New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?
These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin, 2023), Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems--from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster--ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.
Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
Dan Chapman, "A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land" (Island Press, 2022)
MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair
Salar Mameni, "Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2023)
Michael Gilson, "Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
John J. Berger, "Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth" (Seven Stories Press, 2023)
Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen, "Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
Hiromi Ito, "Tree Spirits Grass Spirits" (Nightboat Books, 2023)
Steven C. Beda, "Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, "Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Joshua Trey Barnett, "Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence" (Michigan State UP, 2022)
Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024)
India’s Waste Problem: A Discussion with Pamela Das
Rachel S. Gross, "Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America" (Yale UP, 2024)
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., "Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Charlie Hertzog Young, "Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future" (Footnote Press, 2023)
Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Travis Rieder, "Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices" (Dutton, 2024)
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, "Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield" (U California Press, 2024)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Psychology
New Books in Economics