Environmental Studies

As is becoming clearer and clearer, pressures on water resources in the United States are growing, with no foreseeable end in sight. Yet these pressures are not due to a national water scarcity. While the Southwest faces the problems of draught, a rising population, and over-allocation of resources, the Northeast and Northern Plains must deal with increasingly wet weather and flooding. A Twenty-First Century U.S. Water Policy culls together independent analysis of freshwater availability; water usage in agriculture, municipalities, tribal settlements, and energy production; existing legal frameworks; environmental justice movements; and data on water quality and climate change. The result is a visionary proposal for a coherent and critically needed federal water policy.

This thought-provoking and clearly argued text provides a critical geopolitical lens for understanding global environment politics. A subfield of political geography, environmental geopolitics examines how environmental themes are used to support geopolitical arguments and physical realities of power and place. Shannon O'Lear considers common, problematic traits of such familiar but widely misunderstood narratives about human-environment relationships. Environmental geopolitics demonstrates how we can question familiar assumptions to generate more just and creative approaches to our many relationships with the environment.

Giant redwoods are American icons, paragons of grandeur, exceptionalism, and endurance. They are also symbols of conflict and negotiation, remnants of environmental battles over the limits of industrialization, profiteering, and globalization. Defending Giants explores the long history of the Redwood Wars, focusing on the ways rural Americans fought for control over both North Coast society and its forests. Activists defended these trees not only because the redwood forest had dwindled in size, but also because, by the late twentieth century, the local economy was increasingly dominated by multinational corporations. The resulting conflict, the Redwood Wars, pitted workers and environmental activists against the rising tide of globalization and industrial logging in a complex war over endangered species, sustainable forestry, and, of course, the fate of the last ancient redwoods.