Black Gold: Clearing the smoke on American coal
If I were to mention the words “black gold” you might picture oil (Thank you, Beverly Hillbillies). But the original black gold was coal and it is the title of …
Climate Change
Satellite: Essays of Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far by Simmons Buntin
Terra Firma Books, Trinity University Press, 2025 This fine collection of essays by Simmons Buntin, Satellite: Essays of Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, leads with lizards. “They are tidy, …
Book Review: Little Great Island
A Novel, by Kate Woodworth Sibylline Press, 2025 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest… the trees commingle their …
ASLE announces finalists for 2025 Book Awards
ASLE has announced the finalists for its biennial book awards and I’m excited to see a few titles reviewed here at EcoLit Books, like Sea Change, Soil and The Last …
Novel Ecologies, Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech
by Allison Carruth The University of Chicago Press, 2025 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Think of clouds. Light, airy, floating around in our atmosphere. Therefore, the words “cloud computing” make it …
Book Review: There Are Reasons For This
A novel by Nini Berndt Tin House, June 2025 Desire is the driving force of any story. What do the characters want? In There Are Reasons For This, Nina Berndt’s …
Q&A with Christina Rivera, author of My Oceans
Christina Rivera is an author from Colorado whose girlhood was bordered by coastlines of the Pacific Ocean. Her debut book, MY OCEANS was longlisted for the Graywolf Press Prize, a …
Book Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
In Charlotte McConaghy’s lovely new novel, Wild Dark Shore, Dominic Salt and his family—eighteen-year-old Raff, seventeen-year-old Fen, and nine-year-old Orly—moved to Shearwater Island eight years earlier, when Dominic “needed a …
The Language of Trees, A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape by Katie Holten
Tin House, 2023 Hermann Hesse once wrote that the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees. There is also great pleasure to be had …
Going to Seed, Essays on Idleness, Nature, & Sustainable Work
By Kate J. Neville Texas Tech University Press, 2024, The Sowell Emerging Writers Prize Winner I read Going to Seed right before the U.S election, when I was full of …
The best environmental books we’ve read in 2024
We published 30 book reviews this year and read many more. And out of all the books we’ve read, here are a handful of our favorites. You’ll find a mix …