A lot has changed ahead of this year’s Earth Day, so in addition to featuring new titles in our distinguished environmental science and history lists, including books in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics, and Culture, Place, and Nature series, this year we are offering a short reading list on climate change history and politics.

The University of Washington is also celebrating Earth Day 2017 across the Seattle, Tacoma, Bothell campuses, and beyond. Check out the UW Earth Day events page for more information. Follow #EarthDay and #EarthDay2017 for other events and activities near you!

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Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past
Edited by Joshua P. Howe
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics

This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective.

“Howe has done a huge service in bringing together, in one concise volume, many of the key documents related to the growing understanding of climate change from the nineteenth-century to the present. A must-have for anyone teaching or researching this crucial topic.”
—Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt and author of The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future

Read a commentary by the author about the March for Science on Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians.

Other books for your climate change history reading list:

Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming
By Joshua P. Howe

Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy
Edited by James W. Feldman

The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964
By James Morton Turner

The Carbon Efficient City
By A-P Hurd and Al Hurd

Recent and forthcoming titles in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series:

Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
By Melanie Kiechle
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter
(July 2017)

What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives recovers how city residents used their sense of smell and their health concerns about foul odors to understand, adjust to, and fight against urban environmental changes.

“Smell Detectives draws insights from the rapidly developing literature in sensory history and applies them to the nineteenth-century urban environment. The results are illuminating and extend the field of environmental history in new and fascinating directions.”
—Michael Rawson, author of Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston

Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake
By Joanna L. Dyl
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter
(October 2017)

In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Dyl examines the decades leading up to the disaster and the city’s recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how disaster and recovery became integrated into the history of San Francisco.

“An original work about the 1906 disaster and its causes, context, and consequences.”
—Matthew Morse Booker, author of Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s History between the Tides

Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, Second Edition
By Coll Thrush
Foreword by William Cronon

This updated edition of Native Seattle brings the indigenous story to the present day and puts the movement of recognizing Seattle’s Native past into a broader context. Native Seattle focuses on the experiences of local indigenous communities on whose land Seattle grew, accounts of Native migrants to the city and the development of a multi-tribal urban community, as well as the role Native Americans have played in the narrative of Seattle.

“[A] vivid retelling of Native history in Seattle, and it is an incredible history. . . . We have tremendous roots, we just don’t know it. So read this.”
—The Stranger

The City Is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle
By Frederick L. Brown
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Historian Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals and challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

“Nothing short of pathbreaking. Brown organizes this potentially overwhelming topic into a highly influential study with remarkable grace and concision.”
—Thomas Andrews, author of Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies

Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics
By Darren Frederick Speece
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Defending Giants explores the long history of the Redwood Wars, focusing on the ways rural Americans fought for control over both North Coast society and its forests, and how they shifted the balance of power away from Congress and into the hands of the Executive Branch.

“We need more histories of important examples of nonviolent resistance and creative campaigning and Defending Giants is a much-needed model of careful and serious reporting and analysis that fills this void. It also brings back to life the story of some of the most committed and capable environmentalists I’ve ever known, people who worked on a scale as epic as the forests they fought for.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

The Wilderness Writings of Howard Zahniser
Edited by Mark W. T. Harvey

Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas
By Kurkpatrick Dorsey

Wilderburbs: Communities on Nature’s Edge
By Lincoln Bramwell

Recent and forthcoming titles in the Culture, Place, and Nature: Studies in Anthropology and Environment series:

The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe
By Yuka Suzuki

A fascinating account of human-animal relations and the interplay among categories of race and nature in twenty-first-century southern Africa.

“In lucid, vivid ethnography, Yuka Suzuki makes an insightful contribution to debates on race, nature, and nation. I recommend this book to anyone fascinated or appalled by the enduring romance between settler societies and (imagined) wildness.”
—David McDermott Hughes, author of Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging

Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru
By Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
By Jeremy M. Campbell

Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam
By Pamela D. McElwee

Other forthcoming titles in environmental studies:

Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest
By David Berger
Northwest Writers Fund
(September 2017)

In this lively history and celebration of the Pacific razor clam, David Berger shares with us his love affair with the glossy, gold-colored Siliqua patula and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean, and cook them using his favorite recipes. In the course of his investigation, Berger brings to light the long history of razor clamming as a subsistence, commercial, and recreational activity, and shows the ways it has helped shape both the identity and the psyche of the Pacific Northwest.

“With his history and experience, Berger brings the sand, the wet, and the cold that embody razor clamming. His delivery is in sync with the quirks of this odd sport where you drive to a beach, park your car, open the door, grab your ‘gun,’ and harvest seafood-just like that.”
—Dean Adams, author of Four Thousand Hooks: A True Story of Fishing and Coming of Age on the High Seas of Alaska

Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands
By Zoltán Grossman
Foreword by Winona LaDuke
Indigenous Confluences
(June 2017)

Grossman explores how some of the most intense conflicts between Native Nations and local farmers, ranchers, and fishers were transformed into cooperation to defend sacred land and water. These case studies from the 1970s through the 2010s suggest that a deep love of place can begin to overcome even the bitterest divides.

“When Indigenous peoples united with ranchers and farmers to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, they blazed an electrifying new path away from climate catastrophe. Such alliances to defend land and water have been taking shape for decades – and they have much more to teach us. Grossman draws out the key lessons from these stories with great skill and care.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (New in paperback July 2017)
By James Longhurst

The Tanoak Tree: An Environmental History of a Pacific Coast Hardwood (New in paperback July 2017)
By Frederica Bowcutt