A Voice for Earth is a collection of poems, essays, and stories that together give a voice to the ethical principles outlined in the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter was adopted in the year 2000 with the mission of addressing the economic, social, political, spiritual, and environmental problems confronting the world in the twenty-first century.Part 1 of the book, "Imagination into Principle," comprises Steven C. Rockefeller's behind-the-scenes summary of how the language ...

With its thirty-three essays, This Impermanent Earth charts the course of the American literary response to the twentieth century’s accumulation of environmental deprivations. Arranged chronologically from 1974 to the present, the works have been culled from The Georgia Review, long considered an important venue for nonfiction among literary magazines published in the United States.The essays range in subject matter from twentieth-century examples of what was then...

Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science.A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this gui...

Part memoir, part cultural history, A Woven World celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change.

A new collection from a poet who “writes with scrupulous and merciful passion about every kind of relatedness—family, place, politics, and wildlife” (W. S. Piero)In her fifth book of poems, Stairway to Heaven, Alison Hawthorne Deming explores dimensions of grief and renewal after losing her brother and mother. Grounded in her communion with nature and place, she finds even in Death Valley, that most stark of landscapes, a spirit of inventiveness that anima...

"Beautifully written essays" on animals, "the real and mythological, the ordinary and the exotic, the wild and the domesticated" ( Publishers Weekly).Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world—both as physical beings and spiritual symbols—and not returning.In this collection of linked essays, Alison Ha...

"One of the penalties of an ecological education," wrote Aldo Leopold, "is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." As climate change and other environmental degradations become more evident, experts predict that an increasing number of people will suffer emotional and psychological distress as a result. Many are feeling these effects already. In the pages of Solastalgia, they will find a source of companionship, inspiration, and advice.The concept of solastalgia comes ...

"An anthology of nature writing by people of color, providing deeply personal connections to—or disconnects from—nature." —NPRFrom African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixed-blood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery.With writing from Jamaica Kincaid on th...

“I greatly admire Alison Deming’s lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken—I am more taken—by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge. I am amazed, and delighted, by her authority and tenacity. She is of this world; she lives in it, and for better or worse, it is the w...

From a poet and essayist whose writing about nature has won her comparisons with Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams comes a new collection that offers further evidence of her ability to trace the intersections of the human and nonhuman worlds. The title poem is a lyrical excavation of the city of Prague, where layers of history, culture and nature have accumulated to form “a genius loci”—a guardian spirit.

“I greatly admire Alison Deming’s lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken—I am more taken—by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge. I am amazed, and delighted, by her authority and tenacity. She is of this world; she lives in it, and for better or worse, it is the w...

An Island in the Stream, a collaboration between Cuban and American writers and scholars, is a diverse collection of ecocritical and literary responses to the natural environment in Cuba and to Cuban environmental culture. The chapters explore Cuba’s vibrant cultural history with particular attention to literature and the visual and performing arts, which are viewed through such lenses as ecofeminism, postcolonial ecocriticism, multiculturalism, and the nuclear imaginary, among others. Ame...