New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit.
In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraway’s essay, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” Environmental Humanities 6 no. 1 (2015): 159-165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934, and Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’” Earth Systems Science in the Anthropocene ed. Eckhart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Springer, 2006) pp. 13-18. He references B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two (MacMillan, 1962) at the end of our conversation.
Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Watson Institute for International Affairs. He studies the history of science, agriculture, and other forms of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, focusing on the plantation cultures of the Caribbean and Brazil. He was recently the director of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, and many years ago, when he was more optimistic about the current global epoch, he managed grants for the Sierra Club Foundation in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (U Chicago, 2008) and is cooking up two new projects, on the historical connections between natural science and plantation agriculture in the Amazon River basin and the global history of collecting.
The image for this week comes from Neil’s research on the history of plantation agriculture. This drawing of a plantation from Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) was reproduced in José Mariano da Conceição Velozo's Fazendeiro do Brazil Tome III Part II (Lisbon, 1799), in the volume dedicated to coffee production.
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Helen Anne Curry, "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" (U California Press, 2022)
Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)
The Climate Change Scientist: A Conversation with Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu
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Sayan Dey, "Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems" (Routledge, 2022)
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Finis Dunaway. "Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2021)
Brenden W. Rensink, "The North American West in the Twenty-First Century" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Munira Khayyat, "A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon" (U California Press, 2022)
Michael Weeks, "Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Off-Shore Aesthetics
Cynthia Radding, "Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Sarah Milne, "Corporate Nature: An Insider's Ethnography of Global Conservation" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
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Matthew Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
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