EcoLit and Environmental Writing
In 1927, Henry Beston wrote the environmental memoir The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. During his time along the coast he witnessed an oil spill that killed numerous birds, and he wrote: “Today oil is more the chance fate of the unfortunate individual. But let us hope that all such pollution will presently end.”
Beston was an optimist. For here we are nearly a hundred years later and pollution, animal consumption, and myriad extractive pursuits have led us to an environmental and existential crisis.
We founded EcoLit Books (https://www.ecolitbooks.com) in 2012 with the belief that we have entered an era of “new environmental literature.” This literature is less concerned with how writers describe the landscape than with how writers advocate to protect that landscape.
We also wanted to connect animal rights with environmentalism. Historically, books that glamorize hunting, fishing, and eating animals are widely viewed as environmental. Audubon killed the birds he painted. And many environmental icons, such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold, were hunters. But times evolve, and so has our understanding of the environmental challenges we face.
A new wave of writers have emerged to address these many challenges, giving rise to a robust environmental writing, or ecolit, genre. Through book reviews, we have helped raise awareness and shared a range of recommended steps forward and visions for the future. And not all of them are bad.
The answers to uncomfortable problems are often equally uncomfortable and are more likely to be found on the fringes of mainstream publishing. So we have sought out and reviewed books from smaller presses, university presses, and self-published authors.
We are also proud to have reviewed a number of environmental works long before they won awards or became mainstream success stories, books like The Overstory by Richard Powers, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean by Christina Gerhardt, and Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson. We’ve also interviewed many authors over the years, including Charlotte McConaghy, Deb Olin Unferth, and JoeAnn Hart, who is also an EcoLit Books contributor.
Today, we review books across a wide range of genres that feature the eco prefix: eco-mystery, eco-sci-fi, eco-fiction, eco-poetry. We’re particularly proud of our focus on eco-fiction, as this genre, with a few exceptions, has been largely ignored by mainstream publications. Nonfiction books about the environment tend to get the bulk of attention, but we believe novels speak to the heart while nonfiction largely speaks to the mind. Fiction can succeed where facts fail. And book reviews provide a critical lift to novels that might fall outside of the mainstream environmental community.
EcoLit Books is managed by volunteer readers and writers. Over the years we’ve reviewed approximately 400 books. EcoLit Books is also a source of inspiration and education for authors of environmental literature. We regularly promote new writing opportunities and host an extensive list of journals and publishers of environmental writing (https://www.ecolitbooks.com/resources/literary-outlets-for-environmental-writing).
Though we’ve been around for many years, we’re just getting started. Most readers are only just awakening to the power of literature to not only reflect their fears about the future but to illustrate ways forward that don’t necessarily require dystopian outcomes. And we aim to keep showcasing books that connect readers to their own power — the power to change the world into something better. And there’s no better way to do that than through thoughtful, probing book reviews.
— John Yunker
