A few years ago, I was standing alongside Bear Creek, a small waterway in Southern Oregon, camera in hand, when a river otter approached. I captured the photo, thrilled to have not only seen a river otter so close but one that apparently was not so afraid of me. The otter quickly disappeared underwater and, …
EcoLit contributor Bill Streever has a new book out, A Sea Full of Turtles, and it provides a hopeful antidote to the more dystopian environmental literature in bookstores today. Bill’s book left me feeling optimistic. I hope it does for you as well. I recently asked Bill about the book and here’s what he had …
Sharon J. Wishnow’s debut novel, The Pelican Tide—set on Grand Isle, Louisiana, in 2010, just before the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill—is both an intense environmental disaster story and a heartwarming story of a family finding their way back to one another after a series of devastating events. Josie Babineaux is a chef, mother, newly …
A toad can kill just by belching, and the lust of the octopus is blamed for its short lifespan. To produce a mule, the horse owner must give the mare a bad haircut to shame her into having sex with a donkey. The hedgehog is considered a spiteful animal because it urinates on itself when caught, unlike the lynx, who hides its urine until it forms a gem stone.
Such are a few of the many nuggets of animal lore recorded in Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals, a translation of De Natura Animalium by the third century Roman writer Claudius Aelianus, better know as Aelian.
Here’s the latest batch of books to come across our desks — enjoy! The first book is written by the founder of an amazing chicken rescue organization, Sweet Peeps, based in Mobile, Alabama. If you’ve never visited an animal sanctuary (not a zoo) you’re missing out. And you don’t have to go to Alabama to …
It was while working on a film script set in the Pacific Northwest that journalist John O’Connor began to see Bigfoot everywhere: “On CBD oil and air fresheners. On car polish and coronavirus masks. On scented candles and Nalgene bottles and maple syrup and vile, undrinkable IPA.” But is Bigfoot an “actual zoological possibility or …
The title card at the end of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, a classic of the New Queer Cinema film movement, reads “Sometimes you have to create your own history.” In the instance of The Watermelon Woman, Dunye creates the fictitious historical narrative of a lesbian filmmaker and her actress lover. Yamashita takes a similar …
Imagine it is 1866 and you are strolling the streets of New York City. The first thing you might notice are the hundreds upon hundreds of horses pulling people in packed trolleys up and down the streets and avenues, the closest thing at the time to subway cars. You may find yourself suddenly surrounded not …
Too often, environmental writers fail to capture the complexities that make their genre so interesting. Instead, they tell tales of good versus evil, of right against wrong. While parts of many stories boil down to something at least resembling black and white, few complete stories—at least the ones worth telling—are so simple. Most require convoluted narratives describing more …
There is a conversation, repeated several times, during the powerful novella Of Cattle and Men by Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry: “Like they say in these parts: as long as there’s a cow in this world, there will be a man keen to kill it.”“And another keen to eat it,” concludes Edgar Wilson. Edgar …
In pollinator ecologist Stephen Buchmann’s What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees, the author makes a compelling case for why we need to pay closer attention to bees (and to protect them), offering stories and anecdotes from research and observation that highlight the fascinating lives of these extraordinary creatures.
