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Take four emblematic American scenes: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando; an ecotour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks; the film An Inconvenient Truth. Other than expressing a common interest in the environment, they seem quite dissimilar. And yet, as this book makes clear, these sites are all manifestations of green governmentality, each seeking to define and regulate our understanding, experience, and treatment of nature. This book shows how the museum presents a scientized assessment of global nature under threat; the Animal Kingdom demonstrates that a corporation can successfully organize a biopolitical project; the ecotour, operating as a school for a natural aesthetic sensibility, provides a visual grammar of pristine national nature; and the film offers a toehold on a moral way of encountering nature. But one very powerful force unites the disparate “truths” of nature produced through these sites, and that, the book tells us, is their debt to nature's commodification. This book's analysis reveals how each site integrates nature, power, and profit to make the buying and selling of nature critical to our understanding and rescuing of it. The combination, it argues, renders other ways of encountering nature—particularly more radically environmental ways—unthinkable.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could not afford the water from your tap? What if your water bill was a third of your monthly income, and you had to choose between water and food? This may sound like a fantasy, but it is already happening to millions of people around the world. A handful of multinational water corporations with mafia-like powers are gradually shutting off the taps for people who cannot pay, causing global social unrest. It has led to a revolution in Egypt, border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, social upheaval in South Africa, and street fights in Greece. Today, these same corporations are quietly buying up U.S. water supplies while no one seems to notice. The Price of Thirst examines the colonial history of these companies, as well their current expansion across the globe. Traveling to six continents and a dozen countries, Karen Piper spent seven years investigating who controls the planet’s water and how it is distributed. Talking to CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, she paints a frightening picture of how the world’s water is being divvied up. The Price of Thirst takes readers on a trip around the world to visit both the “hotspots” of water scarcity and the “hotshots” in water finance. What she discovers on her journey will make you rethink what is coming out of your tap—and whether or not it will be there tomorrow.

In Roots of Our Renewal, Clint Carroll tells how Cherokee people have developed material, spiritual, and political ties with the lands they have inhabited since removal from their homelands in the southeastern United States. Although the forced relocation of the late 1830s had devastating consequences for Cherokee society, Carroll shows that the reconstituted Cherokee Nation west of the Mississippi eventually cultivated a special connection to the new land—a connection that is reflected in its management of natural resources. Until now, scant attention has been paid to the interplay between tribal natural resource management programs and governance models. Carroll is particularly interested in indigenous environmental governance along the continuum of resource-based and relationship-based practices and relates how the Cherokee Nation, while protecting tribal lands, is also incorporating associations with the nonhuman world. Carroll describes how the work of an elders’ advisory group has been instrumental to this goal since its formation in 2008. An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Carroll draws from his ethnographic observations of Cherokee government–community partnerships during the past ten years. He argues that indigenous appropriations of modern state forms can articulate alternative ways of interacting with and “governing” the environment.

Little in North America is wilder than the Florida Everglades—a landscape of frightening reptiles, exotic plants in profusion, swarms of mosquitoes, and unforgiving heat. And yet, even from the early days of taming the wilderness with clearing and drainage, the Everglades has been considered fragile, unique, and in need of restorative interventions. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with hunters in the Everglades, this book explores the lives and labors of people, animals, and plants in this most delicate and tenacious ecosystem. Today, the many visions of the Everglades—protectionist, ecological, commercial, historical—have become a tangled web of contradictory practices and politics for conservation and for development. Yet within this entanglement, the place of people remains highly ambivalent. It is the role of people in the Everglades that this book focuses on, as it seeks to reclaim the landscape’s long history as a place of human activity and, in doing so, discover what it means to be human through changing relations with other animals and plant life. This book tells this story through the lives of poor rural whites, gladesmen, epitomized in tales of the Everglades’ most famous outlaws, the Ashley Gang.

Trash Animals, a collection of essays by a wide range of environmental writers, examines relationships between humans and wildlife deemed filthy, feral, unwanted, problematic, invasive or worthless. These essays examine a growing trend of equating wildlife with trash. They question why birders call some birds “garbage” and why fisherman discard “trash” fish. As trash is a category that only exists in human culture, equating animals with trash reveals more about human expectations, fears, prejudices and frustrations with the natural world. Each essay presents a unique thesis about a species—seagulls, coyotes, carp, cockroaches, and others—North Americans deem filthy, dangerous, unwanted, problematic or worthless. By examining the biology and behavior of animals in contrast to its natural and cultural history the authors challenge common notions and assumptions about problematic wildlife, the nature/culture divide and the limits of human agency. Many of the essays provide new perspectives on human-animal relationships and challenge readers to re-imagine our ethics of engagement with wildlife.