Daniel Slager
Andy Revkin
Chip Blake
Daniel Slager
Andy Revkin
Chip Blake
We’re now 70% of the way toward the goal of $300 for these kids. Wish us luck!
]]>With a faculty like Alison Hawthorne Deming, Erik Reece, and Ginger Strand, in a setting as sublime as Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, it’s hard to go wrong. But still, it’s a pleasure to report how right things went at the twenty-second annual Wildbranch Writing Workshop, cosponsored by Orion magazine and Sterling College. This year’s bunch of students was outstanding, and the Friday afternoon student readings showcased short pieces they’d written or honed under the tutelage of the excellent faculty. Next year’s Wildbranch faculty will be announced toward the end of the summer so stay tuned…
Michael Perry, H. Emerson Blake, J. Drew Lanham
2009 faculty: Ginger Strand, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Erik Reece
2009 students and faculty
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It was great to meet so many of the OGN members that make mountaintop removal activism their life, including of course Maria Gunnoe, and Jack Spadaro, who also appeared in that issue of Orion, plus the mighty corps of Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, and Coal River Mountain Watch organizers. Antrim Caskey, the photographer whose images graced that Orion issue was also in attendance. These folks made the most of the DC trip with plenty of lobbying and meetings thrown in at Capitol Hill, EPA, etc.
I also took the opportunity to catch up with some Environmental Capacity Builders Network friends, and got them invited to the event. Here we are at the Prize reception: Stacy Baker and Peter Lane of the Institute for Conservation Leadership, myself, and Errol Mazursky of the Environmental Leadership Program.
OGN coordinator Erik Hoffner is in Washington this week for the formal Goldman Environmental Prize announcement.
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We’re pleased to see our colleagues at The Georgia Review putting literary excellence to work on the environment.
The Spring 2009 issue, released yesterday, includes work by five environmental writers gathered under the title, “Culture and the Environment: A Conversation in Five Essays.” This special feature’s keynote piece, Scott Russell Sanders’ “Simplicity and Sanity,” puts forward a wide-ranging examination of humankind’s relationship to the natural world and argues for its radical overhaul.
Reg Saner’s “Sweet Reason, Global Swarming” embraces Sanders’ fears for the literal survival of the human race but gives the argument a different center—one that conjures a dark figure from all of our high school history classes, Thomas Malthus, whose lone claim to renown is a theory we have let slip into the background while confronting myriad more immediate-seeming dangers. David Gessner then confronts Sanders with “Against Simplicity: A Few Words for Complexity, Sloppiness and Joy,” claiming that his sometime-mentor/idol may be entering the fray with the wrong weapon in hand. Lauret Edith Savoy, in “Pieces toward a Just Whole,” initially lauds Sanders’ position but concentrates the bulk of her essay on certain racial and economic factors that she believes are being overlooked in virtually all discussions of environmental catastrophe. Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Culture, Biology, Emergence,” the most sweeping of the five essays in this conjured five-way conversation, moves across eons of time and many disciplines of study to reach a conclusion that is, paradoxically, more desperate and more hopeful than those presented by her four compatriots.
The environmental focus of this issue also includes poetry by Margaret Gibson and Maxine Kumin among others, as well as an essay-review by Jeff Gundy that examines new work by Elizabeth Dodd, Barbara Hurd, and Capbell McGrath.
For more information, go to The Georgia Review’s website.
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