New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus―and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded―is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will have to adjust.
His well-research and multi-faceted book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (Columbia UP, 2023) is a tour de force that is engaging, informative and a book that is hard to put down. Topics range from the potential loss of the Joshua Tree to the dangers our coral reefs face. Learning from “Lucy,” our three million year old ancestor who can be found in the Hall of Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, is a lesson Verchick tells us, can open new windows into “a saga of resilience and adaptation.” He also illustrates how intersectionality can help us listen, learn and understand how interconnected networks of oppression are woven into the fabric of global warming and climate change.
Rob Verchick examines how we can manage the risks that we can no longer avoid, laying out our options as we face climate breakdown. Although reducing carbon dioxide emissions is essential, we need to adapt to address the damage we have already caused. Verchick explores what resilience looks like on the ground, from early humans on the savannas to today’s shop owners and city planners. He takes the reader on a journey into the field: paddling through Louisiana’s bayous, hiking in one of the last refuges of Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert, and diving off Key Largo with citizen scientists working to restore coral reefs. The book emphasizes disadvantaged communities, which bear the brunt of environmental risk, arguing that building climate resilience is a necessary step toward justice.
Engaging and accessible for nonexpert concerned citizens, The Octopus in the Parking Garage empowers readers to face the climate crisis and shows what we can do to adapt and thrive.
Robert Verchick just became a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Fellow and will be working on the impact our current environment has on oceans and coasts this year. He is one of the leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and designed climate-resilience policies in the Obama administration.
Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).
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Stephen G. Gross, "Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Tessa Farmer, "Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Tobias Ide, "Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts" (MIT Press, 2023)
Rob Marchant, "East Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)
X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction
John D. Aber, "Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change" (Yale UP, 2023)
Christina Gerhardt, "Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean" (U California Press, 2023)
Philip Gooding, "Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
Ailton Krenak, "Life Is Not Useful" (Polity Press, 2023)
Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)
China's Green Consensus: A Discussion with Virginie Arantes
Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)
Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)
Bryan Alexander, "Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)
Darrel Moellendorf, "Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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