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 …
Pollution
New and forthcoming environmental books (June 2025)
As we reach the halfway point of 2025 we have another exciting group of books to share. Enjoy! The Secret of Whylder Wood By Elaine Ramsey Park Woods and Whylder …
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 …
EcoLit Books Success Story: Talitha May
An EcoLit Books success story doesn’t have to be limited to the written word. Reckoning features artwork by Talitha May who discovered the journal through our list of Literary Outlets …
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 …
The most popular book reviews and pages of 2024
More than 35,000 people from more than 100 countries visited EcoLit Books this year. And this post shows where they spent most of their time. Here are the top 25 …
Q&A with Bill Streever, author of A Sea Full of Turtles
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 Review: Casey Huegel’s wonderfully detailed Cleaning up the Bomb Factory: Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest
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 …
Book Review: Of Cattle and Men: Heavy is the hand that holds the stun gun
There is a conversation, repeated several times, during the powerful novella Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry: “Like they say in these parts: as …
Book Review: Picturing a Better World: The Climate Action Handbook
Willard Scott (for the young ones out there: America’s weather person) once said: “Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever seems to do anything about it.” You could say …
Book Review: Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean
Let me begin this review by saying that university presses and small presses have published some of the most creative and thought-provoking environmental literature I’ve read over the past few …