This book gathers together the audiences, addresses, letters, and homilies of Benedict on a wide-ranging set of topics that deal with the world about us. The major themes and connections he explores are creation and the natural world; the environment, science, and technology; and hunger, poverty, and the earth's resources.

How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state.
 
In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.
 
Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.
 
A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

A regional climate impact and adaptation report from the Gwich'in Athabascans of Interior Alaska, The Gwich’in Climate Report is a compilation of transcribed interviews between Matt Gilbert and northern Alaska Gwich’in Athabascan community members, elders, hunters, and trappers. The book explores Gwich’in insight and wisdom about ecology, climate, and the drastic effects of climate change on their landscapes and culture.
 
These interview subjects are at a “ground zero” of climate change, and their voices are largely absent from popular research on and discussion of the topic. Their traditional knowledge of Arctic flora and fauna, forestation, landforms, meteorology, airstream behavior, and river hydrology makes a significant contribution to the documentation of climate change. In addition, Gilbert bridges the Gwich’in worldview and that of Western science by including factual substantiation and citations that corroborate key observations in the Gwich’in transcripts.
 
A text that matters for its cultural and historical significance—as well as its potential impact on the way science and policy are conducted in rural Alaska and on public lands—TheGwich’in Climate Report will be of interest to residents of and stakeholders in the communities it represents as well as researchers concerned with on-the-ground conditions of ecosystems and Indigenous peoples most directly affected by climate change.