In these two volumes Gavin O'Toole sets out to provide a framework for introducing undergraduate students to environmental politics, focusing on a region that, despite its global prominence in terms of ecological diversity, pressing environmental issues and significant efforts towards enhanced environmental governance, has not previously been subjected to a systematic assessment of the role played by the environment in local, national and regional politics. Scholarship on environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is distributed across a range of academic disciplines reflecting the highly diverse ecological and socio-economic characteristics of the region. O'Toole's efforts to marshal these varied insights into a coherent narrative that explicates the foci of environmental concern, while at the same time illuminating the political actors, institutions and processes that have emerged and developed in response to them are most welcome.

Both volumes are divided into six substantive chapters, each intended as the basis of one unit of study in a modular course. Every chapter begins with a clear introduction to the topics to be addressed, the key questions that guide the coming discussion and how the material is structured. Boxed, case study vignettes and tables of data are employed to illustrate the discussion, and chapters are completed by clear summaries of the key concepts and issues that have been covered, followed by helpful lists of recommended readings and useful websites. There are also numerous references to relevant elements of other chapters both within and between volumes. I found this internal referencing less helpful, especially the very general cross-referencing between the two texts. Its value to students would be enhanced were it to be more clearly targeted to specific pages.

The introductory Volume 1 provides an overview of environmental politics in LAC that will be of interest to a very wide audience, providing an alternative to Roberts and Thanos's (2003) Routledge text: Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America, bringing the reader up to date on the principal environmental challenges the region faces today. O'Toole begins in chapter 1 by exploring environmental histories from the pre-Columbian past to the neoliberal present, illuminating as he goes how human interactions with nature have produced the resources for development and causes for environmental concern that have influenced the way power has been exercised in the region. Chapter 2, ‘The environment in ideas’, examines the influence of changing social constructions of nature on resource use and conservation. Having considered relationships between the environment and development through the lenses of both the material and the ideal in chapters 1 and 2, chapter 3 focuses students' attention on the main themes that have framed the study of Latin American and Caribbean environmental politics: institutions, public policy, political parties, social movements and ideology.

Building from the foundations established in the first half of Volume 1, the final three chapters investigate the principal environmental challenges that LAC nations are facing in the twenty-first century. In chapter 4 consideration is given to the ways in which particular development models and degrees of global integration have impacted the physical environment. Chapter 5 looks at the relationship between economic policy and the environment, while the final chapter considers the region's response to the challenges of sustainable development in the context of increasingly rapid and severe climate change. The picture that emerges is of a region that has experienced significant impacts from global climate change and played a prominent role in international efforts to establish mechanisms for its mitigation and adaptation. At the same time O'Toole makes it clear that the extent to which national governments have been able to implement effective sustainable development policy remains limited by their economic dependence on international capital and global commodity markets.

The second volume focuses on the impact of political institutions, actors and ideology on environmental policy-making and seeks to demonstrate that environmental challenges continue to grow in importance in terms of the influence they exert over political development as LAC governments accommodate to the demands of globalisation within the constraints of sustainability. It seeks to foster an understanding of the nuts and bolts of political science and is organised into chapters that develop each of the key themes introduced in chapter 3, Volume 1. The first three chapters examine the institutional (chapter 1) and policy-making (chapter 2) aspects of environmental governance in LAC, and how different environmental conditions and priorities among the region's nations influence international relations (chapter 3). The final three chapters look at LAC's most notable environmental actors (chapters 4 and 5) and ideologies (chapter 6), revealing the growing prominence of green parties and the key roles that environmental social movements and NGOs have played in the formulation and implementation of environmental policy. The final chapter (6) suggests that beyond the region's enthusiastic embrace of the global ‘sustainable development’ orthodoxy, deeper shades of green ideology have found limited purchase in regional environmental politics. While at the aggregate level this is true, it underplays the attention given to campesino and indigenous identity elsewhere in these volumes and I was somewhat disappointed that Volume 2 is rather vaguely concluded with the suggestion that recent developments in home grown environmental ideology may indicate ‘a new chapter is now being written in the history of ecologism’ (p. 247); room should have been made for more thorough discussion of ‘Buen Vivir’ and related concepts, and the challenge they represent to mainstream sustainability discourse.

I have no doubt that the two volumes provide a very valuable resource for undergraduates interested in environmental politics: complex issues are rendered objectively and transparently; fundamental disciplinary concepts and canons are concisely defined; significant areas of academic debate are identified and the texts cite important sources for further independent learning. Numerous journal articles, academic monographs, agency reports and institutional websites are cited and accurately rendered in the books' reference lists. These resources offer a rich seam of research opportunities for inquisitive students to explore. There are, however, no explicit research-based learning exercises or self-assessment sections set-off from the main text in the same way as the numerous and illuminating, boxed case studies and tables of data, which are employed to particularly good effect when used for comparative purposes.

The introduction to the environmental politics of Latin America and the Caribbean that O'Toole has packed into these two volumes is certainly wide ranging. Each chapter is clearly articulated and provides a coherent unit of study, although the intellectual threads that link the chapters together are perhaps less well conveyed. Each volume also has a coherent structure but both would have benefited from some kind of epilogue to summarise the ground that had been covered and how the lessons that emerged might contribute in more general terms to our understanding of regional environmental politics. A short concluding chapter to each volume would be particularly valuable to students that may not have the benefit of a course tutor or seminar group with whom to discuss their understanding of what they had been studying.

Minor gripes aside, these texts are well written and easy to digest. As with all politics, this is a rapidly moving field of study and the volumes will require fairly regular updating: the opening paragraph to the introduction of Volume 1 already looks a little dated as it muses on the fortunes of Partido Verde candidate Marina Silva in the 2014 Brazilian Presidential Elections. Nevertheless, it would be a relatively simple task to design a very solid undergraduate module around the structure and content that O'Toole has provided and with the addition of regular, well thought-out, research-based learning questions and self-assessment exercises, these volumes could be used as the core materials for a distance learning module. In my own teaching at the UCL Institute of the Americas, I have included them as recommended reading for an undergraduate module on environmental issues, movements and policies in the Americas and my graduate students have commented very favourably on them in relation to their studies around globalisation and Latin American development. They have certainly made a hitherto somewhat disparate field of study much more accessible to undergraduate students.