Knocking on Heaven’s Door
By Sharman Apt Russell. Yucca/Skyhorse Publishing: New York, 2016.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is an eco science fiction set in a Paleoterrific future.
In the 23rd century, humans live in utopia, hunting and gathering in tribal bands, reunited with old (cloned) friends like the mammoth and saber-toothed cat, connected by solar-powered laptops, buoyed by the belief in a panpsychic universe in which consciousness pervades matter. A 150 years after the supervirus that killed off most of humanity, our return to a Paleoterrific lifestyle ...
Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists
By James Perrin Warren. University of Arizona Press: Tuscon, AZ, 2015.
The award-winning American environmental writer Barry Lopez has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world. Lopez’s fiction and nonfiction focus on the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, posing abiding questions about ethics, intimacy, and place.
Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, ...
The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture
By Raymond Malewitz. Stanford University Press: Redwood City, CA, 2014.
In the age of Ikea Hackers and salvagepunks, The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. Figures of both literary and material culture whose behavior evokes an American can-do ethic, rugged consumers mediate between older mythic models of self-sufficiency and the ...
Industrial Oz: Ecopoems
By Scott T. Starbuck. Fomite Press: Burlington, VT, 2015.
Industrial Oz: Ecopoems is a 104 page poetry collection about CEOs’ and politicians’ Titanic arrogance in the face of human-caused climate destruction. Bill McKibben described it as “rousing, needling, haunting,” and Thomas Rain Crowe noted it “just may be the most cogent and sustained collection of quality eco-activist poetry ever written in this culture, this country.” Bryan R. Monte of Amsterdam Quarterly wrote, “Starbuck brings the personal and the political quickly together as in his short poem about ...
The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter
By Susan Signe Morrison. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2015.
Tracing the material and metaphoric waste through the western canon, in The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter Morrison disrupts traditional perceptions to understand how we theorize, manage, and are implicated in waste. A major contribution to the growing field of Waste Studies, this book urges the reader to see disposal as the creation of waste literature itself.
Susan Signe Morrison is Professor of English at Texas State ...
Dirt: A Love Story
Edited by Barbara Richardson. ForeEdge (University Press of New England): Lebanon, NH, 2015.
Thirty-six artists, scientists, and renowned writers go wild about the virtues, pleasure, and importance of dirt!
Community farms. Mud spas. Mineral paints. Nematodes. The world is waking up to the beauty and mystery of dirt. This anthology celebrates the Earth’s generous crust, bringing together essays by award-winning scientists, authors, artists, and dirt lovers to tell dirt’s exuberant tales.
Geographically broad and topically diverse, these essays reveal life as lived by dirt ...
Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire
Edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2015.
Decentering the human, the essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism provide important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential for a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.