ASLE EcoCast

We spoke with Denise Baden to chat about her work as a sustainability professor in a business school. From developing sustainability curriculum, writing theatre to resist doom and gloom environmentalism, or championing characters in popular media that lead sustainable lives, Baden is busy. We discuss her initiatives and what’s to come in this month’s episode.

Episode recorded March 11, 2026.  CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

For more on Denise:

Website: dabaden.com

Her Project: greenstories.org.uk

LinkedIn Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/a-jigsaw-to-save-the-world-7300475505529540608

For student and amateur theatre groups, if you’d like ...

We sat down with Matthew Thompson to discuss his forthcoming book: On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s. The book charts various environmentalisms in 1970s films, containment vs. contamination, that evolved out of the environmentalist work of the 1960s typified by Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. Thompson’s idea of “contamination” jockeys with the conceptual north star of recent ecocriticism: interconnectivity. This connects to an earlier EcoCast episode we had with Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay on Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction.

This month, we got to speak with Chaz Yingling and Andrew Kettler about their forthcoming book The Once and the Future Cow: Agency, Appetite, and the Anthropocene. The book’s aim is to show an understudied history of the cow not just in the American West, but on the islands in the Caribbean.

Episode recorded December 11, 2025.  CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

For more on Yingling and Kettler:

Yingling Website: https://www.chazyingling.com/

Kettler Email: smellhistory@gmail.com

Kettler Academic Profile: https://andrewkettler.academia.edu/

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If you have an idea for an ASLE ...

Kaja sat down with Lindsay and I this month to discuss how scholars typically focus on the “were” in the term werewolf, but she wants us to bring more focus to the “wolf” aspect. Why are we fascinated by the prospect of becoming a wolf, and why do coyotes captivate us when they come into cities? In her new book, The Ecogothic Werewolf in Literature: Wolves, Woods and Wilderness, she tells us what werewolves tell us about ourselves and about wolves themselves. Recorded ...

What is ecofascism and who “is” ecofascist or “does” ecofascism? Alex Menrisky walks us through why his new book is titled Everyday Ecofascism, and the ways that ecofascism is not solely a far-right governmental structure but a genre, a mode of storytelling. This means that ecofascism emerges through not just laws and political leaders but through quotidian acts and utterances by citizens and politicians alike. Listen in as he walks us through representations of land, food, drugs, tools, and more that often utilize ...

This month we had a fascinating conversation with Bart Welling, whose presentation at the ASLE Conference this last summer was caught by Lindsay! Bart’s research was informed by his own road trip around the country, a month-long, 12,000-mile trip. This chat was particularly special as Bart is still completing his book project, and we aim to have more episodes in the future with more research-in-progress!

Bart walked us through his new book project, “Resisting Energy: The Long Struggle Against Irresponsible Power,” that looks at ...

For this month’s episode, we sat down with Rachel DiNitto to discuss the pioneering edited volume Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema (2024) and her own chapter in it on “Toxicoscapes.” With thematic coverage that ranges from contaminated childhoods, to nuclear anxiety, and all the way to apocalyptic futures, this manuscript both expands the overall definition of “eco-disaster” and focuses in on the specificity of the Japanese context. Join us for a conversation that offers new perspectives to ecocinema enthusiasts in general and scholars of Japanese environments ...

In this episode, Alex sat down with Amanda Baugh to chat about her new book, Falling in Love with Nature: The Values of Latinx Catholic Environmentalism. An ethnographic study of Hispanic Catholics, Baugh’s book argues to widen the definition of environmentalism to include those who commit more sustainable actions (recycling, public transportation) not because of an express desire to be an environmentalist, but because of pious attention to loving nature in order to uphold one’s faith. Spurred by a Public Religion Research Institute survey ...

For this episode, we sat down with Kate Rigby to discuss her new book Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction. The text is a reclaiming of the ancient theological meditation form, the hexameron, to consider the climate crisis and mass extinction. Meditating on a day of creation in each chapter, she tells us about the insights each day of creation has for the Anthropocene like contemplative practices in the First Day and the move from a “Kingdom” to a “Kindom” of species ...

We sat down with Melody Jue for a second episode to discuss her new work Coralations, a fascinating deep dive into the coral we know and the coral we need to know. Though tropical corals inundate perceptions of coral, there are other deep water and cold water coral that have different connections or coralations to anthropogenic climate change. By rethinking “normative coral,” new media across photography, sci fi, and more come into the light.

Episode recorded March 17, ...