Extractive Bargains: Exploring the State-Society Nexus is a new collection of essays, edited by Paul Bowles and Nathan Andrews, that explores how states are responding to conflicting demands around resource extraction. The book's 16 case studies include countries from both the Global North and Global South, as well as some majority Indigenous states, to understand how "extractive bargains" generate social consensus around resource extraction in different places. The book is the first to analyze in detail and in comparative perspective how states have sought to construct discourses and dialogues designed to support particular extractive policies. It demonstrates, however, that pathways are not pre-determined and that there are possibilities for progressive change.

Carrie Karsgaard, Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Cape Breton University, discusses her recent book, Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The book uses digital methods to explore the educative potential and limits of social media in anti-pipeline activism.

Historian Daniel Macfarlane introduces his new book, Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations from McGill-Queen's University Press. The book shows that the Canada-U.S. energy/environmental relationship is historically the most consequential in the world, spawning important changes in international environmental law and transboundary governance, while also fostering the voracious consumption of resources and and large-scale ecosystem change. In addition to analyzing this history, Macfarlane offers the concept of "natural security" as a potential guide to international environmental agreements and pathways.

Andreas Roos' new book, Solar Technology and Global Environmental Justice: The Vision and the Reality, is both a sober critique of techno-optimistic visions of solar power and a call for “realistic envisioning.” In this Author's Note, Roos discusses the moment he realized that the current structure of solar energy has a darker side, as well as his hope that the book will inspire communities to explore better ways of harnessing solar energy to create new social metabolisms.

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller discusses her award-winning book "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" and makes the case for literature as a unique record of environmental thought that can help us to understand conceptual transformations in new ways.

What do literary narratives have to do with resource extraction? Quite a lot, according to Stacey Balkan. In her book, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, Balkan challenges developmentalist narratives pushed by industry through an examination of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels, or “rogue” tales. Looking to novels by writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, Balkan reveals startling connections between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression in British-occupied Bengal, 1980s Bhopal, and the coal-soaked terrain of contemporary Dhanbad. 

In this Author's Note, political scientist Sarah Marie Wiebe outlines the stories, concerns, and methods animating her new book, "Life Against States of Emergency: Revitalizing Treaty Relations from Attawapiskat."

How might we trace the entanglements of logics of energy in the extractivist projects of the North American West with logics of energy in the body? In this author's note, E Cram sketches the personal and historical inheritances that ground their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land and Energy in Making the North American West.

In "The Thread of Energy" (OUP, 2021), Martin J. Pasqualetti "treats energy as a social issue with a technical component, rather than the other way around." In this Author's Note, Pasqualetti tells the story of how he came to realize the social importance of energy while outlining the book's key topics and themes for prospective readers.

In this author's note on her new co-authored book, A Strategic Nature, Melissa Aronczyk explores the connection between public relations and carbon democracy. Aronczyk also details her surprising relationship with E. Bruce Harrison, the PR pioneer who dedicated his career to crafting messages for chemical and energy companies and whose contributions to our contemporary "culture of publicity" continue to shape political struggles over the environment.

In this author's note on his new book, Pipeline Populism, geographer Kai Bosworth explores the challenges of forging the kinds of broad and effective political coalitions required to achieve a just and sustainable future.

In this author's note on his new book, Who Owns the Wind?, anthropologist David Hughes offers a tantalizing glimpse of what energy justice could look like, and why it matters.