A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth ... Show More
Today
Miles Kenney-Lazar, "Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos" (U Hawai’i Press, 2025)
Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establishment of agricultural and tree plantations. In Laos, the government has granted f ... Show More
1h 1m
Today
Jennifer Boum Make, "Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, ... Show More
50m 7s
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
Oct 2019
Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019)
In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agricultur ... Show More
53m 53s
Sep 2023
The Tale of Two Cities: Water Access Influences Human Decision Making
Does our geographical location shape our thinking? Does water access have an effect on our decision-making habits? Do we choose to live in the moment because of environmental factors? In this episode, Under the Cortex hosts Dr. Hamid Harati, The University of Queensland, and Thom ... Show More
27m 43s
May 2023
Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)
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 neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subc ... Show More
59m 23s
Sep 2023
What makes a healthy river?
River health has captured the public imagination, particularly as overspills from sewers have been getting more attention in the media. But the condition of a river is so much more complicated than what flows into it from our water treatment systems. Agriculture, roads, how we us ... Show More
36m 11s
Oct 2019
Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019)
With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates h ... Show More
45m 52s