Story Magazine is accepting submissions of prose for a new issue devoted to the environment: Climate change is one of the most significant issues of our time. How do we tell stories of it? How do its stories inform us? For Issue #4, send your best work in any form that explores the natural and built worlds here on Earth. Glaciers and cityscapes. Flora and fauna and concrete. From the pastoral all the way to Mega City One. The deadline for this issue is July 15, 2015. Click here for complete details.
Film Review: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Okay, so this isn’t a book review — but it’s such an important documentary that I wanted to review it here on EcoLit Books. (The book connection: As you watch the film, you’ll learn about a few books to add to your reading list, including Comfortably Unaware and The World Peace Diet.) Cowspiracy (which is currently still available for its special Earth Day price of $1) covers the impact of animal agriculture on the planet — it’s the number-one contributor to human-induced climate change and affects everything from the rainforests to the oceans — and why some of the biggest environmental organizations never talk about …
Book Review: We Are All Crew by Bill Landauer
I have to make a confession. In writing circles, there are certain types of books one is supposed to hold dearer than all others. Important books. Literary books. Books that bravely ponder the desperate squalor of the human condition. I hate these books. The truth is I’m a complete plot junkie. I want to read a book that will keep me up until three in the morning because I have to know what comes next. If the book happens to be Dostoyevsky—awesome; I’ll stay up all night pondering that desperate squalor, but Fyodor better keep the blood pumping. Enter We …
The Necessary Evolution of Environmental Writing
Halfway through reading The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston, I came across the following passage: A new danger, moreover, now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible residue of crude oil, called by refiners ‘slop,’ remains in stills after oil distribution, and this is pumped into southbound tankers and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large areas, and the birds alight into it and get it on their feathers. They inevitably die. The passage startled me because so much of the book up to that point was …
Book Review: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Reading A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold I am struck time and again by how contemporary it feels. This is a testament to Leopold, who wrote this book back in the late 1940s, yet clearly had future generations in mind. Leopold saw the environmental issues we are struggling with today because he was struggling with similar issues in his time. During his life in the forest service and in teaching he had come to believe that we needed to develop a new relationship with nature, one no longer based on dominion and extraction. He saw the need for wilderness areas in a time in which people might have assumed we …
Book Review: Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
People of a certain age (myself included) remember growing up outside. Our families opened the doors, shooed us out, and shut them again, leaving us free to wander through our neighborhoods, parks, and/or wild places, making up our own games. I have particularly vivid memories of being let loose on the beaches of Southern California, with only a vague notion of adults close enough to make sure we didn’t drown or get too sunburned but otherwise being free to run around, swim, and build and destroy things in the sand. These are memories that today’s children may never have, worries …
Siskiyou Prize update – new award, extended deadline
The winner of the Siskiyou Prize, in addition to a cash prize of $1,000 and book publication, will also receive a four-week residency at the PLAYA retreat in central Oregon. PLAYA is a nonprofit organization supporting innovative thinking through work in the arts, literature, natural sciences, and other fields of creative inquiry. On the edge of the Great Basin in central Oregon, PLAYA offers creative individuals the space, the solitude, and the community to reflect and to engage their work. The winner of the Siskiyou Prize will receive a four-week residency at PLAYA, which provides private lodging in a fully equipped cabin with kitchen/living room, a place …
Falling In Love With Trees
Seeing Trees Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees. Timber Press, 2011 By Nancy Ross Hugo Photography by Robert Llewellyn “The most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and reality.” Author Nancy Ross Hugo quotes British naturalist Peter Scott to explain why she does what she does, which is to delve deeply into the nature of individual trees. She wants the reader to come along with her on this journey, in the hope that to know trees is to love them. Seeing Trees …
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