 2026) unpacks how reconciliation offers amends for anti-Indigenous violence while disavowing responsibility for that violence, and argues that settler promises of reconciliation cannot be reconciled to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Nevertheless, Weiss illustrates how Indigenous Peoples refuse erasure at every turn, instead building alternate futures and lived worlds that are not always already colonially overdetermined. Joseph Weiss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, American Studies, Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University and where he also chairs the anthropology department. He is also the author of Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    1 h y 6 m
  • Courtney Humphries, "Climate Change and the Future of Boston" (Anthem Press, 2026)
    Mar 16 2026
    Like many of the world’s iconic coastal cities, Boston faces potentially severe impacts from climate change. Depending on global emissions, Boston could face several feet of sea level rise this century, which would leave many parts of the city subject to tidal and storm flooding. Precipitation events could become more frequent and extreme, and its already-humid summers could become dangerously hot, with most days over 90 degrees. Today, Boston is a booming city with a growing population, a glittering new waterfront neighborhood, world-class universities and a strong economy. Its future risks and opportunities related to climate change are shaped by the 400-year environmental, social and economic history of the city’s development. As part of Anthem’s series, Climate Change and the Future of Boston (Anthem Press, 2026) by Dr. Courtney Humphries describes how Boston’s history and current context shape future climate impacts and examines the mitigation and adaptation strategies the city has taken. Boston is a leader in acknowledging the problem of climate change; it has set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, among other climate-related goals. It has also developed science-based climate models and undertaken a robust planning process to identify strategies to protect its waterfront from flooding and increase its resilience to other climate-related impacts. Its mayor has embraced a progressive Green New Deal for Boston emphasizing the need for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. But the city also faces structural challenges, such as aging infrastructure, historic racial inequities, rising gentrification and income inequality and ongoing political and regulatory obstacles that hinder efforts to adapt in an efficient and just manner. The book concludes with a set of forward-looking scenarios about what the future may have in store for the city and the lessons it holds for other coastal cities struggling with these challenges. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
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    36 m