New Books in Environmental Studies

A gentle yet powerful blend of ancient wisdom and modern wellness that shows how seasonal living can enrich your days.

In
the Chinese Five Element system, which links nature’s cycles to our
emotional, physical, and spiritual selves, there are five seasons:
spring, summer, late summer, fall, and winter. You can feel the energy
of that fifth season when the air gets cooler, the light turns golden,
and we enjoy a few weeks of transition from the active energy of spring
and summer to the calming, restorative energy of fall and winter.

Leda
Elliott grew up in Japan and has long been a student of the dialogue
between East and West, between body and spirit. Drawing from decades of
experience in holistic practices, Leda has developed a unique method for
embracing the lessons we can learn from each season—late summer brings
grounding, fall brings release, winter brings stillness, spring brings
vision, and summer brings joy. Incorporating rituals, meditations, and
exercises attuned to each season’s energy can help us feel more aligned.
Things like the foods we eat, the colors we wear, and where we focus
our attention can all deepen our sense of connection to ourselves and
the world.

Leda’s peaceful spirit radiates onto the page in a book
offering tips and exercises, personal stories, illustrations, and
testimonials from her students. These heartfelt narratives demonstrate
how ancient practices can meet the challenges of modern life, providing
support for those navigating grief, stress, and fatigue.

The Five Seasons Method: A Gentle Path toward Emotional and Spiritual Balance (Scribner,
2026) will help readers of all ages and abilities get their energy back
into balance, one breath and one season at a time.

Leda Elliott
is a Tai Chi Master, Reiki Master, and the creator of The Five Seasons
Method, a wellness program that integrates Tai Chi, QiGong, breathwork,
and seasonal energy principles to help individuals cultivate balance,
vitality, and inner harmony. She trained under legendary Tai Chi
Grandmaster Bow Sim Mark and is the owner of A Thousand Cranes Studio,
where she offers in-person classes, private coaching, Reiki healing, and
global online workshops. For more information please visit this website.

Elizabeth
Cronin, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and certified mindfulness
meditation teacher in Norwood, MA. You can find her on Youtube or visit her website.
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In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping up along the way; rather, he lays them all bare in service of paving an actionable path toward the decarbonization and democratization of power.

Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute.

Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.
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The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy (Henry Holt & Co.), award-winning plant biologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website.

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Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes
behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged
in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers,
engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science
and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of
spatial information and modeling software, provides the context for many
of the chapters in that the media and methods employed are designed to
capture phenomena that are not directly visible to human perception, and
where there is a high degree of uncertainty or changeability due to
dynamic material conditions. Co-editors Karen M'Closkey and Keith
VanDerSys bring together authors from a wide range of
disciplines—landscape architecture, media studies, science and
technology studies, history of science, engineering, ecology, and
architecture—to examine how the creation and use of data, images, and
models act as the mediums through which a particular understanding of
“environment” or “landscape” arises. This framing of environmental media
emphasizes the relationships among various design media and the
specific material and social environments within which they operate.
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In Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke UP, 2025), Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself to be a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being—one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating.

In centering Indigenous feminist theories of hunger, Chao offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth. She also considers how Indigenous theories invite anthropologists to reimagine the ethics and politics of ethnographic writing and the responsibilities, hesitations, and compromises that shape anthropological commitments in and beyond the field.

Dr Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, and coeditor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both also published by Duke University Press. Land of Famished Beings won the 2026 ASAA Mid-Career Book Prize. Her latest book Plantations: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence (Cambridge UP, 2026), came out in June.
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