New Books in Environmental Studies

In the mid-twentieth century, researchers at an experiment station in Sonora's Yaqui Valley designed high-yielding wheat seeds with the promise that increasing crop productivity would end world hunger. The seeds made their way across the world, where accompanying inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation systems transformed global farming in what came to be known as the Green Revolution.
In The World in a Wheat Field: Mexico, Science, and the Challenge of Ending Global Hunger (U California Press, 2026), Dr. Gabriela Soto Laveaga challenges this history—often told from the point of view of philanthropic organizations, development proselytizers, or heroic American scientists—by placing native lands, Sonoran farmers, Mexican innovation, and Mexico-India connections at the center. Presenting groundbreaking archival research, The World in a Wheat Field sheds new light on how global initiatives changed a local place and points to why so many development projects failed to eradicate hunger worldwide.
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.

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The uplands of northwest of Vietnam have in recent decades been massively transformed by hydropower schemes, rubber plantations and mining projects. The effects of all on the people and places in this region are, as Nga Dao discusses in this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies on The Everyday Politics of Resources: Lives and Landscapes in Northwest Vietnam, diverse and multilayered. Bringing a political ecology lens to over three decades of accumulated knowledge and fieldwork in the region, Nga describes and interprets the politics of resource extraction to show how the Vietnamese state paradoxically excludes through inclusion; and, how some of its subjects succeed at adapting and thriving in the changed conditions while others fail. She is not starry eyed; the story she tells is precautionary, and the book makes for sobering reading. But it is also celebratory of the everyday cultural politics whose resources upland people draw upon to survive, to be heard, to get redress and sometimes to flourish or prosper.
Nga recommends Extractive Bargains edited by Bowles and Andrews, and Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction.
Like this interview? You might also be interested in Tania Murray Li talking about Plantation Life, or for other episodes on Vietnam, Ben Kerkvliet on Speaking Out in Vietnam and Pamela McElwee on Forests Are Gold.

Neither this interview nor its summary were synthesised by a machine.

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Water, malt, yeast, and hops: these are essential ingredients of beer. Hops, specifically, play an outsized role in determining its flavor and aroma. In Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Jennifer Jordan takes us back to a brief but pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when Wisconsin produced much of the hops grown in the United States. Yet those long-ago hops are not the only ghosts in Jordan’s story. Haunting the pages of this book are the young women whose work at harvest time was key to the rise of the American beer industry.
Until the early twentieth century, the work of picking hops was a time-consuming process that could only be done by hand, one cone at a time. In nineteenth-century Wisconsin, that work was performed almost exclusively by women and girls, who traveled to hop farms in droves as summer came to a close and the harvest began. At the height of the hop boom in the 1860s, farmers and their families laid out beds and prepared food for tens of thousands of seasonal laborers, and hosted parties and dances well into the night. Despite the scale of Wisconsin’s hop boom (and subsequent crash), the industry left behind little trace aside from local records and archives. And it is that barely discernible trace that lures Jordan to dig deeper.
Dr. Jordan’s vivid prose takes us back to this era by drawing on a rich trove of archival sources, from the thousands of hop farmers in the agricultural census to the extraordinary diary of a single hop picker, a young woman named Ella. The history of beer is incomplete without the history of Ella and the others who labored in the hop fields and in the houses that hosted them. In this book, Dr. Jordan gives life and voice to these beer ghosts who call to us from the past, showing the rich connections between a nation’s beer and the lives that made it possible.
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.

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Photographer Peter Aaron and acclaimed wine writer Jane Anson join the New Books Network to discuss Bordeaux Chronicle (Vendome Press, 2026), a visual and historical portrait of one of the world's most celebrated wine regions, told through photographs taken 55 years apart.
In 1969, at just 23, Aaron traveled through Bordeaux on a Vespa with his Nikon camera, commissioned by legendary wine merchant Alexis Lichine to photograph 64 wine estates for an encyclopedia that was never published. His photographs, largely unseen for decades, captured a Bordeaux far removed from today's glamorous châteaux and state-of-the-art wineries: modest cellars, vineyard laborers, family-run estates, and centuries-old traditions. In 2024, Aaron returned to photograph many of those same properties, offering a fascinating then-and-now portrait of the region.
Aaron recalls his introduction to wine through his father, Sam Aaron of New York's famed Sherry-Lehmann, his teenage experience working at Château Haut-Brion, and the encounters that shaped his original journey. He also reflects on returning half a century later and reconnecting with people and places he first photographed as a young man.
Anson, who has lived in Bordeaux since 2003, brings her deep knowledge of the region's wines, history, and families to the conversation. Together, they trace Bordeaux's rise as a global center of fine wine, luxury, and architectural ambition, touching on advances in winemaking, evolving ownership, environmental practices, and opportunities for women, while considering what has been gained - and lost - along the way.
The interview also delves into the collaboration behind Bordeaux Chronicle, which pairs Aaron's photographic archive with Anson's historical perspective. More than a wine book, it offers a compelling look at the people, places, and traditions that have shaped Bordeaux across generations, and the enduring character of a region where past and present remain closely intertwined.
Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger here.

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The oil industry today sponsors dozens of citizen advocacy organizations. Often called 'front groups' or 'astroturf,' they have become key actors in fossil fuel companies' political efforts across the US and Canada. People For Oil: Citizen Mobilization in the U.S. and Canadian Fossil Fuel Industries (Cambridge UP, 2026) by Dr. Tim Wood digs into these groups and the day-to-day ways they shape our energy future. Drawing on interviews with pro-oil organizers and citizen joiners, Dr. Wood explains why these groups form, why people join, and how these organizations intervene in governance. He shows that while we tend to think of all corporate grassroots mobilization as financially secretive, many campaigns today are openly sponsored and long-lasting. This allows industry lobbyists to stake a claim to representing citizen voice. By making sense of the backstage logics and affective politics of pro-oil organizing, People for Oil equips readers to better understand important new players in today's climate and energy politics.
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.

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