John Muir, Mary Austin, and Gary Snyder are perhaps best known for their connection to specific California ecological regions--Muir's Sierra Nevada "Range of Light," Austin's southern "Land of Little Rain," and Snyder's "Kitkitdizze" region of the north. In Reading the Trial, ecocritic and outdoorsman Corey Lewis proposes a provocative new way to read and interpret the classic works of these major nature writers and to bring their ideas into the discussion of ecological values and viable responses to the current environmental crisis. The literary work of Muir, Austin, and Snyder reflects...

A collection of personal essays from one of the most widely published American environmental writers addresses the concerns about the effects of ranching on the environment.

A hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, Sespe Creek flows through some of the wildest territory in California. A mostly roadless expanse of chaparral and mixed forest, in many places nearly inaccessible even on foot, the Sespe is the untamed heart of Southern California, a wilderness on the edge of one of the world s major metropolitan developments. To nature writer and outdoorsman John Bradley Monsma, the Sespe is both his place of escape and the place that teaches me to be fully alive. InThe Sespe Wild, Monsma shares his exploration of this unique and fantastic region. His...

Greening the Lyre covers important and neglected ground environmental language theory. David W. Gilcrest poses two overarching questions: To what extent does contemporary nature poetry represent a recapitulation of familiar poetics? And, to what extent does contemporary nature poetry engage a poetics that stakes out new territory? The author addresses these questions with important thinkers, especially Kenneth Burke, and considers such poets as Frost, Kunitz, Heaney, Ammons, Cardenal, and Rich. This book will be of great value to anyone in the environmental studies field.
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