If we lived on this planet only one day a year then perhaps celebrating one “Earth Day” a year would make more sense. But as LitHub points out, every day is earth day. And they are assembling an ambitious list of 365 books for your climate change library, beginning with the classics. It’s nice to …
Today is World Penguin Day— not that we need a reason to celebrate these amazing little creatures, but it’s great to have a designated day on which everyone thinks about these birds and how they’re faring in such a rapidly changing world. So, how exactly are the penguins doing? According to the International Union for Conservation of …
Even though every day is Earth Day at EcoLit Books, we wish you all a lovely day and hope it includes some quality time outdoors, with animals, and enjoying all our planet has to share.
Congratulations to Richard Powers for a novel that captures the tragedy of what we have lost (and continue to lose) every time we cut down some of the oldest-living inhabitants of this planet. I reviewed the book here with my only criticism being the conspicuous lack of vegan characters. You don’t have to look very …
The UK-based Green Stories Writing Competition is looking for full-length plays that address sustainability — and, best of all, the contest is free to enter. Here are the details… We are looking for Stage Plays that in some way touch upon ideas around building a sustainable society. If you’d prefer to create your story in …
The cover of Ethical Vegetarianism and Veganism, a collection of essays edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, features a photograph of a rescued chicken taken by Jo-Anne McArthur. Rescued is an optimistic word because the life of a chicken freed from a factory farm is often all-too-brief. Chickens bred for food are pumped so …
The winter issue of Minding Nature (published by our contributor The Center for Humans and Nature out now and well worth reading (free download here). This issue features essays about democratic ecological citizenship, reflections on birdsong, sword ferns, and the cultural wisdom of animals, artistic responses to the Anthropocene, and some beautiful poetry scattered throughout.
I’m pasting below a unique writing opportunity: The Waterston Desert Writing Prize 2019 is now open for submissions. Applicants must submit online via Submittable through April 1,2019. The Prize honors creative nonfiction that illustrates artistic excellence, sensitivity to place, and desert literacy, with the desert asboth subject and setting. Inspired by author and poet Ellen …
This is our third year of recapping the best books we’ve read over the past year. Here are the 2017 and 2016 lists. We’re so glad that the number of both readers and reviewers of EcoLit Books have grown enough to now have an annual tradition of celebrating our favorite books of the year. And …
Here’s an exciting new call for submissions from the UiO (University of Oslo) Department of Sociology and Human Geography: Attention writers and humanities researchers: this is a call for narratives that bring us closer to the potentiality of the present and activate “the politics of the possible” in our changing climate. Twelve stories will be …
Reviewed by James Ballowe, Distinguished Professor English Emeritus from Bradley University In his “Prologue” to The Way of Coyote, Gavin Van Horn, Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature, leaves no doubt as to what his book is about. Before coming to Chicago, his “Plan A” was to inhabit a cabin …
As a former volunteer for Dee Boersma at the Punta Tombo Magellanic colony in Argentina, I was especially eager to read Eric Wagner’s Penguins in the Desert, in which he recounts the six months he and his wife, El, spent among the penguins in 2008. Two years earlier, my husband, John Yunker, and I spent …
Pity the keystone species. Those animals upon which the health of so many ecosystems depend — wolves and jaguars, sharks and sea otters, to name just a few. Due in large part to their outsized impact on our planet, they are often blamed for getting in our way. Wolves take our cows and sheep. Sea otters take our …
Here in Ashland, Oregon, I listen to our local radio station KSKQ. And for the past several years I’ve enjoyed the weekly, two-minute BirdNote programs. So I was excited to find that there is now a BirdNote book. What the book lacks in audio, it makes up for in very high print production values; it is …
Back from the Brink, by Nancy F. Castaldo, is a collection of stories for older kids (10 – 12 years old) about animals that have come very close to extinction. Due to efforts from conservation researchers and passionate individuals who want to see these species survive, their populations have increased again. I recommend this book …
