New Books in Environmental Studies

There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It
seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things
can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as
they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short
supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026).
Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in
‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems
less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the
persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’
which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses
this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests
itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black
utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining
the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be
different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe.

In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of
utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley
tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think
about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different
worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for
postdystopian utopian novels.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unpredictable climate, and how the hobo played a central role in the histories of industrialization and westward expansion.Challenging common depictions of the hobo as a world-weary, bearded man in ragged clothes, Dr. Suits reveals how these wandering laborers were often fastidious and heartbreakingly young. Forever on the move due to economic hardship and climate disaster, they chased harvests and took seasonal jobs in industries like logging and mining. Too often they couldn’t find employment at all. Suits describes the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked while shedding light on the hobo life and philosophy, from their techniques for stowing away on railroads to their unique blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work thought. He traces the emergence of the hobo to the advent of steam and the need for manual laborers in places where this new technology couldn’t reach and describes how a growing reliance on the internal combustion engine brought an end to hobo work.Drawing on oral histories, environmental data, and cutting-edge digital methods, The Hobo paints an unforgettable portrait of an eclectic group of wandering radicals, troublemakers, poets, and writers, demonstrating how their experiences upend some of our basic assumptions about how environments and technologies shape society.

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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An exploration of the concept of cultivation, as conducted on both
the land and the body, which expands our understanding of it as
practice, aesthetic, and ideology.

In Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control (Yale University Press, 2026),
Jeffrey Hoelle traces the imprint of cultivation across the naturally
growing covers of the land and body—plants and hair. The book builds
from research in the agricultural fields and cattle pastures at the edge
of the Amazon rainforest to domestic landscapes and hair salons and
shops in the frontier cities of Brazil and beyond. In spaces where the
tangled forest once stood, clean pastures and ordered rows of crops now
sit on properties with geometric edges. From rural spaces to immaculate
lawns and cemeteries in the city, the imprint leads to the body, where
hair, like plant growth, is cut, trimmed, and otherwise managed.
Seemingly separate domains of agriculture, landscaping, and personal
grooming are governed by a similar aesthetic of control.

This unique pairing of land and body expands our understanding of
cultivation as a practice and as an ideology that operates in frontier
Amazonia—but also closer to home, influencing how we conceptualize and
interpret the covers that grow on and around us, and our imagined
relations with nature in the future. Hoelle argues that we must
understand this system of thought and the overlooked role it plays in
environmental destruction and social inequality.

Jeffrey Hoelle is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His research explores the social, cultural,
and political-economic dimensions of environmental transformation and
deforestation in frontier Amazonia. He is the author of Rainforest Cowboys: The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia (UT Press, 2015)

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of
Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his
scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026),
Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before
the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state
moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to
incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for
economic recovery. Brodie contends that while the Irish state’s
investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed
to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it
instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability
and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations.
Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s
policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites,
Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of
Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct
investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and
comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.
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Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography.

From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Dr. Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized.

Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies