Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature. The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia's Meldrum Creek and Italy's Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism. Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet. In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.

Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature. The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia’s Meldrum Creek and Italy’s Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism. Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet. In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.

Imagine a world structured around ecological and cultural diversity, rather than national and political parameters. In response to present and impending ecological and economic crises, Kirkpatrick Sale offers a definitive introduction to the unique concept of bioregionalism, an alternative way of organizing society to create smaller scale, more ecologically sound, individually responsive communities with renewable economies and cultures. He emphasizes, among many other factors, the concept of regionalism through natural population division, settlement near and stewardship of watershed areas, and the importance of communal ownership of and responsibility for the land. Dwellers in the Land focuses on the realistic development of these bioregionally focused communities and the places where they are established to create a society that is both ecologically sustainable and satisfying to its inhabitants.

Winner of the Western Literature Association’s 2017 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies Mexican American literature brings a much-needed approach to the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice. Although current environmental studies work to develop new concepts, Writing the Goodlife looks to long-established traditions of thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for the past century and a half. During that time period, Mexican American writing consistently shifts the focus from the environmentally destructive settler values of individualism, domination, and excess toward the more beneficial refrains of community, non-possessiveness, and humility. The decolonial approaches found in these writings provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature, an approach that Priscilla Solis Ybarra calls “goodlife” writing. Goodlife writing has existed for at least the past century, Ybarra contends, but Chicana/o literary history’s emphasis on justice and civil rights eclipsed this tradition and hidden it from the general public’s view. Likewise, in ecocriticism, the voices of people of color most often appear in deliberations about environmental justice. The quiet power of goodlife writing certainly challenges injustice, to be sure, but it also brings to light the decolonial environmentalism heretofore obscured in both Chicana/o literary history and environmental literary studies. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics—the worsening environmental crisis and the rising Latino population in the United States—and puts them in literary-historical context from the U.S.-Mexico War up to today’s controversial policies regarding climate change, immigration, and ethnic studies. This book uncovers 150 years’ worth of Mexican American and Chicana/o knowledge and practices that inspire hope in the face of some of today’s biggest challenges.

This book is the first collection of its kind, an anthology of classic and cutting-edge writings in the rapidly emerging field of literary ecology. Exploring the relationship between literature and the physical environment, literary ecology is the study of the ways that writing - from novels and folktales to U.S. government reports and corporate advertisements - both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.

Table of contents

Gathers essays about the southern landscape and nature by eighteen writers with ties to the region

After the ceasefire in 1988, the devastation to the landscape of Iraq wrought by the longest war of the twentieth century—the Iran-Iraq War—becomes visible. Eight years of fighting have turned nature upside down, with vast wastelands being left behind. In southeastern Iraq, along the shores of the Shatt al-Arab River, the groves of date palm trees have withered. No longer bearing fruit, their leaves have turned a bright yellow. There, Iraqi forces had blocked the entry points of the river’s tributaries and streams, preventing water from flowing to the trees and vegetation. Yet, surveying this destruction from the sky, a strip of land bursting with green can be seen. Beginning from the Shatt al-Arab River and reaching to the fringes of the western desert, several kilometers wide, it appears as a lush oasis of some kind. The secret of this fertility, sustaining villages and remaining soldiers, is unclear. But it is said that one old woman is responsible for this lifeline.

Peter Goin and the Photography of Environmental Change narrates the forty-year quest of award-winning and internationally exhibited contemporary photographer Peter Goin to document human-altered landscapes across America and beyond. It is a collaborative work between an artist and a literary critic, a retrospective of an accomplished environmental photographer, and an innovative education in visual reading. Enduring howling wind, pounding rain, and blistering sun, Goin bears witness to radioactive landscapes, abandoned mines, simulated swamps, rechanneled rivers, controlled burns, overgrown ruins, industrialized agriculture, shrinking reservoirs, feral spaces in the city, architected wilderness, sacred wastelands, contested borderlands, and more. Based on more than seventy hours of taped interviews with the artist spanning over a decade, trailblazing ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty narrates the arc of Goin's career, sharing excerpts from their conversations that reveal his brilliant mind and piquant personality while situating his work within the broader context of environmental thinkers. This beautifully illustrated volume, with 200 images in color and black-and-white showcasing Goin’s work, will be a fascinating and insightful read for upper-level students, academics, and researchers in photography, environmental history and culture, landscape studies, and environmental humanities.

"The physical earth is clearly under unprecedented siege—heated, toxified, scraped. But almost as if they were antibodies, the finest nature writers of any era have come forward to help in the fight. This anthology collects many of the most important, at their most eloquent. May it ring and echo and do some good!"—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature "This is a stunning collection of vivid writing about landscapes and the people who inhabit them. The diverse narratives gathered here do more than describe hawks diving and twigs snapping, although the book has its share of moving accounts of the natural world. A concern to live responsibily in nature runs through this evocative anthology like a subterranean stream, and that moral impulse, together with the lively prose, makes this the best collection of nature writing I've seen."—Thomas A. Tweed, editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History