2025 Turku Book Award Winner Announced

The 2025 Turku Book Prize goes to Netta Cohen (University of Oxford) for her monograph New Under the Sun: Early Zionist Encounters with the Climate in Palestine (University of California Pres, 2024). The Turku Book Prize is intended to identify and encourage innovative and well-written scholarship in the field of European environmental history and carries a prize money of 3000€. The prize is awarded by the Rachel Carson Center and the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). Congratulations to Netta Cohen on an outstanding work!

New Under the Sun makes a nuanced and clear intervention solidly rooted in environmental history. Engaging also with the history of science, the book investigates ideas of race, colonization, and climate in relation to their real-world consequences on the ground. It builds on past environmental histories of settler colonies and of the Middle East, while avoiding simplistic binaries and drawing original conclusions about the unique context of Palestine.

What motivates us to elect this work as a winner for the Turku Book Prize is its thorough environmentalization of European settler colonialism, European politics, and other relevant aspects of European history – all applied to a region beyond Europe. More generally, the book exemplifies how the imagination of climate shapes colonial projects that, when realized, often do not match the underlying imagination. By comparison and juxtaposition, Cohen argues against the exceptionalism of Zionism among colonial projects, instead revealing its commonalities with similar projects in warmer climates.

Dealing with a historical topic that intersects with an ongoing humanitarian disaster, the end of which is still unclear, Cohen’s work is timely and will help environmental historians approach this disaster, not only as humanities scholars but also as environmental scholars. At the same time, it offers an environmental lens for the interested public and researchers in other fields, adding an important dimension for making sense of what has happened and what is yet to unfold. As such, New Under the Sun is sure to be and remain influential in and beyond Europe, as well as in and beyond the field of environmental history.

Shortlisted Titles

• Gabriela Jarzębowska. Species Cleansing: The Cultural Practice of Rat Control. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2024.
• Joana Gaspar de Freitas. A Global Environmental History of Coastal Dunes. Routledge, 2025.
• Ellen Arnold. Medieval Riverscapes: Environmental Meaning and Memory in Northwest Europe, ca. 300–1100. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

The selection committee consisted of chair Jonatan Palmblad (Rachel Carson Center) with fellow members Abigail Agresta (Georgetown University), Etienne Benson (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University), and Melanie Arndt (University of Freiburg).