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 say it was a moving experience is an understatement. The photographs I took were also an understatement; no picture can capture the enormity of these …

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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 the following prompt from guest editor John Ryan: A novel area of science called plant cognition is showing us that plants are more than photosynthetic androids or …

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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 and Beyond Meat rank highest, though I’ve also been a long-time fan of Field Roast. But I always find it odd when taste tests include …

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Writing Opportunity: The Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental Humanities

Wallace Stegner Prize

Here is an excellent opportunity presented by the University of Utah Press: The Wallace Stegner Prize will be awarded to the best monograph submitted to the Press in the broad field of environmental humanities. To compete for this award, manuscripts must emphasize interdisciplinary investigations of the natural and human environments and their fundamental interconnectedness, research …

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Book Review: Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy, and Everyday Practice

When you hear the word “garden” do you picture something like this: Or do you picture something more like this: The fact that these are both “gardens” illustrates just how loaded the word has become over the years. And the fact a garden can be so many things made me curious as to how we …

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Writing Opportunity: Michigan Quarterly Review

Here’s a unique opportunity for writers of essays, fiction, poetry and, well, pretty much anything that focuses on water. Deadline is December 1st. Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) is seeking submissions for Not One Without: A Special Issue on Water. The edition seeks to explore urgent, complex, and revelatory writing on water from around the world. …

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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 Backyard Habitat for Wildlife. The Humane Gardener makes a persuasive case for rethinking conventional knowledge about what a garden or yard should look like and …

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Muri

As Arctic sea ice melts, what, if any, responsibility do humans have for the animals whose very existence is threatened? It’s a question worth considering as temperatures rise and sea ice declines, a situation brought to light, once again, in the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s also the question …

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OINK

OINK Book Review by JoeAnn Hart Exisle Publishing, November 2019 By Renée Hollis There is a saying in the book reviewer world, that if you review a book with a pig on the cover, you will be destined to review all books with pigs on the cover. And so it has come to pass. Not …

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Review: Edge of Awe: Experiences of the Malheur-Steens Country

Funny how a word can change on you. When I moved to Oregon nearly a decade ago, I first heard about the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about the Steens mountain range, and the diversity of bird species that migrate through this region. Back then, Malheur meant wilderness. But in 2016, after group of armed men …

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New Opportunities for Writers

It’s submissions season for us writers and here are a few of particular interest to writers of environmental literature: Fire and Water Stories Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene will be a print anthology of short literary fiction from writers with diverse perspectives and artistic approaches that explore our current reality on a changing …

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What We’re Reading: September 2019

Midge Raymond This opinion piece in The Guardian shows in great detail why eating animals and animal products needs to be part of the conversation about climate change.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/08/ipcc-land-climate-report-carbon-cost-meat-dairy This opinion piece in the New York Times uses both wit and wisdom to discuss why “vegans are irrefutably on the right side of history.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/vegan-food.html Jacki …

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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 collection of essays about plants and animals, indigenous and scientific awareness, and our tenuous relationship with nature. But more than that, it is the story …

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