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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June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)
Sarah T. Hines, "Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia" (U California Press, 2021)
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Andreas Malm, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Verso, 2021)
Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)
John Suval, "Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Julie Sze, "Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger" (U California Press, 2020)
Rafico Ruiz, "Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier" (Duke UP, 2021)
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)
M. Margaret McKeown, "Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas" (Potomac Books, 2022)
Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)
Saheed Aderinto, "Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria" (Ohio UP, 2022)
Jennifer Wenzel, "The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature" (Fordham UP, 2019)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)
NBN Classic: Kate Brown, "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)
NBN Classic: Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019)
Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017)
Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)
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