Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchExtraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism with Thea Riofrancos
Episode 1155
Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutio…
8 months, 2 weeks ago
Theodore J. Karamanski, "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
Episode 1154
Theodore Karamanski joins fellow Lake Michigan enthusiast Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. L…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)
Episode 72
The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Episode 138
Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation tha…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)
Episode 146
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking s…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Anna Zeide, "US History in 15 Foods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Episode 142
From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that repr…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Andrew W. Bernstein, "Fuji: A Mountain in the Making" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 1149
Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton UP, 2025) is A panoramic biography of Japan's iconic mountain from the Ice Age to the present
Mount Fuji is…
9 months ago
Weila Gong, "Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 17
This episode explores what China’s subnational climate experiments tell us about the possibilities and limits of climate leadership in an era of inte…
9 months ago
Thomas Manuel Ortiz, "Why We Struggle to Go Green: Hard Truths about the Clean Energy Transition" (Texas A&M Press, 2025)
Episode 1148
Clean energy won’t save us from the effects of climate change.
Amid corporate Net Zero campaigns, the politics of the Green New Deal, and the calls to…
9 months ago
Amy Bowers Cordalis, "The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family's Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life" (Little Brown, 2024)
Episode 132
For the members of a Northern California tribe, salmon are the lifeblood of the people—a vital source of food, income, and cultural identity. When a …
9 months ago