Review: Building a Better World in Your Backyard
When it comes to nonfiction environmental books these days, I feel that we’re reaching “peek dystopia.” Or, at least I hope we are. Because it seems that between books about …
Trees
New Podcast: John Yunker joins The Afterword for a Chat About Environmental Stories
Author and EcoLit Books co-founder John Yunker joined guest Joelle Teachey, executive director of Trees Upstate, for a podcast focused on environmental literature. The Afterword is a podcast devoted to …
The list of outlets for environmental writing turns 70
As in there are now 70 of them. Thanks for everyone who contributed. We actually just received another contribution today so the list will be turning 71 shortly. The next …
Book Review: Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics
A decade ago, not long after moving to Oregon, I traveled to Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park where I entered an old-growth coast redwood forest for the first time. To …
Writing Opportunity: Poetry and essays on plant poetics
Here’s an opportunity for contributions to a special issue on plant poetics. Submissions are open from November 1st to December 27th. Poems and scholarly essays are invited in response to …
What I’m reading in the New York Times
A few articles that I bookmarked in the Times over the past two weeks… How Do the New Plant-Based Burgers Stack Up? We Taste-Tested Them I agree that Impossible Burgers …
Book Review: The Humane Gardener
What in the world could be inhumane about gardening? Plenty, it turns out, thanks to this beautifully produced and incredibly important book by Nancy Lawson: The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a …
Braiding Sweetgrass: Finding a way through environmental despair
At the ASLE conference earlier this summer I heard this book referenced in a number of sessions. And now, having read it, I realize why. Braiding Sweetgrass is a rich …
Notes from the ASLE Conference in Davis, California
ASLE is the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Every other year, the organization hosts a conference; this year it was at the University of California at …
Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment: And our irrational, insatiable, unsustainable desire to control nature
I feel ashamed to admit this, but until recently I had not read, end to end, Silent Spring. I had read parts of the book over the years and have …
Book Review: The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption is at once a memoir of the author’s experiences in nature and a …