Climate Politics on the Border by
Explores the ways climate change and extreme weather are negotiated politically in a border community As a borderland city with generations of slow violence and extreme weather events like flash flooding and intense heat waves, San Antonio, Texas, speaks directly to global issues in climate politics. In Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics, Kenneth Walker takes a place-based approach to his study of San Antonio to explore how extreme weather events and responses to them shape local places, publics, and politics, with an eye toward a future characterized by severe climate breakdown. Attending to the local histories and micropolitics of San Antonio, Walker examines the effects of extreme weather events as they are experienced across radically inequitable social categories. These local histories serve as a guide, not just for future climates, which stand to be unprecedented, but for the necessary public and political responses to them. He shows how extreme weather events in the past have reinforced colonial social orders that weaken democratic goals of pluralism and equity. Conversely, he also shows how diverse coalitions have resisted and responded to these forces. Walker examines the ethics of Latinx and Anglo relations within state-sponsored productions of racial inequity and environmental degradation, the coalitional capacities of environmental activists and second-wave Chicana/o organizations to protect clean water and transform local political representation, the obligations of place-keeping in Latinx urban design and ecological restoration, and the need to foster pluriversal worlds in city-level climate action and adaptation plans. Collectively these chapters rethink tropes of adaptation, resilience, and coalition as rhetorical and ecological capacities for public and political responses to extractivism. Based on years of archival work and fieldwork, Climate Politics on the Border demonstrates vividly why ecological and anticolonial approaches to rhetoric are essential for grappling with climate politics. Overall, this is a timely study of how environmental degradation, pollution, and climate change are disputed and negotiated at the local political level in a borderland community.
Endangered Maize by
Charting the political, social, and environmental history of efforts to conserve crop diversity. Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
Sundressed by
For conscious consumers, buying clothes has never been more complicated. Even as fashion brands tout their sustainability, the industry is plagued by pollution, waste, and poor working conditions. If our clothes reflect our values, is it possible to be truly well-dressed? Sustainable fashion consultant Lucianne Tonti answers with a resounding yes. Beautiful clothes made from natural fabrics including cotton, wool, flax, and cashmere can support rural communities and regenerate landscapes. They can also reduce waste--but only if we invest in garments that stand the test of time rather than chasing fast fashion trends. In Sundressed, Tonti travels the world to showcase producers who are reforming the industry, from Mongolian goatherders, to Mulberry groves in China, and American hemp farms. Many of these innovations begin in the fields, with the cotton crops that will ultimately be spun into a soft T-shirt or the sheep's wool than will be knitted into a cozy sweater. Fiber farmers are taking a page from the regenerative agriculture movement, giving back to the land as they tend it. Meanwhile, further down the supply chain, top designers are working with Indigenous communities to relearn the artistry of sewing--and reward them financially. And global brands, including Levi's, are working to produce a pair of jeans that can withstand dozens of washes without any sign of wear. Tonti also shows readers how accessible sustainable fashion can be. Not everyone can afford a designer shirt that was lovingly hand-sewn. But most of us can buy less, choose natural fabrics over polyester, thrift shop, and wear our clothes longer. Sundressed is an exploration of a revolution taking place in fashion. And it is a love letter to clothing that embodies beauty and value, from farm to closet.
Violent Inheritance by
Violent Inheritance deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages--"land lines"--between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the "electric" climates of the Rocky Mountains to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities.
Visions of Nature by
Visions of Nature revives the work of a cast of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers from Australia to California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and recreated on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman world, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate "nature" with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the settler work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a sweeping new comparative frame.
