All Sides with Amy Juravich on WOSU: The United Nations' Climate Change Conference was held in Baku, Azerbaijan on Nov. 29. Multiple Ohio State students and professors were among the attendees. They discuss the conference and what climate negotiations thousands of miles away may mean for the state of Ohio.

Guests:

• Bart Elmore, Ohio State professor, environmental and business history
• Tom Dunn, Ohio State student
• Cherod Bowens, Ohio State student

The world's nations are racing to adopt a treaty this year to cut plastic waste. That's because every month, companies produce tens of millions of tons of plastic. It's everywhere - toilet seats and clothing, candy wrappers and grocery bags. Most of it ends up in places like landfills and oceans, and it breaks down and gets into our bodies. But it wasn't always this way. Michael Copley from NPR's Climate Desk reports on how plastic became so ingrained in modern life. 

Guests are Jill Jedlicka, Heather Davis, Bart Elmore, Matt Seaholm, and Susan Freinkel

(The New Books Network podcast, Nov. 18, 2022) Guest Jennifer Eaglin

As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world.

Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP, 2022) offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this program. By 1985, over 95% of all new cars in the country ran exclusively on ethanol, and, after consumers turned away from them when oil was cheap, the government successfully promoted flex fuel cars instead. Yet, as Jennifer Eaglin shows, the industry's growth came with associated environmental and social costs in the form of water pollution from liquid waste generated during ethanol distillation and exploitative rural labor practices that reshaped Brazil's countryside.

By examining the shifting perceptions of the industry from a sugar byproduct to a national energy solution to a global clean energy option, Sweet Fuel ultimately reveals deeper truths about what a global large-scale transition away from fossil fuels might look like and challenges idealized views of green industries.

Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.

(The New Books Network podcast, Feb. 15, 2019) Guest Nicholas Breyfogle

Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) that brings together multiple perspectives on Russian and Soviet environmental history. Starting with the story of two dams built 150 years apart, Breyfogle discusses both continuity and change in how Russian and Soviet citizens and its various governments viewed the environment. The focus of the volume is contextualizing and “de-exceptionalizing” Russia and the USSR by placing Russian and Soviet environmental history in a global context as well as demonstrating how the environment can profoundly impact the course of human history. Listen in as we discuss both the tragedies and triumphs of Russian and Soviet environmental policies, ecology and conservation, such as dam building, collectivization, industrialization, eco-tourism and the rise of the Soviet environmental movement.

Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Learn about her research.

(The New Books Network podcast, Dec. 8, 2021) Guests David Moon, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova. 

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through the areas they study, seeing them as living places, interviewing inhabitants and marveling at the beauty and harshness of the environment they study. Join us as we talk with Nicolas Breyfogle, David Moon and Alexandra Bekasova about their journeys and research, how the two intertwined and how that granted them new perspectives on the Russian and Soviet environment.

Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.

(The Road to Now podcast, May 15, 2023) The “Amazon economy” seems like something new, but it rests on the physical and intellectual infrastructure built by those who came long before the age of the internet and leaves many of the same marks on the environment. Prominent in this story are five companies- Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, Bank of America, and FexEx-  all of which have global reach and southern roots. In this episode, Bart Elmore joins us to talk about his new book Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade our Economy and the Planet (UNC Press, 2023), and how understanding the history of American business can help us address the environmental challenges that are undeniably facing humanity today.

Dr. Bartow Elmore is Associate Professor of History and a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. In addition to Country Capitalism, he is also the author of  Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) and Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021). You can hear his discuss these books in RTN episode 140 and episode 208 respectively. Bart is also a 2022 winner of the Dan David Prize.

This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer