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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Betsy Hartmann

Betsy Hartmann

BETSY HARTMANN writes nonfiction and fiction about important national and global challenges. She is a well-known educator, commentator, and advocate on women’s rights, population, environment, and security concerns. Her new book The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness explores how end-times thinking profoundly influences American foreign policy, environmental politics, and the persistence of injustice. Now in its third edition, Betsy’s feminist classic Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control tackles the powerful myth of overpopulation and its negative consequences for women’s reproductive health and rights. She is also the co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village and co-editor of the anthology Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. Her political thrillers The Truth About Fire and Deadly Election explore the threat the Far Right poses to American democracy. 

Betsy is professor emerita of Development Studies and senior policy analyst of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She received her BA magna cum laude in South Asian Studies from Yale University and her PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. To learn more about Betsy, visit http://betsyhartmann.com/.

We project onto nature the tensions and contradictions of our providential mission. Nature is seen as a wilderness to be tamed, a continent to be conquered, an apocalypse over the horizon, and at the same time a sublime landscape where we can escape the wounds of civilization and lift ourselves toward heaven.