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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
Davide Rodogno, "Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, "Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility" (Haymarket, 2023)
Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, "Noah's Arkive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)
Shelley Ingram and Willow G. Mullins, "Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)
Christopher C. Sellers, "Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
Sally Hawkins et al., "Routledge Handbook of Rewilding" (Routledge, 2022)
Ulbe Bosma, "The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2,000 Years" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Satish Kumar and Lorna Howarth, "Regenerative Learning: Nurturing People and Caring for the Planet" (Salt Desert Media, 2022)
Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World
Indra’s Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World
The Silent Epidemic: Coal and the Hidden Threat to Health
Vinod Thomas, "Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023)
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now" (Routledge, 2023)
Simone M. Müller, "The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade" (U Washington Press, 2023)
Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022)
Richard C. Hoffmann, "The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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