ASLE News Fall 2009
A Quarterly Publication of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
In This Issue
ASLE Elections
VP Candidates
EC Candidates
Carbon Offset Donations
Independent Writer Interview
ASLE-ANZ Update
ASLE-Taiwan Update
ASLE-Japan Update
ASLE Panel at SEA
Members Write: Migration
ASLE Member News
ASLE News Notes
ASLE Bookshelf
GSL Sought
Donating to ASLE
Submit to Members Write
ASLE Ph.D.
Fall is Election Time for ASLE Candidates
Each autumn, ASLE members are invited to elect a new vice president and two new
executive council members. The vice president serves one year as vice president,
the subsequent year as president, and the year following as past president. Executive
council members are selected for three year terms. Once again, we have a fantastic
slate of candidates whose statements are printed below.
As instituted in 2008, this year the election will primarily be an online voting
process. To cast your vote, login at the ASLE website as a member with your email
and password at https://www.asle.org/site/members/login/.
Once you are logged in, you will see a link in the right hand column under the
heading "2009 Election for Vice President and Executive Council" that says "Cast
Your Vote." Click on this link and the slate of candidates will appear and you
can make your selections. There is also a link to review the same candidate statements
published below. The secure system will insure that each member can vote only once.
Online voting will begin immediately and will close at 11pm EST on December 1, 2009.
If you would like a paper ballot sent to you, or have questions about online voting,
please contact Amy McIntyre at info@asle.org or 603-357-7411.
Read the statements from our candidates for vice president and executive council
below, make your selections, and vote online or send your paper ballot--postmarked
by December 1, 2009--to:
Karla Armbruster
Webster University, English Dept.
470 E. Lockwood Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63119-3194
Candidates for Vice President
(vote for one)
Ursula Heise, Stanford University
It's hard to imagine a more exciting request than to be asked to run for Vice President
of ASLE. As our field is being recognized and integrated into the curricula, faculty
searches and institutional profiles of literature departments around the US and
overseas, we face new possibilities and challenges. Here are some of the initiatives
I'd like to explore if elected:
· Given the somewhat uncertain future of literary studies, I'd like to think about
how ecocriticism's interdisciplinary profile can help to reinvigorate the discipline,
and how we can envision our own work in the larger context of Environmental Humanities,
including environmental anthropology, history and philosophy.
· In a wider interdisciplinary context, I believe one central task remains: the
interface with the natural sciences. I'd like to explore ways in which we can show
natural scientists how the study of culture is relevant and important to their study
of nature, and I'm eager to enhance ASLE's visibility to ecologists and biologists.
· Over the last few years, ecocriticism has expanded from its original North American
focus to include comparative and postcolonial dimensions. Fostering different local,
regional, national and transnational perspectives and connections remains an important
challenge, along with the need to include in our work environmentalisms, in the
plural, that are inflected by vastly different cultural assumptions and socio-economic
contexts. Translating theories of transnationalism, globalization, human rights,
and environmental justice into our organizational practice means, for me, continuing
to seek out and engage with voices from around the world.
· There's been a lot of debate in the environmentalist movement recently about whether
some of the thought and writing that the movement has relied on since the 1960s
need to be reconceived. As experts on narrative and imagery, ASLE members are in
a privileged position to clarify what's at stake in holding on to or letting go
of particular stories and metaphors, and which ones might be most useful for the
future. One of our most exciting tasks will be to envision the future of environmentalisms.
My interest in these issues comes from several sources. Growing up in Germany and
studying Spanish, Latin American, French and Japanese literature have made me aware
that we cannot take assumptions about nature, wildness, agriculture, animals, or
the human body for granted across cultures, and that we need to know cultural differences
both for their own sake and to make our activism effective. More informally, encounters
with birds at home and in the wild have turned my conceptions of animals upside
down, and led to a deep interest in animal cognition and communication (Critical
Animal Studies remain a vibrant focus of interest). It was the combination of these
interests that led me to ecocriticism and to ASLE in the late 1990s.
I currently teach in the Department of English at Stanford University and direct
the graduate Program in Modern Thought & Literature. I'm also affiliated with
the undergraduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Interdisciplinary
Program in Environment and Resources, and the Woods Institute for the Environment.
In these settings, I've worked to establish connections between humanist research
and environmentalist perspectives, have created eco-focused classes, and raised
funds for initiatives and fellowships in Environmental Humanities. I've also worked
for the inclusion of environmentalist viewpoints in other professional contexts
such as the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Association
for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), the Society for Literature, Science
and the Arts (SLSA) and the PMLA Advisory Board. It'd be a great pleasure and an
exciting challenge to continue this work in ASLE at the institutional core of environmental
literary studies.
Laura Dassow Walls, University of South Carolina
Ecocriticism in its various forms has always been at the center of my career, and
today I believe we are on the leading edge of the most exciting moment since the
founding of environmental literature over 200 years ago. First, ecocriticism is
now in a deepening conversation with philosophy, environmental history, and science
studies, opening new ways to make nature "matter" in literature. We are forging
new theories, new conceptual grounds, new genres and ways of writing for and about
an endangered world. Second, today "nature" matters more than ever. The present
reality of climate change shatters centuries of Western metaphysical dualism: where
can we now draw the line separating humans from nature? Worse, if our most daily,
mundane actions contribute to ending life as we know it, how then shall we live?
What must we do? How do we teach, write, think, in this emergent world? Apocalyptic
thinking has returned as a driving force in our politics, literature, and culture.
We in ASLE are on the front lines of this future, and we--the writers, artists,
and teachers, the ones who have been paying attention all along to sky and land
and water--must think creatively about meeting the wilder world ahead of us. We
are the ones who know how to communicate love and urgency, whether in polemics or
poetry, sober analyses or ecstatic song. The time for elegies is passing. The time
now is for instilling resilience, for making sure that humans remain part of the
dance of the cosmos.
My life has been lived on the cusp of this change. I was born in an Alaskan fishing
village, grew up on the once-wooded outskirts of Seattle, and worked as a wildlife
and botanical illustrator while earning my graduate degrees in English at the University
of Washington in Seattle, then at Indiana University in Bloomington. (How I would
love to help bring ASLE to my alma mater for our 2011 conference!) After teaching
for twelve years at Lafayette College, I joined the faculty of the University of
South Carolina, where I have fought to create a place for the environmental humanities.
My books have focused on Thoreau (Seeing New Worlds), Emerson (Emerson's Life in
Science: The Culture of Truth), and Alexander von Humboldt (The Passage to Cosmos),
in whom I have traced a deep tradition that braids together nature, poetry, and
ethics, a legacy passed to us from poets and scientists who rewrote the dualism
of science and literature into a complex weave of ecological thought. I believe
this is a paradigm shift so tremendous that it is still in the making, and I am
working to connect literature and science studies into a new vision for ecocriticism.
I tell my students that in this unprecedented age, the "anthropocene," environmental
thinking needs every one of them, for all our inherited knowledge must be renovated
and renewed in its light. I pledge to work to help realize ASLE's exciting new strategic
plan, and to reach out to our allies in environmental history and philosophy, historical
ecology, science studies, literary and cultural studies and critical theory. We
need to enhance student participation, bolster efforts on campuses across the nation
to found and sustain the environmental humanities, and join our voices to those
of our colleagues across the planet, of all races and nations. In the global debates
of our time, it is we who must be voices for the local, to insist that the local
becomes a cause for thinking the global, and thus articulate the multiple and divergent
worlds that compose the cosmos, the world we all hold in common.
Candidates for Executive Council
(vote for no more than two)
Greta Gaard, University of Wisconsin-River Falls
When my partner and I camped in the foothills outside of Fort Collins in 1992, I
felt delicious excitement in combining nights under the open sky with days at a
professional conference--wearing the same set of clothing. This is it!, I thought;
the eco-kids are finally drawing a new map.
So I was happily surprised to be nominated to run for the Executive Council, since
my standpoint works at the margins--as an ecofeminist, a bisexual, a direct action
eco-activist in professorial drag. Although I co-founded the Diversity Caucus in
1999 at Kalamazoo, organized conference panels and edited books, I never contemplated
serving in the leadership of an academic organization. Until now.
ASLE faces an exciting future: issues of climate justice, food and water democracy,
ecological culture-building and sustainability have never been more urgent. ASLE's
international branches are already communicating ecocritical values across the boundaries
of discipline, culture, nation, and wealth. Our studies of literature, composition,
rhetoric and culture can be energized by these alliances, and our scholarship has
the real potential to influence the future of sustainability.
My work is part of this process: it includes Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature
(1993), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (1998), Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists
and the Greens (1998) and The Nature of Home (2007). My courses on EcoComposition
and Environmental Justice, like my presentations on World Food Day and World Agribusiness,
participate in "culture-jamming," raising critical debate about environmental beliefs
and behaviors. Through teaching a graduate seminar on Ecofeminist Literary Criticism
at Tamkang University in Taiwan, and participating in ecocritical conferences at
Tsinghua University in Beijing and Haceteppe University in Turkey, I am part of
ASLE's movement toward international ecocritical exchange.
I am committed to helping ASLE continue to develop in ways that enact our shared
commitment to sustainability, justice, intellectual and ecological health.
Richard Hunt, Potomac State College
Once upon a time, I graduated from the University of Nevada-Reno's Literature and
the Environment Program in May 2000 and set out on what has become an unorthodox
career path; after stops in several other places, I now teach at Potomac State
College, a two-year division of West Virginia University. Throughout my peripatetic
career, my consistent academic home has been ASLE, which I joined in the summer
of 1993. I have been involved in all of our conferences since the first one, presenting
papers both scholarly and creative, and playing music late into the night.
I am particularly interested in two new areas of interest that have arisen as both
the conference and the organization have grown. First, from within ASLE, it's sometimes
easy to imagine that we will always be able to teach our passions, to offer those
dream courses we hear about in conference sessions. My own experience suggests otherwise,
though. Indeed, in the current economic era programs seem more likely to disappear
than to emerge. I would like to have a part in ASLE's response to such shrinkage.
Second, I want to enhance the opportunities for undergrads to participate in ASLE.
Like many of us, I teach in a school without graduate programs. The shape of my
career has led me to teach mostly composition, with a few general lit courses thrown
in. This spring, I will present my college's initial course in Environmental Lit.
Over the years, I have seen several bright undergrads develop a strong interest
in environmental literature--one even presented a fine paper in Eugene. I would
like to see ASLE include more such promising young scholars into our overall conversation.
I am honored to be considered for a position that will allow me to give something
back to a group that has long given so much to me.
Paul Outka, Florida State University
ASLE has been central to my scholarly identity and teaching for almost a decade.
In addition to publishing an essay on Whitman in ISLE in 2005, I have given papers
at the 2003 ASLE convention in Boston, the 2003 MLA as part of an ASLE-sponsored
panel, and the 2007 American Literature Association as part of the "Ecocriticism
on the Edge" panel. In Victoria, I gave a paper and chaired the "African Americans
and Ecocriticism" panel, and was profoundly honored to be awarded ASLE's 2009 ecocriticism
prize for my book, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance.
The book focuses on the intersections between racial self-construction and natural
experience in American literature and culture. I have also designed and taught courses
on American literary environmentalism at two small public liberal arts colleges--New
College of Florida and the University of Maine at Farmington--and at the graduate
level at Florida State, a large public research university where I currently serve
as an Assistant Professor.
My diverse teaching experience and scholarly focus on race and the environment would,
I hope, be helpful in bridging the many communities that comprise ASLE, as well
as reaching out to new ones. If I am fortunate enough to be elected to the EC I
would concentrate on expanding ASLE's outreach in three ways: first, by working
to further include African American and other long-marginalized voices in the discussion
and in the membership; second, by increasing the long-term centrality of ecocritical
perspectives in contemporary academic discourse by attracting more professors from
graduate institutions and more graduate students from a wider variety of programs;
and, third, by seeking ways ASLE might become a more effective public advocate for
environmental concerns. It would be an honor and privilege to work toward these
goals on the Executive Council.
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, York University
As far as formal literary studies go, I remain something of an outsider despite
15 years of working in environmental humanities in an interdisciplinary Faculty
of Environmental Studies. My graduate training was in social/political theory, and
my trek toward ecocriticism took me on a hilly route through environmental philosophy,
history, and ecocultural studies before depositing me at ASLE in Boston in 2003.
I am committed to "the study of the relationship between literature and the environment,"
as Cheryl Glotfelty so generously put it, but much as I love texts themselves, there
is enough social theorist in me to want to probe the relationship part: What does
literature offer environmental studies? How do specific literary and critical works/acts
reflect, negotiate, and/or disrupt their (capitalist) eco-cultural contexts? How
do we speak, as a body of scholars, writers, and activists, about these relationships?
These are the questions, then, that I offer as the basis of my service to this vital
organization.
ASLE has abundantly welcomed my and other "outsiders'" questions (as has ALECC,
of which I am also a member), which is why I consider it such an important scholarly
and professional home. Indeed, as an interdisciplinary--and, as a result of many
people's hard work, increasingly international and demographically/ecopolitically
multiple--organization, ASLE faces a challenge. The diversity of our commitments
to ecocriticism (what Buell has wonderfully called our "concourse of discrepant
practices") demands, I think, a collective conversation about what it is that we
are doing, how, and why. If outreach and inclusiveness are key trajectories for
ASLE (which they must be), then how can we use our multiple social, national, (inter-)
disciplinary, institutional/political locations to deepen through conversation,
as well as broaden through diversification, our ecocritical projects? I look forward
to negotiating such questions toward Bloomington in 2011 and beyond.
Julianne Warren, New York University
ASLE is the prime organization that brings together people from many fields who
are engaged in probing and stimulating understandings of art and nature. If
our efforts are to be truly helpful, it is critical that our narratives reflect our
most substantiated ecological understandings as well as our highest ideals. As a
member of the Executive Council I would bring to the service of ASLE my training
as an ecologist. I also would bring my experience as author of an intellectual biography
of the conservation thinker Aldo Leopold, most known for his writings on human moral
and ecological relationships with the rest of nature. Additionally, I have helped
plan cross-boundary symposia and meetings, hoping to aid in making the most of the
work of institutions with some shared core interests, including ASLE, the Ecological
Society of America, the Society for Conservation Biology, and the American Society
for Environmental History. I would like to continue promoting joint efforts. Finally,
as a faculty member of New York University and an outdoor enthusiast, I also would
offer a viewpoint that stresses urban, rural, and wilderness interconnectedness.
It would be an honor to serve on the Executive Council.
Karl Zuelke, College of Mount St. Joseph
I began my undergraduate career as a biology major and ran into trouble when faced
with studying things like statistical genetics, those byzantine biochemical pathways,
and all that Latin nomenclature. I suppose I was expecting something more like collecting
butterflies (one of my nerdy boyhood passions). I switched to English and thrived,
but I couldn't leave the love of nature behind, readopting the biology major as
well as keeping English and ultimately understanding how fascinating life science
is in all its facets. I've been exploring the overlap between nature and literature
ever since, discovering literary nature writing while earning an MFA at Indiana
University, finally completing a dissertation on nature and science writing at the
University of Cincinnati. Now I direct the writing center and teach writing and
literature at the College of Mount St. Joseph, in Cincinnati. I presented my first
conference paper at the 1997 ASLE conference in Missoula. I knew right away I had
discovered something special when I met such a gathering of like-minded people.
Most of the ASLE folks I've come to know express that same feeling, that we are
really onto something here. Since Missoula, ASLE has had a growing effect on my
personal and professional life. It informs the opinions I share with my friends
and colleagues, the material I present to my students, the directions my scholarly
and creative work take, and my commitment to environmental justice
So I would cherish the opportunity to serve everyone associated with ASLE by becoming
a member of the Executive Council. As might be suspected from my background, I hold
interdisciplinary perspectives in high esteem, and I fully expect that an interdisciplinary
approach to literature and environment studies will continue. I'm ready to add my
voice to ASLE's chorus of guiding spirits.
Carbon Offset Contributions Made by 2009 Conference Participants
and Matched by ASLE
For the second time in ASLE history, attendees at ASLE's Biennial Conference had
the opportunity to donate money for carbon offsets to help reduce the environmental
impact of carbon emissions involved with travel to and from the conference. Those
who came from near or far to Victoria, British Columbia, this past June donated
a total of $1,602; matching funds from ASLE raised the total to $3,204. This marks
a nearly $1,000 total increase from the first year of this program, launched at
the 7th Biennial Conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 2007.
As in 2007, the funds have been given to the non-profit organization Atmosfair in
Bonn, Germany. With Atmosfair, travelers calculate the greenhouse gas emissions
associated with their travel or other activities, and their donations are then used
to "save" those emissions through projects involving solar, hydropower, biomass,
and energy efficiency.
Atmosfair is involved in projects all over the world, from small hydropower in Honduras
to wastewater treatment in Thailand. Visit www.atmosfair.de
for more information; if your German is rusty, you'll want to click on the British
flag in the lower left-hand corner to read the text in English.
As ASLE News explained in Fall 2007 after the Spartanburg conference, while ASLE's
leadership decided to continue offering the option of carbon offsets, they do not
consider this a "quick fix" for all of the problems associated with long-distance
travel. Since 2007, instances of "greenwashing" have become even more frequent--leaving
all of us more wary of where our money goes--and the need to address the root causes
of large scale environmental problems has become even more dire. ASLE continues
to look for ways to operate sustainably, and welcomes your suggestions for doing so.
Interview with an Independent Writer
by Catherine Meeks
This new feature is launched with the intention of highlighting, in a more personal
way, many of the phenomenal members of ASLE working as independent writers. If you'd
like to suggest a member--yourself or someone else--for this feature, please contact
catherine-meeks@utc.edu.
Elizabeth Van Zandt is a freelance writer living in Indio, California. She received
an MFA in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University in 1976.
She is a retired national park ranger/interpreter and volunteers as a naturalist
at several government agencies in the area. She has published a book of poetry,
Persephone Rising, and has had work in several journals, most recently in Todd
Point Review.
Q. How did the natural world become important to you?
A. I've always preferred being outdoors, so the natural world has always been important
to me on some level. But it wasn't until I began spending time at Pinnacles National
Monument near Hollister, California, that I really became conscious of the natural
world as more than a backdrop to other activities. It was at this time that nature
began to enter my poetry as symbol and metaphor and subject matter, and I literally
fell in love with the earth, with rocks, soil, flowers, oak trees, the wind. The
Pinnacles is still a mystical place for me, where it all began.
Q. What landscapes do you consider most important to your work?
A. The landscape where I feel most connected is one with lots of open space and
sky and with hills or a mountain range somewhere in the picture to give it perspective.
I lived in Washington, DC, and worked at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National
Historic Park at Great Falls, Maryland, for a year and a half in the late 1980s.
There were forests everywhere. When the first spring rolled around, I felt claustrophobic
in the middle of all that green. Luckily, I was able to return to California before
the second spring. My imagery and inspiration comes mainly from landscapes where
I feel at home: California, the desert, in the mesas and canyons of the Southwest.
Q. What three authors have most influenced your work?
A. The poets James Dickey and W. B. Yeats and the novelist Thomas Hardy. One of
the main reasons I was attracted to their writings while pursuing my MFA is that
they all use imagery and symbolism from the natural world. At that time I was writing
poetry, and I was heavily influenced by Dickey's style and content; I was seduced
by Yeats' imagery and language. I liked Thomas Hardy because the natural world in
his novels was almost a character in its own right. Now I am writing mainly non-fiction
and the natural world is often a main character for me.
Q. What is the best thing anyone ever taught you?
A. Two things: good grammar and a love of words. My English teacher in my senior
year of high school, Mrs. Fuller, drilled grammar into us on a daily basis, then
plied us with lists of new and unusual words every Friday. She often used pages
from the Reader's Digest Word Power, where we had to pick the meanings, and made
it like a game; I came out of that class with almost perfect grammar and a huge
vocabulary for a high school senior. I still think of Mrs. Fuller with gratitude.
She made me crazy about the English language.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. I have been taking time to edit and polish and send out some work to magazines
and journals, including a piece I read from at the ASLE conference in June titled
Islands in a Sea of Sand. I'm also reading about and mulling over Jacqueline Cochran,
a pilot of the same vintage as Amelia Earhart. I recently discovered that the land
on which I live was once part of a ranch she owned and loved here in Indio, so I
feel a connection. I'd like to explore that connection.
Update from the Southern Hemisphere: ASLE-ANZ
by CA Cranston, President, ASLE-ANZ
The Southern Hemisphere recently lost one of its elders, the genial Geoff Park,
a founding ASLE-ANZ member and author of the groundbreaking Nga Uruora: The Groves
of Life: History and Ecology in a New Zealand Landscape. New Zealand Vice-President
Charles Dawson's tribute to Geoff can be read in the July issue of ANewZletter on
the ASLE-ANZ website. Charles is the only incumbent officer for 2009-2011. Newly
elected officers include President CA Cranston, Vice-President (Australia) Deborah
Bird Rose, Newsletter Editor and Communication Representative Chris Coughran (whose
article "Green Scripts in Gravity's Rainbow" appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of
ISLE), and Treasurer/Secretary Barbara Holloway, known for her handiwork with a
chainsaw. Barbara replaces Iris Ralph who absconded to Tamkang University, Taiwan,
and recently joined ASLE-Taiwan.
Riding on the tails of its members' successes, ASLE-ANZ was thrilled to hear that
Tom Griffiths was co-winner of the 2008 Prime Minister's $100,000 Prize for Australian
History for Silencing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. Traveling in an opposite
direction, poet and publisher Susan Hawthorn (Earth's Breath) is currently in Tamil
Nadu on an Australia-India Council grant. Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry
Country was published in March by CSIRO, and co-edited by Libby Robin. In addition
to these achievements, the Australian Humanities Review (an online publication)
has a number of articles by members, and there's a special section on 'Naturecultures'
with contributions by yet another active member, Emily Potter. As a community, ASLE-ANZ
has launched the Green Grammar Dictionary as a wiki site. The site is a compilation
of environmental definitions and extracts from New Zealand and Australian writers,
artists, scientists, and wedding planners. It is hoped that the development of a
site dedicated to Southern Hemisphere speak will encourage a departure from the
reliance on Northern sources which inevitably act as ecological and cultural filters
in the way the South is interpreted.
In the matter of tributes and conferences, the biannual Watermark Literary Muster
was well attended by ASLE-ANZ members, who gathered together to commemorate and
celebrate the life of Eric Rolls through the whorls and burls of the topic 'Wood'.
The new Executive officers are planning a conference for 2010 broadly around the
theme of Air, more specifically Sound, and more particularly Music. Time and place
has not yet been decided; check the December ANewZletter on our ASLE-ANZ site
(http://www.asle-anz.asn.au/) for details.
Newly Formed ASLE-Taiwan Quickly Making its Mark
by Peter Huang
As you may have read in ASLE News last Fall, ASLE-Taiwan became a new affiliate
of ASLE in September of 2008. Since then, the group has been busy! In March 2009,
ASLE-Taiwan became officially established with the election of the group's first
officers. Professor Lin Yaofu was elected the first president, and Ted Yang was
invited to serve as secretary general of the organization.
Three officers of ASLE-Taiwan--Hsinya Huang, Serena Chou, and Peter Huang--attended
the ASLE Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, in June. Serena Chou and Hsinya
Huang gave papers, and Peter Huang announced the establishment of ASLE-Taiwan at
the international reception on the evening of June 3rd and participated in the
roundtable discussion "Returning Home: An Emerging Land-based, Ecofeminist Environmental
Ethics in Taiwan" on June 6.
On July 15-16, the English Department of Tamkang University held a workshop--ASLE-Taiwan's
first academic activity--on the future direction of ecocriticism. The first day
of the workshop saw the gathering of local scholars with specialties and interests
in eco-philosophy and aesthetics. They presented papers, such as "Eco-Poetics: Heidegger's
Poetics and Eco-philosophy," and organized a panel in the afternoon. The next day,
Scott Slovic offered a new vision for the future direction of ecocriticism in his
keynote speech "The Third Wave of Ecocriticism." Other highlights from the two-day
event included Liu Ke-Siang, a renowned Taiwanese nature writer, giving a talk on
an organic farm in Taiwan; Ken Noda and Shin Yamashiro from Japan presenting papers;
Greta Gaard speaking about new directions for ecofeminism; and Chia-ju Chang, who
currently teaches in New York, giving a paper on a Zen ecoanalysis of cinema. Simon
Estok also spoke about consumption and ecocriticism. The workshop successfully
concluded with a reading of Yang Ming-tu's inspiring eco-poetry. The day after the
workshop, Liu Ke-Siang led a field trip to Ta Tun Old Creek, enabling all to feel
a strong sense of local place.
Later that month, ASLE-Taiwan's second academic activity was held at National Sun
Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung on July 24. Lin Yi-jen from Providence University
gave a talk on "Place, Indigenous Peoples, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge."
Both Greta Gaard (University of Wisconsin River Falls) and Rob Wilson (UC Santa
Cruz) spoke at the workshop, which was organized by Serena Chou.
Peter Huang and Hsinya Huang were invited to attend the International Conference
on Ecological Literature and Environmental Education held at Peking University,
China, August 14-21. From this work, a kind of Asian forum is being envisioned,
and we are exploring the possibility of closer cooperation between ASLE-Japan,
ASLE-Korea, China, India and ourselves. We look forward to strengthening such cooperation
with scholars from neighboring Asian countries.
ASLE-Japan: Crossing Borders, Fall 2008 to Fall 2009
by Shoko Miura, PR, ASLE-Japan
In the wake of the dramatic events of the Joint Symposium we held with ASLE-Korea
in Kanazawa in August 2007, ASLE-Japan continues to pursue studies in environmental
writing and environmental justice in East Asia. What follows are some of our recent
efforts to explore environmental issues both within and beyond national borders.
The 2008 ASLE-Japan Conference, held from October 12 to 14 in Oita, started with
the East-Asian Panel on Environmental Literature. The panelists from Korea, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and Japan shared their views and readings of environmental literature
in different locations. At the 2009 annual conference, held from August 29 to 31
in Kiyosato, Professor Haruo Shirane of Columbia University illustrated how the
idea of "nature" has been enjoyed in Japanese culture with examples of traditional
products and seasonal events in his keynote speech, "Japan and the Culture of the
Four Seasons: Secondary Nature, Social Difference, and the Illusion of Harmony."
At a workshop, "Bringing Environmental Justice to the Ainu," Mr. Osamu Hasegawa
shared his personal and collective struggles as a member of the Ainu, the indigenous
people of north Japan.
Also this past year, we began making a list of works of Japanese nature writing
and have been working closely with ASLE-Korea to make possible an ASLE Korea-Japan
Joint Symposium in Korea in the near future. In addition, some of our members are
making individual efforts to introduce Japanese environmental literature outside
Japan, such as Bruce Allen who translated Ishimure Michiko's Lake of Heaven (Lexington
Books, 2008) into English.
Society of Early Americanists in Bermuda and Beyond
by Thomas Hallock, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
The Society of Early Americanists (SEA) held its sixth biennial conference in March
2009, on the culturally rich and stunningly beautiful island of Bermuda. A number
of sessions and papers focused on environmental themes, indicating continued interest
amongst early Americanists in the natural world.
Thomas Hallock (U. South Florida St. Petersburg) chaired an ASLE sponsored session,
"Storm Stories: Literature and Environment in Early America." Reiner Smolinski (Georgia
State University) led off with "Tempests in a Teapot? Divine Judgments, Catastrophes,
and Nature in Scientific Discourse," drawing attention to a figure that our environmental
tradition too often overlooks - Cotton Mather. Lisa Logan (University of Central
Florida) followed with "Under the Radar, Bending the Map: Early Women's Diary Writing
and Ecocritical Studies," raising the astute point that narratives of disaster focus
upon exceptional moments of contact with the natural world, while women's diaries
often mark the mundane, resulting in their occasional neglect. Anne Baker (North
Carolina State University) rounded out the panel with "Tempestuous Passages: Storms
in the Fiction of Susanna Rowson," a careful and skillfully crafted analysis that
explored points of interface between metaphoric constructs and our physical surroundings.
The future promises renewed collaboration between the SEA and ASLE. In May 2010,
the SEA will be sponsoring an off-year symposium, "Early American Borderlands,"
in St. Augustine, Florida, May 13-16, 2010. For more about the Society, including
other upcoming conferences, go to www.societyofearlyamericanists.org.
Members Write: "Migration"
by Jamie Barber, Instructor, English Department, Penn State University
(Note: this is the Inaugural entry in the new Members Write feature of ASLE News.
For more information on submitting to this feature, see this issue's "Members Write"
article.)
Tonight, as the distant lightning flashes an echo to the fireflies, I sit on the
sloping lawn of my new apartment complex in Highland Park, New Jersey, and watch
my new neighbors migrate home from the park. None of them are of Anglo-descent and
as I listen to them speak, I imagine their regular migrations to places they used
to call home. I have just returned from my summer migration to Utah--my birth place--to
take my young son to visit his grandparents and cousins. Though I've lived in Oregon
and Pennsylvania since living in Utah, the place still makes me ache, and I'm doing
my best to find central New Jersey's own special wildness instead of comparing its
crowded highways to Utah's wide expanses of quiet. But I'm feeling unsettled in
this "home" that has been mine for less than two weeks--the home that many outsiders
see as nothing but the commute route for New York City employees. But today a man
stopped me in the park, told me about the community gardens, told me about the "spit
fire" mayor, explained that I lived on the "south side." Perhaps for some this
place is nothing more than a migration corridor--but I'm looking forward to understanding
the perspective of those who see it as home.
ASLE Member News
Janet Fiskio has accepted a tenure-track position in Environmental Studies at Oberlin
College. Her courses will include a seminar in environmental justice literature;
sustainable agriculture; and ethics, equity, and narratives of climate change.
Tom Lynch's book Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature
has won the 2009 Thomas J. Lyon award from the Western Literature Association.
The award goes to the previous year's best work on the literature and culture of
the American West. Xerophilia is a bioregionally oriented ecocritical study of
multicultural literature of the arid regions of the American West, and contains
a foreward by Scott Slovic. In the book, Lynch analyzes works in a variety of genres
by writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, Ray
Gonzales, Charles Bowden, Susan Tweit, Gary Paul Nabhan, Ann Zwinger, and Janice
Emily Bowers, to reveal how southwestern writers, in their powerful role as community
storytellers, contribute to the evolution of a sustainable bioregional culture that
enables inhabitants to live imaginatively, intellectually, and morally in the arid
bioregions of the American Southwest. All proceeds from the sale of Xerophilia are
being donated to ASLE. For more information about Xerophilia, see www.ttup.ttu.edu/BookPages/9780896726383.html.
Sarah Jaquette Ray completed her dissertation, titled "The Ecological Other: Indians,
Invalids, and Immigrants in U.S. Environmental Thought and Literature," in July
2009, just in time to pack up and move to Juneau, Alaska, where she has begun her
post as tenure-track Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alaska
Southeast. She will teach writing, environmental literature, and geography.
ASLE News Notes
Help Us Update the ASLE Syllabi Database
Many of you in the past have generously submitted your Literature and Environment-related
syllabi to the ASLE syllabus database (see http://www.asle.org/site/resources/syllabi/).
But this resource is in desperate need of being updated!
The Graduate Student Working Group made updating the syllabus database one of its
off-year projects and will facilitate new submissions. If you have any syllabi
that you'd be willing to post on the ASLE syllabus database, please submit one of
two ways: Add your syllabus directly online by following the link to the database
above and clicking on "Add Syllabi"; or you can send it to GSL Sarah Jaquette Ray
(sjray@uas.alaska.edu) who will compile it for posting to the database.
The field of Literature and Environment is changing quickly, and each time you put
a course together, you are doing invaluable work defining the field. Indeed, the
ASLE Syllabi Database serves as a crucial resource for ASLE members, but also beyond
ASLE. It is the syllabus "go-to" link for other schools, environmental websources,
journals, and groups. It thus serves as an important representation of ASLE to many
external sources, as well as a resource for our teaching.
If you have any questions, please contact Sarah Jaquette Ray (sjray@uas.alaska.edu).
ASLE Member News
Whether you got a new job, won an award, or did something interesting, enlightening,
or exciting, we want to know what you're up to! If you have some news to share with other
ASLE members, and it doesn't "fit" into the Bookshelf, PhD, or Emeritus categories, please
contact Catherine Meeks (catherine-meeks@utc.edu) with the Subject heading "Member News."
ASLE Emeritus
ASLE News honors those ASLE members retired or retiring from teaching. If you would
like to acknowledge someone in this new feature--or if you yourself will be retiring
during the coming academic year--please contact please contact Catherine Meeks
(catherine-meeks@utc.edu). We will include a brief account of scholarly
interests, the institutions of employment and years taught in the next newsletter.
ASLE PhDs
Have you or one of your students recently defended a dissertation? If so, ASLE News
wants to know. Each issue, we include announcements commemorating those members
who have recently completed their doctoral work. If you would like to be included
in this feature, please contact Catherine Meeks (catherine-meeks@utc.edu)
with the dissertation title, degree-granting institution, and committee members.
ASLE Bookshelf
The following works were recently published by ASLE members. If we've missed your
publication, or if you have a newly published work you'd like to have included in
the next ASLE News, please send bibliographic information to Catherine Meeks (catherine-meeks@utc.edu).
Fromm, Harold. The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Iredell, Jamie. Prose: Poems, a Novel. St. Charles, IL: Orange Alert Press, 2009.
Johnson, Rochelle. Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics
of Alienation. Athens: UGA Press, 2009
McFarland, Sarah E. and Ryan Hediger. Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration.
Brill, 2009.
Philippon, Daniel J., ed. Our Neck of the Woods: Exploring Minnesota's Wild Places.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Taylor, David A. Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression
America. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley and Sons, 2009. A companion documentary with the same
title appeared on the Smithsonian in September.
ASLE Seeks Graduate Student Liaison
We are currently seeking a new Graduate Student Liaison (GSL) for a two-year term.
GSLs perform a vital service within ASLE by representing the interests and concerns
of graduate students at meetings of the Executive Council, and they work closely
with ASLE's Graduate Mentoring Program Coordinator in shared pursuit of this goal.
During the second-year of the GSLs two-year term, the GSL also has voting rights
within the Executive Council. For a full description of GSL rights and responsibilities,
see the website at http://www.asle.org/site/about/policies/liasons/.
If you would like to be considered for a GSL position, please submit a formal letter
of application to current president Dan Philippon at danp@umn.edu
by November 1 for a term beginning in January, 2009. Please include a statement
of interest that describes your specific interests in serving ASLE, the length and
nature of your involvement in the organization, a description of your professional
interests (particularly as they connect to literature and environment), and the
names and contact information of three faculty references.
Ways to Donate to ASLE
Though our self-imposed October 1 deadline for submitting pledges to the ASLE Strategic
Plan fundraising campaign has officially passed, we will of course still happily
accept your donations!
Remember that a donation to ASLE is tax deductible, and that your pledge card contains
options to spread out any contribution over months or years, so that the financial
impact on your budget can easily be minimized. If you have made a verbal pledge
but not yet sent in your pledge card, please do so soon so we can count your pledge
officially in our efforts. A full report of donors and dollars raised will appear
in the Winter 2010 issue of ASLE News.
Many ASLE members publish books of creative and scholarly work, fiction and nonfiction.
Some ASLE members (including Tom Lynch, see this issue's Member News section) have
recently come forward with an innovative way to give to ASLE: donate the royalties
from your titles to us! Please contact Amy McIntyre, info@asle.org,
for more information on how to set up such an arrangement with your publisher.
Members Write
ASLE News wants to include your voices! We invite members to write 100-200 words
in response to a word, phrase, or question that we will print in each issue of
ASLE News. Selected responses will then be published in the next issue. (Readers
of The Sun magazine will recognize this feature as similar to their always fascinating
"Readers Write.") Be sure to read Jamie Barber's take on "Migration" published in
this issue!
For the Winter 2010 Members Write, respond to the following word:
"Heal"
Please send responses either in the body of an e-mail or as an attachment to Catherine
Meeks at catherine-meeks@utc.edu.
ASLE PhD
Sarah Wald received her PhD in American Civilization from Brown University. The
Brown Graduate School awarded her dissertation, "The Nature of Citizenship: Race,
Citizenship and Nature in Representations of Californian Agricultural Labor," the
Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award. Ralph E. Rodriguez
and Arlene R. Keizer directed the dissertation. Karl Jacoby and Matthew Garcia
served as readers.
ASLE Website Member Tools
Here are a few of the things you can do once you login at https://www.asle.org/site/members/login/:
Renew Your Membership
View Current and Past Issues of ISLE Journal Online
Search the Membership Directory
Update your Directory Entry
Vote in ASLE Officer Elections (through December 1, 2009)
Contact Information
ASLE
Amy McIntyre, Managing Director
info@asle.org
www.asle.org
Phone & Fax: 603-357-7411
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment | P.O. Box 502 | Keene | NH | 03431