Member Bookshelf

By Heather Swan. Penn State University Press, 2024.

Through narrative, verse, and art, Where the Grass Still Sings celebrates the many tiny creatures that play crucial roles in our ecosystems—as well as the people on the front lines of the fight to save them. Weaving art and science with inspiring stories of people doing their part to protect insects and the environment, author Heather Swan takes readers around the globe to highlight practical solutions to safeguard our fragile planet. Visit a sustainable coffee farm ...

By JoeAnn Hart. Green Writers Press, 2024.

In the novel ARROYO CIRCLE, hoarding and homelessness are depicted through the dark marriage of environmental degradation and rampant capitalism. The story explores our collective role in the climate crisis through the lives of Shelley, a white, middle-aged handmaiden of a hoarder, and Les, an alcoholic, shape-shifting scientist, who lives in the creek bed behind Shelley’s house in Boulder, Colorado. As wildfires in the mountains fill the town with smoke, Shelley is confronted by gun-wielding police who ...

By Lisa Han. University of Minnesota Press, 2024.

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at the role that oceanic media have played in representing the seafloor as a ...

By Daniel Philippon. University of Virginia Press, 2024.

At turns heartfelt and witty, accessible and engaging, The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef explores how Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, and Alice Waters have changed America’s relationship with food over the past fifty years. Daniel Philippon weighs the legacy of each of these writers and activists while planting and harvesting vegetables in central Wisconsin, speaking with growers and food producers in northern Italy, and visiting with chefs and restaurateurs in southeastern France. Following Berry, ...

By Jennifer Case. Trinity University Press, 2024.

When Jennifer Case became pregnant unexpectedly with her second child, she was overwhelmed at the prospect of caring for another child in a society with high expectations and low support for mothers. She sought to reclaim control over, if not her changing body, then at least her rapidly declining mental health. Immersing herself in research, Case learned that the United States has one of the highest maternal death rates among developed countries. One in every five women develops ...

By Valeria Meiller. Black Ocean, 2024

Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.

The poems are informed by the ...

Candice Allmark-Kent. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism is the first book-length study of animals in Canadian fiction. Using a historical approach, it offers a much-needed alternative to existing models of animals as symbols of Canadian victimhood. Spanning more than a century, the scope of this book includes classic writers, Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts, as well as popular contemporary authors, such as Barbara Gowdy, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood, and many others.

By recontextualizing these works ...

Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield. Mountaineers Press, 2023.

Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry is a book that blends art, science, and literature to celebrate the Cascadia region, which stretches from Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. The book is organized into 13 bioregions and includes 128 organism profiles, each with a combination of ecological prose, poetry, and black-and-white art. The guide’s organization encourages readers to consider the connections between different beings, rather ...

Paul Huebener. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled sleep tends to be seen as an individual problem and personal responsibility, to be fixed by better habits and tracking gadgets, but the reality is more complicated. Sleep is a site of politics, culture, and power.

In Restless in Sleep Country, Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with contemporary issues. The book ...

By Serpil Oppermann. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

By drawing on oceanography (marine sciences) and limnology (freshwater sciences), social sciences, and the environmental humanities, the field of the blue humanities critically examines the planet’s troubled seas and distressed freshwaters from socio-cultural, literary, historical, aesthetic, ethical, and theoretical perspectives. Since all waterscapes in the Anthropocene are overexploited and endangered sites, the field calls for transdisciplinary cooperation and encourages thinking together beyond the conventions of tentacular anthropocentric thought. Working across many disciplines, the blue humanities, then, challenges ...