Member Bookshelf

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

By Jeremy Pataky. University of Alaska Press: Fairbanks, 2015.

A debut collection from an exciting new voice in Alaska poetry, Overwinter reconciles the natural quiet of wilderness with the clamor of built environments. Pataky’s migration between Anchorage and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park inspires these poems that connect urban to rural. This duality permeates Overwinter. Moments are at turns fevered or serene. The familial and romantic are measured against the wildness of the far north. Empty spaces bring both solace and loneliness in full. Past ...

Edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow.  NYU Press: New York, February 2016.

Understandings of “nature” have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies.

Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across ...

Edited by Christina Robertson and Jennifer Westerman. University of Nevada Press: Reno, 2015

Working on Earth is a collection of essays examines the relationship between environmental injustice and the exploitation of working-class people. Twelve scholars from the fields of environmental humanities and the humanistic social sciences explore the connections between the current and unprecedented rise of environmental degradation, economic inequality, and wide-spread social injustice in the United States and Canada. The authors challenge prevailing cultural narratives that ...