New Books in Environmental Studies

In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it.

Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain. 

Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world’s rarest Christmas tree in Sicily.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales.

The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies.

Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr.

Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.
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Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group.

Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action (Bloomsbury, 2024) helps
us reimagine our approach to environmental stewardship critically
interrogating the problems associated with existing legacies of
environmentalism and how we imagine other ways to addressing the multiple planetary crises.

The
authors cast a critical eye on wealthy and influential environmental
groups that committed to anti-racist strategies in the wake of the
racial awakening of 2020. Yet, they continue to embrace false solutions
like carbon markets and biodiversity offsets, which carry deeply
racialized consequences. By tracing the roots of these misplaced
priorities to detrimental modernity steeped in colonialism and
capitalism, the authors call for transformational changes in
human-nature relationships. They distill lessons from the divestment
movement, which has questioned the fossil fuel industry's moral
standing, and food sovereignty activists, who have mobilized global
civil society to hold agribusiness corporations accountable.

In
these extraordinary times, Decolonizing Environmentalism invites
readers to embark on a transformative journey to embrace anti-racist,
emancipatory, and regenerative approaches to environmentalism.

Prakash Kashwan is
an educator, author, and scholar, whose work cuts across the fields of
climate governance, environmental and climate justice, and international
affairs. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Environmental
Studies at Brandeis University. He also holds faculty affiliations with
the Heller School of Social Policy & Management, and Politics
Department at Brandeis. Before moving to Brandeis, he was a tenured
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Connecticut and Co-directed the Economic and Social Rights Research
Program at UConn's Human Rights Institute.

Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King’s College London. Her
research focuses on global environmental politics with a particular
focus on climate and energy security, climate justice grievances,
international orders and questions concerning security and existential
risks in a warming world. She co-directs the Centre for Integrated
Research in Risk and Resilience (CIRRR) and the Environmental Security
Research Group.
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Savage: The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong
(Cornell University Press, 2026) explores the dark side of colonial
modernity through canine eyes, showing the many ways that dogs
involuntarily contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century Hong
Kong. Dr. Catherine S. Chan follows the piecemeal transplantation of
British animal humanitarianism as pedigree dogs accompanied hardening
class differences, dogmeat became a contested racial issue, and dogs
were roped into the long list of undesirables fabricated in the
so-called golden era of reforms following the social disturbances of the
1960s.

Dr.
Chan reveals a fragmented civilizing project that constructed dogs as
dangerous, filthy, and unnecessary nuisances in a burgeoning city,
rationalizing the slaughter of tens of thousands of dogs alongside
paradoxical criticism of the native population for perpetrating animal
cruelty and the promotion of British animal humanitarianism. Departing
from anthropocentric perspectives in understanding the use of
Britishness in the molding of modern cities, Savage
restores the presence and agency of dogs to encourage a rethinking of
the patchiness of British colonial governance and the long-lasting
repercussions that modernity can have on our relationship with animals.

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

The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet’s biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation.

Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law (NYU Press, 2026) showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America’s colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change.Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.
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