In the first chapter of Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era, Sarat Colling tells the story of Emily, possibly the most famous cow to have escaped a slaughterhouse. It was 1995 and Emily was being led to her death when she hopped over a five-foot high gate near the killing floor and disappeared into …
Not surprisingly, we’ve been doing quite a bit of reading this year. Here are some of our favorite books. And not all of them were new in 2020. We reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass back in 2019, and it’s comforting to see that book rise to the top of our collective consciousness (a seven-year old overnight success …
Who were the first humans to bake bread? If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have probably guessed the Egyptians. But what if it was the Aboriginal Australians? And not by any small margin. There is evidence to suggest that Australians were cultivating grains and baking bread more than 30,000 years …
I live in an old house. So old that it tilts off to one side and you can feel a winter breeze coming up through the floorboards. When we had it renovated several years ago, I wondered if it would have made more sense, environmentally, to tear it down and build a LEED-certified (whatever exactly …
Sadly, we cannot review everything we receive here at EcoLit Books — but I did want to highlight a few new and newly republished works… The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animalsby Katy M. GuentherStanford University Press For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gazeby Elizabeth CherryRutgers University Press Butterfly: Poems by Miriam Sorrel …
Bookshop.org is a new way to support local bookstores. Started less than a year ago, Bookshop has already raised more than five million dollars for local bookstores. Bookshop is an alternative to Amazon. Booksellers that refer you to the Bookshop site receive a percentage of revenues from each book you purchase. We’ve created a page …
Always nice to see the emergence of a new environmental publication. This one is called Ecocene and is published by the Cappadocia University Environmental Humanities Center. The inaugural issue is free to download — see below: The idea with our first special issue is to inaugurate not just the journal but the kind of key …
The cover of The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson features a nearly complete St. Louis Arch, known as the Gateway to the West. It was completed about six years before my family moved to St. Louis and my memories of it consist of squeezing into an egg-shaped elevator and tilting our way up …
Summer in Ashland, Oregon, means fawns following their mothers through the streets of our small town. The local deer are, sadly, a contentious issue. Many residents resent their appetites for rose bushes and other flora. Others have accused deer of assault (typically a mother deer’s instinct to protect her fawn). But a major reason we …
Dandelions. Bull thistle. Kudzu. Japanese knotweed. Himalayan blackberry. From front lawns to woodlands, these are among the most despised of plant species. Species that, we are told, are hell-bent on taking over every square inch of soil, crowding out native species, ruining ecosystems, giving gardeners ulcers. But what if everything we know about weeds is …
We are delighted to announce that Athena E. Copenhaver is the winner of the 2019 Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, for her novel MY DAYS OF DARK GREEN EUPHORIA. The award’s final judge, Carol J. Adams (author of The Sexual Politics of Meat) writes: “Awareness of ecocide, environmental devastation, and animal suffering might not seem the likely content for …
