New Books in Environmental Studies

Journalist Katherine Blunt, who writes about renewable energy and utilities for the Wall Street Journal, talks about her new book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book tells the fascinating story of how declining performance at an electrical utility eventually led to wildfires and staggering loss of human life. Blunt and Vinsel also talk about what this story means for the future of electricity utilities in the face of global climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much of her recent work aims at addressing denialism about climate change. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Leif Wenar the Chair of Philosophy and Law at Kings College London. He is the author of the 2016 book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World. This book has led to the publication, in 2018, of a companion volume, Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

How does corporate misinformation and partisan skepticism effect what we know about climate change? Lawrence Torcello is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Philosophy. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, democratic theory, and climate justice.  The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. In this episode, Mia Bennett—co-author with Kalus Dodds of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (Yale UP, 2025)—discusses the state of the Arctic today, highlighting the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition, as well as how the region is becoming a space for experimentation in everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global, from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition. If you are to read one book to understand the Arctic today, from its history to global stakes, this is the one. — Mia Bennett is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. She is a 2025-26 British Academy Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Outer Space Studies at University College London and a Fulbright Arctic Initiative scholar. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, she traces, maps, and critiques processes of Arctic frontier-making from the edges of settler-colonial states and orbits of space powers like China to the depths of Indigenous lands. She is currently examining how the frontiers of the Arctic and outer space are intersecting through case studies involving the rise of Starlink satellite internet and the development of commercial spaceports and ground stations in places like Kodiak, Alaska and Svalbard, Norway. She has done fieldwork on bridges, both real and imagined, in the Russian Far East, on a new highway to the Arctic Ocean in Canada’s Northwest Territories, atop the melting Greenland Ice Sheet, and inside air-conditioned offices in Singapore. Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (Yale University Press 2025) Cryopolitics (started by Mia) A complete list of Mia’s publications on GoogleScholar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Lithium is necessary for the green transition but its mining comes with significant environmental and social harms. This is the conundrum at the core of decarbonisation, which host Licia Cianetti discusses with Thea Riofrancos. They talk about how Riofrancos’s book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (published by W.W. Norton in 2025) helps us understand the local and global politics of lithium extraction and the lessons it holds for a more just green transition. Transcript here Thea Riofrancos is Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. She researches the politics of climate change and of resource extraction and is also the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019) Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

When maps come up short and the path ahead is uncertain, how do we find our way? Visionary climate leader Katharine K. Wilkinson offers a compassionate and empowering guide to navigating from ache to action, doubt to possibility. Through transformational programs and books, including the national bestseller All We Can Save, Wilkinson has inspired hundreds of thousands of climate journeys. In Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home (Amber Lotus, 2026) she shares a proven process for looking inward with care, outward with curiosity, and forward with courage. Ultimately, readers chart a course toward playing their unique part in our collective healing. With her singular blend of warmth and rigor, Wilkinson lights the way through stirring personal essays, interwoven with the wisdom of other climate leaders and the beauty of poetry, art, and song. A book to sit with and savor, Climate Wayfinding also invites engagement with journaling prompts, practical exercises, and guides for conversation. Whether steeped in climate or newly curious, readers will discover something grounding and generative in these pages. The terrain ahead is calling—and we have everything we need to find our way. (Source: here) Dr. Katharine Wilkinson is a climate leader named by Time magazine as one of 15 “women who will save the world.” Her publications include the New York Times bestseller, Project Drawdown, and the co-edited, All We Can Save, which is an anthology of writings on climate change named among the 10 best science books of 2020 by Smithsonian magazine. Dr. Wilkinson is the co-founder and executive director of the All We Can Save Project and Co-host of the podcast, A Matter of Degrees. In this interview with Dr. Patricia Houser, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson discusses the unique organization of the Climate Wayfinding book--with its strategic juxtaposition of inspirational essays, poetry, music and reflective passages. This “quilt of components” says Wilkinson, was honed in a series of workshops designed to help people find meaningful and impactful roles as climate leaders/workers. Selected subtopics and excerpts of the conversation can be found at the following timestamps: 0:04 mins. The podcast opens with the author explaining that people today are confronting a world where the earth’s features no longer resembles what is on a map—we are literally “map-less.” [Background instrumental music: folk_acoustic from Pixabay] 3:04 “Most books talk to you. These pages hope to walk with you.” 4:18 The Author explains, when she is asked “What can I do?” about the climate crisis, she feels that the answer is really, “something of a Russian doll:” Wilkinson: We ask, what can I do? But sitting within that question are often other bigger wonderings about what it means to be alive at this time, what it means to contribute, where we belong, how are we going to cope? 5:12 Wilkinson: This is an unusual book in the sense that it grew out of this experiential learning and leadership development program and then found its way onto the page. 6:41 Explaining who the book is written for and who is it designed to help 10:41 How the reflective passages and invitations to meditate in this book help people prepare for climate work 15:08 The power of community building as part of a preparation for climate work, has its parallels in history. 17:15 The challenge of better engaging the 89% of people around the world who would like to see more climate action. 24:40 The website climatewayfinding.earth offers audio versions of specially designed meditations printed in the book. 26:45 Features of the website linked to the book. 30:00 Wilkinson: What I hope is that readers, that reading groups, that people who come through the program, they feel at the end of it more equipped for the ongoing work of orientation and navigation and finding our next steps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit--especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree--and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit (Island Press, 2026), Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature. Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple's storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello fruitery. The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an "apple a day." Kumar shows how--if we follow untamed paths--the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild. Priyanka Kumar is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and the author. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings (Zone Books, 2026) is a compelling and wide-ranging analysis of pneumatic phenomena in modern culture. Architect and historian Dr. Tim Altenhof brilliantly explores the physiology of breathing and its reciprocal relationship to bodies and buildings, both of which share a common atmosphere. Because breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system and cannot be willfully overridden, it takes place unconsciously and involuntarily—most of the time. However, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, attitudes toward breathing changed significantly. Breathing became a widely investigated cultural and physiological phenomenon and was the basis for techniques and bodily practices that heightened pulmonary awareness. New understandings of air pollution and disease stimulated a widespread preoccupation with ventilation, impacting architecture in countless ways. Dr. Altenhof’s close readings of built structures show how the science of breathing was incorporated into architecture, whether in the design of factories, residences, or medical facilities. The lungs form a major part of the respiratory system and like no other organ tie the living body directly to its surroundings. Yet the role of lungs also poses a topological problem: engaging in atmospheric transfer, they dissolve the division between inside and outside, and despite being an internal organ, they sustain a permanent and living connection to the external world. This ambiguity and permeability constitute the spatial dimension of breathing. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Fossil Consumerism: Energy, Ecology and Everyday Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (Leuven UP, 2026) by Dr. Wout Saelens explores how the homes of ordinary city dwellers sparked our modern dependence on fossil fuels. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including probate inventories, household manuals, personal journals, medical treatises and contemporary artwork, it reveals how households in the early modern Low Countries embraced peat and coal to fuel new standards of warmth, light and domesticity. Yet, with these new home comforts came rising indoor pollution, intensified and gendered housework and, ultimately, a quiet shift in humanity’s relationship with nature. Bridging the histories of environments, material culture and consumption, Fossil Consumerism offers a reinterpretation of the historical roots of global warming, finding these not in the industrial mill, but in the intimate, overlooked spaces of the home. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the everyday origins of the Anthropocene and is available Open Access. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Salt lakes are some of the most beautiful and unusual landscapes that you can find on this planet, even as they can be quite alien to people used to fresh bodies of water. They're also uniquely threatened, both by everyday human activity such as farming and industry and by the looming problem of anthropogenic climate change. As the lakes dry up, the consequences to the surrounding ecosystems can be devastating; meanwhile, people who live nearby can suffer from declining air quality, toxic levels of exposure to minerals in the lakebeds, and long-term health concerns. In Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (W. W. Norton, 2026) that's part memoir and part history and geography, Caroline Tracey describes a series of journeys across North America and Central Asia that brought her close to numerous different salt lakes. She outlines their history, the threats facing them, their ecological and cultural significance, and how people are trying to protect and conserve them. And even as she does the work of telling their history, she also makes clear the effect that these landscapes had on her in developing a greater understanding of her own sexuality and place in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What is that rock you’ve just picked up? Which minerals is it made of, what’s unique about it and what can it reveal about Earth’s deeper story?Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell (Frances Lincoln, 2026) gives you the tools to answer these questions. Geologist and science illustrator Vojta Hybl guides you through more than 100 rock types, explaining how they form, what they look like and the geological processes they represent.This authoritative yet accessible guide includes clear explanations of igneous, volcaniclastic, sedimentary, metamorphic and anthropic rocks. It also discusses practical tips for spotting and identifying rocks, including detailed specimen illustrations that highlight key features for easy recognition. Alongside practical identification advice, Rocks invites you to see the ground beneath your feet in a new way, connecting everyday stones to billions of years of planetary change.Whether you’re a curious walker, an outdoor enthusiast or simply fascinated by the natural world, this book will transform how you experience landscapes and help you read the stories written in stone. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.” This “tension” takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; “Future tension” accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families. Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how “tension” acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from filmed landscape-portraits of women in Los Angeles, Orkney, and the Navajo Nation to Indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia. Proposing "land cinema" as an urgent genre for our time, this book reveals how images and ideas produced half a century ago sowed the seeds for climate justice movements today. Becca Voelcker is Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountains in southwestern China, a region that was incorporated into the nascent people’s republic of China from 1953 onwards, with immense consequences for Blang communities and ecologies. Our guest Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström disentangles how the arrival of the state disrupted long-standing relations between Blang communities and the local mountain gods, making the land sick. And what Blang people can teach us about tackling the ongoing climate crisis. Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström is a guest researcher at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is a social anthropologist working at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Place-Based Solutions (JHU Press, 2026) offers a bold and practical response, charting a path toward what Charles G. Curtin calls "prosilience"—the capacity not just to endure crises, but to leap forward through them. With over thirty years of collaborative, on-the-ground experience in conservation and climate adaptation. This book emphasizes the power of small and mid-sized organizations to catalyze meaningful change, using real-world examples to illustrate how lasting impact depends on aligning ethics, equity, institutional design, and the ability to learn over time. Curtin encourages readers to shift their focus from the pre-crisis status quo to preparing for—and thriving in—novel futures. This is the third of a series of books that Charles has authored to explore and test frameworks for addressing social and ecological change. His previous two books, The Science of Open Spaces and Complex Ecology: Foundational perspectives on Dynamic Approaches to Ecology and Conservation. Charles has a Master's in Land Management and a doctorate in Zoology. And he completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Climate Change Adaptation. His current work develops carbon-negative, place-based conservation strategies addressing fire and drought in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, with companion projects focused on sustaining intact Panamanian cloud forests. He now lives near Taos, New Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling authors of Overshoot The world is crossing the 1.5°C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2°C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by re­moving CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe; they come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? Or will any such round­about measures simply make things worse?The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late (Verso Books, 2025)maps the new front lines in the struggle for a liveable planet and insists on the climate revolution long overdue. In the end, no technology can absolve us of responsibility for our planet and each other. Cody Skahan is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford as a recipient of a Grand Union ESRC doctoral training partnership. His work focuses on the intersections of people, the environment, and technology. Currently, he is focusing on the emergence of carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal, as well as running a series of public engagement workshops across the UK and the Arctic around the topic of geoengineering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state and local officials, school curriculum changes, and a recently christened national holiday. However, Joseph Weiss argues, these state-driven initiatives reinforce Indigenous subordination to the settler state. This incisive study of the varied responses from both Indigenous Nations and individuals illuminates how reconciliation is implicated in ongoing colonial erasure.Critically engaging with a variety of fields, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss captures the multiple scales at which these contested dynamics unfold and explores their underlying technologies of erasure. Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada (UNC Press, 2026) unpacks how reconciliation offers amends for anti-Indigenous violence while disavowing responsibility for that violence, and argues that settler promises of reconciliation cannot be reconciled to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Nevertheless, Weiss illustrates how Indigenous Peoples refuse erasure at every turn, instead building alternate futures and lived worlds that are not always already colonially overdetermined. Joseph Weiss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, American Studies, Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University and where he also chairs the anthropology department. He is also the author of Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Like many of the world’s iconic coastal cities, Boston faces potentially severe impacts from climate change. Depending on global emissions, Boston could face several feet of sea level rise this century, which would leave many parts of the city subject to tidal and storm flooding. Precipitation events could become more frequent and extreme, and its already-humid summers could become dangerously hot, with most days over 90 degrees. Today, Boston is a booming city with a growing population, a glittering new waterfront neighborhood, world-class universities and a strong economy. Its future risks and opportunities related to climate change are shaped by the 400-year environmental, social and economic history of the city’s development. As part of Anthem’s series, Climate Change and the Future of Boston (Anthem Press, 2026) by Dr. Courtney Humphries describes how Boston’s history and current context shape future climate impacts and examines the mitigation and adaptation strategies the city has taken. Boston is a leader in acknowledging the problem of climate change; it has set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, among other climate-related goals. It has also developed science-based climate models and undertaken a robust planning process to identify strategies to protect its waterfront from flooding and increase its resilience to other climate-related impacts. Its mayor has embraced a progressive Green New Deal for Boston emphasizing the need for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. But the city also faces structural challenges, such as aging infrastructure, historic racial inequities, rising gentrification and income inequality and ongoing political and regulatory obstacles that hinder efforts to adapt in an efficient and just manner. The book concludes with a set of forward-looking scenarios about what the future may have in store for the city and the lessons it holds for other coastal cities struggling with these challenges. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroelectric power. However, in the current rapidly changing climate, many nations face recurring droughts, which hinder electricity production just when demand is on the rise. This situation has led to challenges like load shedding and unplanned power outages, which have strained the bond between citizens and the government. Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026) aims to unravel the puzzling reality that, despite enduring increasing difficulties from these electricity shortages, the Ghanaian citizens who suffer most harshly are also the least likely to demand political accountability from the state. Drawing on archival evidence, focus groups, qualitative interviews, survey data, and contemporary art and music, author Lauren M. MacLean explains how this disparity in experience—fueled by differences in income and geographical location—has led lower- and higher-income Ghanaians to form contrasting perspectives on their social rights regarding public services and to adopt varying approaches to political involvement. Rather than relying on a predetermined social contract, citizens in Ghana develop a more fluid relationship with the state, shaped by their histories, identities, and personal experiences. This reciprocity highlights their awareness of how climate change and the global shift toward green energy can significantly impact their lives while also underscoring the necessity for the government to take the lead and engage with Ghanaians to promote climate justice. Lauren M. MacLean is the Thomas P. O’Neill Chair of Public Life and Department Chair of Political Science at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the politics of electricity access and the everyday practice of citizenship in Africa. She conducts fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya, collecting survey data from individuals, conducting focus group discussions, doing archival work, and carrying out qualitative interviews with politicians, policymakers, practitioners, and ordinary people. MacLean has published award-winning books and articles, including: Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa (Cambridge, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell, 2014), co-edited with Cammett, and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge, 2015), coauthored with Kapiszewski and Read. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and supported by grants, including NSF, SSRC, RWJ, Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie. She was the recipient of the APSA QMMR 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award. You can learn more about her work here. Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies