“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and we will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the …
People, Place & Planet: WWF Cymru Prize for Writing on Nature and the Environment From the website: New Welsh Review, in association with WWF Cymru and the CADCentre, is thrilled to announce the New Welsh Writing Awards, which will celebrate the finest non-fiction writing in the new and increasingly popular ‘short’ form. We’re looking for …
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, …
The Wildlife Detectives: How Forensic Scientists Fight Crimes Against Nature by Donna M. Jackson is particularly intriguing for me as a resident of Ashland, Oregon—which is home to the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. Open since 1989, this lab is the only full-service animal crime lab in the world, and all evidence of crimes …
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 …
The Animals and Society Institute has launched a journal exclusively for undergraduate and graduate students, to publish papers, book reviews, essays, and other work. Sloth is an online bi-annual journal that publishes international, multi-disciplinary writing by undergraduate students and recent (within three years) graduates that deals with human/non-human animal relationships from the perspectives of the …
Just a brief reminder that we are fast approaching the deadline for the 2014 Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Writing. Our final judge is award-winning author Karen Joy Fowler. You can learn more here. Full disclosure: This prize is sponsored by Ashland Creek Press, the same press that hosts this blog.
I began reading this short story collection during a stay at a tiny cabin on Minnesota’s Gull Lake and couldn’t have asked for a more perfect setting to enjoy Rebecca Lawton’s stories. Flipping pages to the soundtrack of the waves hitting the shore, I became effortlessly drawn in to the worlds of the Western whitewater …
I just came across an interesting opportunity (via Aerogramme) for writing focused on our relationship with meat: Issue #69 (Winter) — Theme: “MEAT” Humans have hunted, trapped, and killed animals for their “meat” (Old English mete = food) from at least as far back as our “hunter-gatherer” days. From guinea pigs to bison, quail to turkeys, …
As James McClintock points out in his enlightening book, Antarctica is often referred to as “the poster child” for global warming, a bellwether of climate change, the place where we see the most drastic results of a warming planet. McClintock’s Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land offers a firsthand view of the challenges facing …
Read this in the heat of August — languorous, sweltering, submerged. It begins, “Soon it would be too hot.” J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is a classic in the growing genre of climate fiction — fiction that brings attention to climate change. It’s not about the cause of a manmade global catastrophe (For this, Martin …
