Stanford University Press Blog

Earth Day Week Recommended Reading

Books about sustainability, nature, and the environment.

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

We have composed a recommended reading list for Earth Day Week 2020.

 

 

Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care »

By GIORGOS KALLIS

How did we come to think of the planet and its limits as we do? Limits reclaims, redefines, and makes an impassioned plea for limits—a notion central to environmentalism—clearing them from their association with Malthusianism and the ideology and politics that go along with it. Giorgos Kallis rereads reverend-economist Thomas Robert Malthus and his legacy, separating limits and scarcity, two notions that have long been conflated in both environmental and economic thought. 

"Malthus is a key figure for understanding how to survive the twenty-first century, yet Kallis shows we have spent the last two hundred years misunderstanding him. Quirky, provocative, and engaging,  Limits is a must-read book for environmentalists and anti-environmentalists alike."

—Bill Adams, University of Cambridge

 

 

The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet »

By MAGALI A. DELMAS with DAVID COLGAN

Magali A. Delmas and David Colgan argue that many green products now offer the total package—a "green bundle" that checks the environmental box, but also offers improved performance, health benefits, savings, and status. To help consumers cut through the noise and make their best decisions, we need new strategies. The award-winning The Green Bundle offers some of the best and most effective communication techniques for pushing consumers in the right direction. If you are looking to win over the convenient consumer or understand how companies can create the next tipping point in green consumption, this is the research-based, practical guide for you.

"The Green Bundle offers penetrating insight into green products, showing how businesses can fully realize this latent market. Synthesizing behavioral economics, human psychology, and basic business principals, the authors set forth a brilliant but practical guide on how to ignite consumer interest in sustainably produced goods."

—Steve McCormick, former CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Coming of Age During the Cuban Revolution

Anna Veltfort on turning memories of living in Castro’s Havana into art

ANNA VELTFORT

Panel from Goodbye, My Havana »

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with Goodbye, My Havana» author Anna Veltfort

1. What made you want to write this memoir?

I had never been able to explain, to the people in my life in the US, what the Cuban Revolution was like or what my experience living in Cuba during the early years of the Revolution as a teenager and young adult was like, much less how it was to come out gay there. I attended all of high school and college in Havana, and came of age in a country, a historical period, utterly different from life in the United States. Writing and illustrating this memoir was the solution to my desire to convey at long last this strange and amazing experience of life on another planet.

 

2. Why did you choose to tell this story in color?

Cuba is a land of intense color, impossible for me to imagine in anything but full color. I also set out to use color as a visual stand-in for music and sometimes emotions. Thus to life in the USA, before moving to Cuba, I gave a muted palette intended to evoke the period of my childhood in the US during the 1950s. The long, difficult wait in Mexico before getting to Cuba, I rendered in a limited palette of blues and greys, and the times of terror in Cuba, when homophobic repression touched my life and of others I knew, in reds and orange.

 

3.  What was the writing process like?

1. First I created an annotated chronological timeline of the events, places and characters that I felt played a role in the story.
2. Guided by that timeline I wrote a running narrative of what would roughly be the whole book, subject to many changes, omissions and additions along the way. While crafting this narrative, I mined many letters, diaries, and photographs from that past, and consulted photographs that I commissioned as references from friends in Havana, drawings I had made in Cuba at the time, letters from my family. I had a trove of materials that I had brought from Cuba in 1972-- vinyl records, posters, books, magazines, political pamphlets, school papers, calendars... all very useful to transport my mind back into that time and place.
3. The key, and for me, most important and difficult part of the whole process happened now: translating this textual narrative into a visual narrative. This involved creating first rough thumbnail page-by-page sketches of panels and art and then more detailed storyboards of the panels, art and speech balloons for texts.

Democracy’s Borderlands

Democracy’s future in India lies in the politics of protest and resistance

SANJIB BARUAH

Kangla Uttra Sang at the Kangla fort. By Diamond Oina - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0. No changes made. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

We're pleased to present an adapted excerpt from In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast» by Sanjib Baruah.

A curious fact about democracy in India is that the states in the country’s Northeastern borderlands, which officials routinely describe as being troubled by insurgencies, has among the country’s highest voter turnout rates. In 2012 the robust voter turnout numbers of Manipur found their way into an unlikely document: an affidavit filed in support of the government in a public interest litigation lawsuit that charged security forces of hundreds of extrajudicial killings. Convinced that there was some truth to the allegations India’s Supreme Court ordered “a deeper probe.” Since the number of incidents is large–many of them decades old and the resources available to the Supreme Court relatively limited–the progress in the investigations has been slow.  

The government affidavit cites Manipur’s high electoral participation rates to make the case that normalcy prevails in the state. Apparently, people carry on with their daily lives despite “an insurgency problem.” Counterinsurgency does not affect the “common man,” and democratic institutions function better than normally. It is hard to think of a more compelling example of representative democracy’s “postcolonial neo-life,” as John and Jean Comaroff once put it.  It has been reduced to “a very ‘thin’ distillation of the concept: a minimalist, procedural version that equates freedom with the occasional exercise of choice among competing, often indistinguishable alternatives.”¹ The attorney general of an established postcolonial democracy cites evidence of high voter turnout as part of his legal defense of a government accused of hundreds of extrajudicial killings allegedly committed by its security forces. And this is done without any apparent sense of irony or contradiction–as if it could absolve the government from responsibility.

A history of armed conflicts and the discourse of insurgency surrounding it have had a formative role in shaping the way Manipur–and much of Northeast India–is governed. Armed conflicts, small and large, provide both the backdrop and the rationale for the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)–a law that has been in effect in the region for nearly six decades.²  It allows civilian authorities to call on the armed forces to come to the assistance of civil powers. Once a state–or a part of a state–is declared “disturbed” under AFSPA, the armed forces are empowered to make preventive arrests, search premises without warrants, and even shoot and kill civilians. Legal action against an officer for abusing those powers requires the prior approval of the central government–a rule that effectively means de facto immunity from prosecution. A disturbed area proclamation under AFSPA has uncanny similarities with emergencies or states of exception–including martial law and a state of siege.

Mortality, Myth, and the UFO

UFOs may not exist—but in the age of Trump and COVID-19, they’ve taken on fresh relevance and power.

DAVID J. HALPERIN

                                      Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Are UFOs real? Or a myth? I would say they’re both—understanding “myth,” not in its common sense of “bunk” or “falsehood,” but as something vital and profound: a collective dream, a symbolic display of cultural and human realities of which we hadn’t let ourselves be aware.

Which, for our ancestors, might have been visions of God.

UFOs have fascinated me for nearly my whole life, starting when I was a teen “UFOlogist” back in the 1960s. I grew up to become a professor of religious studies, with special expertise in traditions of heavenly ascent and otherworldly journeys. Once, I believed UFOs were visitors from other planets. I now recognize them as a religious phenomenon. A UFO encounter, insofar as it’s not a simple misinterpretation of something in the sky, is a bona fide religious experience. The lore surrounding the UFO is a religious myth—or rather a full mythology, complex and ramified; a product of the space age, yet as rich and evocative as the great mythologies of antiquity.

      Ever hear of Roswell, New Mexico? Area 51? Chances are you have, even if you’re not sure just what happened at Roswell or what Area 51, the top-secret tract of Nevada desert that saw some of the Cold War’s most horrific weapons tests, has to do with UFOs. When Barack Obama declared in 2013 that “when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is, ‘What’s really going on in Area 51?,’” of course he was joking. But the joke would have fallen flat if there hadn’t been some truth in it that his audience could understand and appreciate. Hillary Clinton may have been less than serious when she promised a New Hampshire reporter at the beginning of 2016 that if elected she’d “get to the bottom” of UFOs, sending a “task force” to Area 51. But surely she’d crunched the numbers—polls have consistently shown that one-third to one-half of Americans believes in UFOs.

Distracting Reads Part 2

Recommended reading for right now

Free shipping on all online orders » with the discount code TIMETOREAD-FM until April 30

 

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books that will engage, fascinate, and delight.

 

 

Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime, A MusiComic Manifesto »

By GE WANG

 Do you want to embrace your creative side? Try Artful Design. What we make, makes us. This is the central tenet of Artful Design, a photorealistic comic book that examines the nature, purpose, and meaning of design. Using music as a universal phenomenon that has evolved alongside technology, this book breaks down concrete case studies in computer-mediated toys, tools, games, and instruments, including the best-selling app Ocarina. Ge Wang implores us to both embrace and confront technology, not purely as a means to an end, but in its potential to enrich life. 

Interested in this book? Consider tuning in every Wednesday 1 PM for Artful Design Television an online, multi-format weekly series encompassing artful design, music, coding, critical making with helpings of history and philosophy. No experience needed; it's free and all are welcome. For details or to register please visit the Artful Design TV page.

Silver in the Graphic Novel/Drawn Book - General category in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards

 

 

 

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism »

By NICK COULDRY and ULISES A. MEJIAS

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, the book offers a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

"A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism's current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent, and bracingly original."

—Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies, Rutgers University

 

 

Motherhood: A Confession »

By NATALIE CARNES

Thinking about what it means to be a parent? Try Motherhood. What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's—even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.

The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice.

Distracting Reads Part 1

Recommended reading for right now

Free shipping on all online orders » with the discount code TIMETOREAD-FM until April 30

 

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books that will engage, fascinate, and delight.

 

 

Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO »

By DAVID J. HALPERIN

Sitting inside and wondering about life, the universe, and visible and invisible invaders? Try Intimate Aliens. The power and fascination of the UFO has nothing to do with space travel or life on other planets. It's about us, our longings and terrors, and especially the greatest terror of all: the end of our existence. This is a book about UFOs that goes beyond believing in them or debunking them and to a fresh understanding of what they tell us about ourselves as individuals, as a culture, and as a species.

"David Halperin doesn't believe in the literal reality of flying saucers, but he understands that they needn't physically exist to teach us lessons about a culture that sees them. Part folklorist and part psychologist, Halperin reads our UFO mythos like an alienist analyzing an extended collective dream."

—Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

 

 

 

Invisible Companions: Encounters with Imaginary Friends, Gods, Ancestors, and Angels »

By J. BRADLEY WIGGER

Have you been thinking about the potential heights of creativity and imagination? In his award-winning book Invisible Companions J. Bradley Wigger travels five countries on three continents to hear children describe their invisible friends—one-hundred-year-old robins and blue dogs, dinosaurs and teapots, pretend families and shape-shifting aliens—companions springing from the deep well of childhood imagination. Drawing on these interviews, as well as a new wave of developmental research, he finds a fluid and flexible quality to the imaginative mind that is central to learning, co-operation, and paradoxically, to real-world rationality.