Series: Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics

In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world’s precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today’s coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical moment in the history of coral reef science. Gleaning...

In the pursuit of socialism, Cuba became Latin America’s most oil-dependent economy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country lost 86 percent of its crude oil supplies, resulting in a severe energy crisis. In the face of this shock, Cuba started to develop a low-carbon economy based on economic and social reform rather than high-tech innovation. The Low-Carbon Contradiction examines...

The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examination of the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France over the twentieth century, this unique history uncovers the...

What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation's...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing programme. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Almonds have become a poster crop for agriculture's environmental controversies. Notorious for consuming vast volumes of water and trucking honeybees across the continent, California's almond orchards appear extraordinarily needy. In Spain, however, almond trees have long...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing programme. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Making Our Beasts is an ethnography of science-in-action that uses a familiar topic—dinosaurs—to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment...

Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first water-exporting country when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbour. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent's water-stressed economic epicentre. Hopes that receipts from water sales could improve Lesotho's fortunes, however, have clashed...

The Pathogens of Finance is an exploration of how the rising power and profits of Wall Street underpin the contemporary increases in and inadequate responses to vector-borne disease. Over the past fifty years, insects have transmitted infectious diseases to humans with greater frequency and in more unexpected places. To examine this phenomenon, Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin take...

Strawberries are big business in California. They are the sixth-highest-grossing crop in the state, which produces 88 percent of the nation’s favourite berry. Yet the industry is often criticised for its backbreaking labour conditions and dependence on highly toxic soil fumigants used to control fungal pathogens and other soilborne pests. In Wilted, Julie Guthman tells the story of how the...

How does a banal earthworm become a valuable commodity? Lumbricus terrestris, otherwise known as the Canadian nightcrawler, is the most popular live bait used by recreational anglers throughout the world. Each year, as many as seven hundred million worms are handpicked from Ontario farmland for the bait market, earning the region the undisputed title of worm capital of the world....