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Recent News
Feb 22, 2023
Alumna Becomes Delaware's First Environmental Justice Coordinator
The Earth and Environmental Sciences grad will work with marginalized communities to address water quality and climate change.
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- Alumni News
Feb 14, 2023
How Valuable Is Public Space? Priceless, Argues a New Book by Setha Low
"Why Public Space Matters" analyzes the role of parks, plazas, and other communal places in our public culture.
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- Faculty News
Feb 6, 2023
Science Alumni Spotlight: Gisselle Mejía (Ph.D. ’22, Earth and Environmental Sciences)
Now a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth, Mejía studies soil microbes in urban and rural forests.
- Alumni News
Feb 1, 2023
Celebrating Our Scholars During Black History Month
From a book on Black-owned bookstores to the first CUNY Kennedy Center honoree, Graduate Center scholars are writing and changing Black history.
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Earth and Environmental Sciences Books

Abolition Geography Essays Towards Liberation
New collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geographypresents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.
Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Published May 2022
Verso

Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition
Haymarket Books, 2022
Racial, gender, and environmental justice. Class war. Militarism. Interpersonal violence. Old age security. This is not the vocabulary many use to critique the prison-industrial complex.
But in this series of powerful lectures, Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows that the only way to dismantle systems and logics of control and punishment is to change questions, categories, and campaigns from the ground up.
Abolitionism doesn't just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that's already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.
As Gilmore makes plain, "Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything."
Change Everything is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.
Published February 2022

Climate Change, Torn between Myth and Fact
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021
This book is both a plea and an invitation to consider climate change from a multi-faceted perspective, taking into account (geo)physical, social, cultural, psychological, religious, mythological, economic, and judicial viewpoints, among others. As such, it will serve as a useful and necessary guide towards a better understanding of our own mental structures and systems of preferences, ideologies, or beliefs.
Published August 2021