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Pollyanna Rhee, Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture, has an important and compelling new book Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920-1970 due to be released from University of Chicago Press this May 2025. Natural Attachments uses the occasion of a major oil spill along the California coast to discuss how environmental politics have been shaped by privilege. Prof. Rhee uncovers how residents of Santa Barbara played a self-interested role in casting class, home, and property values as central in the American environmental movement. As reviewers have noted, Prof. Rhee’s book provides a critical historical case study that helps to explain continued conservatism and exclusion within American environmentalism.
Prof. Rhee will be giving an online book talk on Monday morning, April 28th through The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Please join the talk via this Zoom link.
In addition to her faculty position in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Prof. Rhee is also Co-Director of the Humanities Research Institute Research Cluster on Environmental Humanities.