Celebrate Earth Day with These Books

Every year on April 22 we celebrate Earth day, which marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. This year, to celebrate, we’ve compiled a recommended reading list of some of our Environmental Studies titles for you to enjoy.

---

Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks

“There’s great urgency when it comes to saving threatened plants, and Saving the Wild South is an inspiring, journalistic overview of endangered and important species, with broad appeal for gardeners and conservationists.”—Foreword Reviews

“Eubanks’s determined journey to see these plants and talk to those who are trying to preserve biodiversity in the wild South make this book revelatory, joyous and sobering.”—Southern Review of Books

Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South by Caroline Grego

“Grego tells a complicated story of how sudden environmental devastation empowered white supremacists to consolidate power despite the efforts of the Red Cross and the local African American community. Hurricane Jim Crow recounts the history of this disaster not by presupposing the coming of Jim Crow as an inevitability but by emphasizing contingency and negotiation between white oppression and Black resistance.”—Cynthia A. Kierner, author of Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood

“Hurricane Jim Crow is an incisive and compelling chronicle of the aftermath of a devastating storm that collided with social, economic, and political realities, exacerbating and unearthing African Americans’ struggle for survival and their freedom fight.”—Melissa L. Cooper, author of Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination

Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode

“A significant contribution to a growing field of studies on pre–twentieth century antecedents to contemporary sustainability rhetoric and practices. Agrotopias highlights the ways that U.S. agrarianism has been entangled from the beginning with nativist and eugenic assumptions about population control and racial purity.”—William Gleason, Princeton University

“Goode attends to the racial dimension of American sustainability discourse and the literature of agriculture and that has long been missing from scholarly work on the subject. An important intervention in the history of American agrarianism.”—Timothy Sweet, West Virginia University

Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century by Neel Ahuja

Honorable Mention, 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary

“As the planet continues hurtling toward disaster at breakneck speed, Ahuja presents a convincing framework for understanding environmental racism.”—Scientific American

“A vital and stimulating read—both for its piercing rebuttal of the racism inherent in current ideas of climate migration, and for its analysis of the material changes of the past seventy years in the age of oil.”—US Intellectual History

Use code 01UNCP30 to get these books, or any of our Environmental Studies titles, for 30% off + free shipping on US orders $75 and over.