Giulio Boccaletti, "The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World" (Princeton UP, 2026)

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Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Morteza Hajizadeh** (1:16)
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. I'm Morteza Hajizadeh, your host, and today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Giulio Boccaletti about his most recent book, a fascinating topic which brings environmentalism and politics together. The book is called The Environmental Republic, Why Citizens Will Save the World. It's a bold new conception of the republic for a planet in crisis. And Dr. Giulio Boccaletti is an author who's writing on natural resources and security. Natural resources and security have been translated into several languages. He has had international leadership position in private and non-for-profit sectors.
He's the scientific director of Europe-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, one of Europe's largest research institutions focused on air science and transition economics. There's also the author of a very famous book called Water, A Biography, and today he's here with us to talk about his most recent book, published by Princeton University Press in 2026, The Environmental Republic. Giulio, welcome to New Books Network.

**Giulio Boccaletti** (2:27)
Thank you for having me.

**Morteza Hajizadeh** (2:30)
It's a fascinating topic and I'm keen to know how the idea of this book came to you and if it's somehow connected to your previous book, which I'm sure it is somehow, but I'll leave it to you to discuss it. Can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us about the conception of this book?

**Giulio Boccaletti** (2:47)
Sure. Well, I'm a climate scientist by training, but I've then spent over 20 years working at the interface of public policy and business strategy and economic development, and so had a very broad exposure to issues of the environment. In fact, for quite a large part of that time, I focused on issues of water security in a number of different countries, and that was in part the inspiration and the origin of my previous book, Water, a Biography, and I will say just a couple of words on that because it was, in fact, the starting point for this new book, The Environmental Republic. The Water Biography was really an attempt at writing a new history of civilization from the point of view of the dialectic relationship that connects us to water.
Water is how the climate system expresses itself on the landscape. And over the course of centuries, millennia, societies across the planet have mobilized what Michael Mann would have called the sources of social power. So the ability to mobilize resources and labor to transform and engineer the environment to control the behavior of water, right? Have water when it's not raining, avoid floods, and protect yourself from floods when there's too much water in the waterfront. And obviously, every time you transform the environment, you transform the behavior of the very thing you're trying to control. And so in that sense, I've defined it in that book as a dialectic relationship, but not dialectic in the Hegadian senses. You know, some of your listeners might think of, but the dialectic in the sense that it is a kind of a action and response relationship. Now, that book was interesting, but over the course of writing it, I realized that there was a gap. And the best way to describe the gap was that I wrote that whole book without ever once using the word we, the word we. And part of the reason was that, you know, I usually, maybe some of your listeners will find this, so I kind of, I often get irritated by the use of we as a rhetorical device in academic writing, you know, we know this as if we are in a classroom. You know, and always the question comes to me of who is we, you know? And so in that book, I never used the word we, but as I examined the relationship of different societies across the world to water, it became amply evident to me that the question of who is we matters enormously.
And in fact, it's inextricably linked to the question of what political institutions govern our life together and realize this collective we. And so The Environmental Republic, Why Citizens Will Save the World, is a book that kind of starts with this question in mind of who is we.