New Books in Environmental Studies

Noo Saro-Wiwa is an author and journalist. Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England, she attended King's College London and Columbia University in New York.​

Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Granta), was published to critical acclaim in 2012. It was selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in 2012; named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012; shortlisted for the Author’s Club Dolman Travel Book of the Year in 2013; nominated by The Financial Times as one of the best travel books of 2012. Looking for Transwonderland has been translated into French and Italian, and was awarded the Albatros Travel Literature Prize in Italy in 2016.

Noo's second book, Black Ghosts (Canongate, 2023) explores the African community in China and was named Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year in 2025.

Her latest publication, The Burning Ground: Oil and Militancy in Nigeria (Columbia Global Reports) examines the social and environmental effects of the insurgency that arose in the oil-rich Niger Delta after the death of her father, the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In the report, Noo highlights the undervalued role of women and meets individuals who are working towards sustainable development. It will be published in the US on 14th April 2026, and in the UK on 28th May 2026.

Noo has also contributed to the following anthologies: Go Girl 2: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure (2024); An Unreliable Guide to London (Influx Press, 2016); A Place of Refuge (Unbound, 2016), an anthology of writing on asylum seekers; and La Felicità Degli Uomini Semplici, an Italian-language anthology based around football. ​​

Noo is a staff writer for Condé Nast Traveller magazine, and she has contributed book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for various publications including The Guardian newspaper, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, City AM, and Chatham House.

She lives in London and supports Liverpool FC.

Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.
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Climate Change Litigation in Japan: Cases, Challenges, and Opportunities for Environmental Law (Brill, 2026) provides the details of Japanese climate litigation, positioning them both within the global trends of climate litigation and on the trajectory of Japanese past pollution lawsuits. It identifies the barriers that hinders the number of climate cases in Japan, a country known with a significant low litigation use. It then discusses the future prospects for climate change litigation in Japan by comparing with tobacco litigation in the United States. This original work makes a significant contribution to the international academic community, by describing Japan's climate cases, previously little known internationally.

Masako Ichihara, Ph.D. (2021), Kyoto Univeristy, is Program-specific Assistant Professor at the Unit of the Environment and Law, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Policy, Kyoto University.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations.

Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of support, pioneering a form of regional radicalism with global implications. Drawing out the international dimensions of the protest, Make cheese not war: Transnational resistance and the Larzac in modern France (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Andrew Smith explores a transnational resistance movement in the 1970s that challenged dominant visions of modernity and became a wellspring of radical alternatives. Exploring previously unconsulted archives in France and elsewhere, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the decade-long peasant movement and its aftermath.

Repositioning the Larzac struggle within a wider network of French and international solidarities, from the US to the UK, Germany, Burkina Faso, New Caledonia and Japan, the book retraces political networks of pacifist activism, as well as environmental movements and anti-nuclear protest. It shows how this French peasant campaign became both a platform and a model for popular engagement.

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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Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today. Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes (Princeton UP, 2026) by Nabil Ali brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.This unique book takes its title from an ink recipe derived from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which ingredients extracted from the bark are transformed, seemingly by magic, from brown to a yellow gold. But gold pigments can also be extracted from cornflower, crocus, greater celandine, myrrh, and turmeric. Ali shares his own accessible adaptations for preparing these and other recipes rooted in medieval craft traditions. Along the way, he provides an engaging and informative natural history of the plants used, alongside the broad spectrum of marvelous colors they produce.Presenting original translations of medieval recipes taken from painters’ and illuminators’ technical manuscripts from the third century BCE through to the twenty-first century, alongside stunning botanical illustrations, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree is a captivating celebration of colors derived from nature.

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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A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age.

We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (U Chicago Press, 2025), the period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive.In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age (University of Chicago Press 2025) turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.

Our guest is Professor Clifton Crais, a Professor of History at Emory University

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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