Irus Braverman Book Launch at Hallwalls
Join us in the Cinema at Hallwalls to launch UB Law Professor Irus Braverman's new book, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (University of Minnesota Press). Professor Braverman will be joined in conversation with documentary filmmaker John Fiege and environmental activist and author Margaret Wooster.
As in her previous books, many launched with events at Talking Leaves, Professor Braverman takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the complicated relationships of humans and their institutions with the natural world, in this case looking at very specific conservation practices in a particular place, one with which she is deeply familiar. Settling Nature draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, Braverman plants the seeds for possible reimaginings of nature that transcend the grip of the state’s settler ecologies.
"This remarkable book expertly covers a neglected part of the planet’s most commented-on conflict, the central role of nature protection in Palestine-Israel. Combining rich empirics and eye-opening theoretical insights, Irus Braverman presses a highly ‘unsettling’ yet profoundly important point: how the conservation of critical more-than-human natures sits at the heart of many of the most consequential and distressing power struggles of our time." — Bram Büscher, author of The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism
Irus Braverman is Professor of law and adjunct professor of geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is author of several books, including Wild Life: The Institution of Nature; Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine; Zooland: The Institution of Captivity; and Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink.
John Fiege hosts the Chrysalis podcast and makes films that delve into the cultural dimensions of ecological problems. He teaches filmmaking and environmental studies at UB.
Margaret Wooster was a founding member of the Friends of the Buffalo River, now Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, and served as Executive Director of Great Lakes United. She is author of two books: Living Waters: Reading the Rivers of the Lower Great Lakes, and Meander: Making Room for Rivers.
This event is free and open to the public; we will have books available for purchase there as well as in the store and on our website.
