Examines the science of the air we breathe and how the smallest molecular changes in composition can make the difference between life and death.

Arborist William Bryant Logan recovers the lost tradition that sustained human life and culture for ten millennia. Once, farmers knew how to make a living hedge and fed their flocks on tree-branch hay. Rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts, and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls, and baskets. Townspeople cut their beeches to make charcoal to fuel ironworks. Shipwrights shaped oaks to make hulls. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again. Pruning the trees didn’t destroy them. Rather, it created the healthiest, most sustainable and most diverse woodlands that we have ever known. In this journey from the English fens to Spain, Japan, and California, William Bryant Logan rediscovers what was once an everyday ecology. He offers us both practical knowledge about how to live with trees to mutual benefit and hope that humans may again learn what the persistence and generosity of trees can teach.

Winner of the 2023 ANZATS Award for the Best Monograph by an Established Scholar Applying a re-envisioned, ecological, feminist hermeneutics, this book builds on two important responses to twentieth- and twenty-first-century situations of ecological trauma, especially the complex contexts of climate change and cross-species relations: first, ecological feminism; second, ecological hermeneutics in the Earth Bible tradition. By way of readings of selected biblical texts, this book suggests that an ecological feminist aesthetic, bringing present situation and biblical text into conversation through engagement with activism and literature, principally poetry, is helpful in decolonizing ethics. Such an approach is both informed by and speaks back to the new materialism in ecological criticism.

Elemental Ecocriticism: An in-depth exploration of the intricate relationship between nature and human existence through the lenses of four visionary poets. This book delves into the macro- and micro-level injustices inflicted upon the elements of nature, as conveyed through systematically crafted narratives. Through the poetical verses of these four poets, the principles and features of the elements are showcased, highlighting their importance for human ecstasy and existence. A must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between humanity and the natural world.

Explores the role that the oak tree has played throughout history and in shaping the modern world.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

Wes “Scoop” Nisker is an award-winning broadcast journalist and commentator, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher, a best selling author and a captivating performer. In How to be an Earthling, Wes draws on his diverse experiences delivering a collection that brims with the insight, humor and wisdom he is famous for. Compiling for the first time, Wes’ best known essays as well as a selection of recent and never before published work, Wes takes readers on both a cultural journey (a tour through the sixties, through the modern environmental movement, the surge of Buddhism to the West) and a more personal one, exploring the motivation behind humanity’s search for spiritual enlightenment.