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Category: Environmental Studies

July 14, 2015

Ellen Griffith Spears: End Toxic Discrimination

One Supreme Court decision announced this June received limited notice, in part because it came out the same week as momentous decisions on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and following the horrific tragedy at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. But the Court’s decision in a fair housing dispute, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs et al. v. Inclusive Communities Project, merits serious attention as LGBTQ activists and their allies move on to tackle employment and housing discrimination and as the momentum from the campaign to remove the Confederate flag from public places turns toward a broader agenda. The ruling could be especially significant for activists working to end the disproportionate placement of polluting factories and hazardous waste facilities in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Continue Reading Ellen Griffith Spears: End Toxic Discrimination

Categories African American Studies/Author blog entry/Civil Rights/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/Law / Legal History/Public Policy
May 11, 2015

Timothy P. Spira: Hiking Rainbow Falls Trail

One of my favorite waterfall hikes in the southern Appalachians is the Rainbow Falls Trail in western North Carolina, just south of Lake Toxaway. Beginning in Gorges State Park, the 4-mile (round-trip) trail soon enters Pisgah National Forest, where it follows the Horsepasture River (a designated Wild and Scenic River) along the Blue Ridge Escarpment. Four waterfalls occur along this stretch of the river, including Rainbow Falls, a near-vertical cascade about 125 feet high with a large plunge pool at the base. Few waterfalls in the southern Appalachians are as spectacular (and powerful) as this one. Continue Reading Timothy P. Spira: Hiking Rainbow Falls Trail

Categories Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/Hiking/Nature/North Carolina/Travel
April 23, 2015

Lindsey A. Freeman: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene, Atomicocene

I’m going with Atomicocene because what has changed with this new time is not only humans and their activities, but specifically, and most dramatically, the role some humans in atomic states have played in the spreading of “artificial” radioactivity across the globe. Continue Reading Lindsey A. Freeman: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene, Atomicocene

Categories Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/History/Sociology
March 23, 2015

Adam Wesley Dean on the Creation of Yosemite

Yosemite National Park made the evening news on Wednesday, January 14, 2015. American rock climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson reached the top of El Capitan by ascending Yosemite’s Dawn Wall. The climbers’ years of preparation, 19-day free-climb, and personal stories riveted television audiences nationwide. News programs also gave audiences a rare treat: panoramic views of the park’s natural beauty that included cascading waterfalls, granite formations, and snow-dusted trees.
Yet Yosemite almost did not become a national park. Continue Reading Adam Wesley Dean on the Creation of Yosemite

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Civil War/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/Hiking/History/Nature
March 11, 2015

Lindsey A. Freeman: On the Anniversary of Fukushima

I am in one of the uncanniest locations to learn of this tragedy on the other side of the globe. Richland was the bedroom community for scientists, engineers, and managers working at the Hanford Site, a top-secret complex created for the Manhattan Project. After the war, Hanford was a key location for nuclear bomb production during the Cold War. Now the site is mostly dedicated to cleaning up after those nuclear adventures. Continue Reading Lindsey A. Freeman: On the Anniversary of Fukushima

Categories Author blog entry/Current Events/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/Science/Sociology/UNC Press Authors
March 10, 2015

Timothy P. Spira: The Lure of Waterfalls

Waterfalls are constantly changing. A rapid surge in stream flow following a heavy rain can turn a modest waterfall into a raging torrent of water. Dry periods can transform a waterfall into a trickle of water (much to the disappointment of waterfall enthusiasts). A slight breeze can elicit a shimmering spray, and if the light is right, a colorful rainbow. If passing clouds obscure the sun, the brightly reflective waterfall changes to softer hues, and the rainbow vanishes into thin air. Continue Reading Timothy P. Spira: The Lure of Waterfalls

Categories Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/Hiking/Nature/Travel
January 9, 2015

Christopher C. Sellers: How a Mid-Century LA Environmentalist Got Beyond John Muir

A century out from Muir’s death, humanity’s mounting influence on the planet, and what we now know about that influence, have made a truly pristine nature ever more difficult, even impossible, to find. No place on earth stays untouched by a phenomenon like climate change. To be sure, we still need our Yosemites, not least for the transcendent encounters that Muir and his descendants have helped us to find in them. Yet in a time when human impacts have turned planetary in scale, the project of protecting our wildest places has become far more bound up with what we do in our cities, suburbs, and factories than Muir ever imagined Continue Reading Christopher C. Sellers: How a Mid-Century LA Environmentalist Got Beyond John Muir

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers
November 14, 2014

Christopher C. Sellers: Beyond Environmentalism: Marching toward Climatism

Over the last decade around New York, a host of more localized concerns and groups have mobilized around a new bevvy of “green” causes: banding together to rebuild after Sandy, campaigning for locally grown and organic food, and fighting against fracking. At the People’s Climate March, they found welcome and common cause with those pushing for divestiture from fossil fuels, as well as those from more far flung locales, those rebuilding on the Gulf Coast after Katrina, those from island nations and from other communities on the “front line” of environmental change. In an earlier era, “the environment” had gained traction because of how it linked so many issues long considered separate, from pollution to wilderness preservation. Now “climate” may have proven itself sufficiently capacious to serve as an entire movement’s umbrella. Continue Reading Christopher C. Sellers: Beyond Environmentalism: Marching toward Climatism

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers
October 8, 2014

Interview: Christopher Norment on the beauty of the desert ecosystem

The amount of surface water in the Basin and Range country of California and Nevada, where my book is set, has fluctuated tremendously over the last several million years and the fortunes of the salamanders, toads, and pupfishes have waxed and waned with the advance and retreat of these waters. Imagine standing above Death Valley 150,000 years ago and looking out over ancient Lake Manly, which was six hundred feet deep and eighty miles long. Lake Manly—and Searles Lake, Panamint Lake, and Tecopa Lake, on and on—would have been stunningly beautiful, part of a widespread Pleistocene “sea.” The fishes and amphibians that lived in or near these lakes, or along feeder streams, must have prospered. Now these waters have been replaced by desert and salt pan playas, and “my” species have retreated into refugia, where they persevere, sometimes against great odds. Continue Reading Interview: Christopher Norment on the beauty of the desert ecosystem

Categories Biology/Environmental Studies/Interviews/Science
September 22, 2014

Interview: Steph Jeffries and Tom Wentworth on Hiking Appalachian Forests

I think most of us are “destination-oriented”—focused on the trail’s end, the scenic vista, the waterfall. Many of our hikes have points of interest such as these, because we love them too. By using our book, you can become a “journey” person as well, someone who sees something new and exciting around each bend in the trail. We want you to start seeing the forest intimately, instead of a background of green noise. Continue Reading Interview: Steph Jeffries and Tom Wentworth on Hiking Appalachian Forests

Categories Environmental Studies/Hiking/Nature/Travel
August 4, 2014

Sarah S. Elkind: Air Pollution and Prosperity

I was recently interviewed for a series of radio essays called “We Used to Be China,” on China’s air pollution, by Sarah Gardner at American Public Radio’s Marketplace. These stories got me thinking about China’s air pollution problem, and about Marketplace’s premise. Did we, the United States, used to be China? In what ways? Continue Reading Sarah S. Elkind: Air Pollution and Prosperity

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers
March 13, 2014

Announcing a new book series: Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges

Under the editorship of Mart A. Stewart and Harriet Ritvo, Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges seeks book projects that explore the cross-border movements of organisms and materials that have shaped the modern world, as well as the varied human attempts to understand, regulate, and manage these movements. Although the series will emphasize scholarship whose analysis is transnational in scope, it will also include scholarship that explores movement across intranational boundaries. The core discipline of the series will be environmental history, but authors might also engage with scholarship in such allied fields as agricultural and rural development history, urban history, political ecology, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and natural resource policy. Continue Reading Announcing a new book series: Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges

Categories Environmental Studies/UNC Press News
November 21, 2013

Kathryn Shively Meier: Civil War Soldier Trauma in Unexpected Places

Soldiers on both sides pegged environmental circumstances as some of the most serious stressors of the war. Privates through non-commissioned officers, common soldiers rarely had traveled far from home before deploying. That meant the vast majority of them were transported to foreign environments that appeared extremely threatening based on popular notions of disease causation. Lacking conceptions of germ theory or insect-borne illness (theories developed in the 1870s and 80s respectively), mid-century Americans widely believed that a sudden change of location or weather and the air, water, and terrain of certain locales (particularly those of the South) caused life-threatening diseases, such as dysentery, malaria, and typhoid. It was clear to soldiers that disease claimed far more mortalities than combat; indeed, two-thirds of soldier deaths by war’s end would be from sickness rather than wounds. Nature appeared to be the soldiers’ fiercest enemy. Continue Reading Kathryn Shively Meier: Civil War Soldier Trauma in Unexpected Places

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Civil War/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers/Health / Medicine/History/Military History/Military Studies
June 10, 2013

Interview: T. DeLene Beeland, author of The Secret World of Red Wolves

Red wolves are shy, elusive, and misunderstood predators. Until the 1800s, they were common in the longleaf pine savannas and deciduous forests of the southeastern United States. However, habitat degradation, persecution, and interbreeding with the coyote nearly annihilated them. Today, reintroduced red wolves are found only in peninsular northeastern North Carolina within less than 1 percent of their former range. In The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf, nature writer T. DeLene Beeland shadows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s pioneering recovery program over the course of a year to craft an intimate portrait of the red wolf, its history, and its restoration. Continue Reading Interview: T. DeLene Beeland, author of The Secret World of Red Wolves

Categories Environmental Studies/Interviews/Nature/North Carolina
April 22, 2013

Interview: Tom Earnhardt on Crossroads of the Natural World

The first essay, “Three Elephants in the Basement,” allowed me to transport the reader back to a time not very long ago—just a comma and three zeroes ago—when the land that would become North Carolina was populated by three species of elephant and a menagerie of strange animals as large as any in Africa today. Continue Reading Interview: Tom Earnhardt on Crossroads of the Natural World

Categories Environmental Studies/Interviews/Nature/North Carolina/Photography/Travel
February 22, 2013

Award-winning books from UNC Press (updated)

We are honored and delighted to share the news of some of our most recent award-winning books. Hope you’ll join us in congratulating these fine authors. And you may want to consider using some of these books in your classroom or kitchen. Click the cover images or book titles to go to the book page on the UNC Press website,… Continue Reading Award-winning books from UNC Press (updated)

Categories Africa & African Diaspora/African American History/African American Studies/American History/American Studies/Awards/Biography / Autobiography/Civil War/Cooking / Food/Cuba/Cultural Studies/Documentary Studies/Environmental Studies/Global Studies/Health / Medicine/History/Latin American/Caribbean Hist./Native Amer./Indigenous Studies/UNC Press News