Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017) presents a path-breaking approach to the study of the environment and history. In ... Show More
Mar 1
Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw, "Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy. Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fiber, has a long relationship to war, both in terms of supporting it and causing it. Wool's strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, and contrived shortages of same ... Show More
1h 9m
Feb 23
Aidan Seale-Feldman, "The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal. In a world of cascading disasters, what are the consequences of transient care? In 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake ... Show More
38m 37s
Feb 23
Jason Cons, "Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier" (U California Press, 2025)
A free e-book version of Delta Futures is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier (U California Press, 2025) explores the competing v ... Show More
51m 41s
Jul 2016
From Tree to Shining Tree
<p>A forest can feel like a place of great stillness and quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour.</p>
<p>In this story, a dog introduces us to a strange creature that burrows beneath forests, b ... Show More
32m 8s
Dec 2021
The Origins of Life on Earth
<p>Today we’re going back to the beginning – no Romans, Celts, Egyptians or Macedonians in sight. We’re going much further back, covering billions of years of prehistory as we look at the emergence of life on Earth. From the rise of the earliest microscopic membranes to the arriv ... Show More
1h 24m