Michael P. Branch | |||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3rd President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment | |||||||||||||||||||||
In office 1995–1996 | |||||||||||||||||||||
Preceded by | Scott Slovic | ||||||||||||||||||||
Succeeded by | John Tallmadge | ||||||||||||||||||||
Personal details | |||||||||||||||||||||
Born | December 6,1963 | ||||||||||||||||||||
Citizenship | American | ||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||
Michael P. Branch (born December 6,1963) is an ecocritic,writer,and humorist with over three hundred publications,including work in The Best American Essays , The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Nonrequired Reading . [1] An important member of the environmental and writing community, Western American Literature has described him as part of the "enduring procession of outdoor journalists." [2]
His academic work has been called by reviewers as "an excellent entry to the field for the student or general reader who may have read considerably in the area but who is only beginning to make his or her way around the academic study of nature writing". [3] The Best Read Naturalist was called "[a] much needed and thorough collection of Emerson's most significant nature writings." [4]
When not writing,Branch enjoys activist and stewardship work,native plant gardening,bucking stovewood,playing blues harmonica,sipping sour mash,cursing at baseball on the radio,and walking at least 1,000 miles each year in the hills and canyons surrounding his high desert home.
Michael Branch received a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William &Mary in 1985. [5] He received a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Virginia. He currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Nevada,Reno,where he is University Foundation Professor of English. [6]
One of the founders of ecocriticism,Branch co-founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) [7] and served as the president from 1995-1996. [8] He also worked as book review editor for the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment [9] and co-edited the series Under the Sign of Nature published by The University of Virginia Press. [10]
His professional memberships include the Sierra Club,Wilderness Society,Nature Conservancy,Friends of the Everglades,Sierra Nevada Alliance,League to Save Lake Tahoe,Friends of Nevada Wilderness,Great Basin Mine Watch,Cenozoic Society's Wildlands Project,John Muir Society,Modern Language Association,American Association of University Professors,American Literature Association,American Society for Environmental History. [11]
Branch's writing career spans from academic articles to humor essays. His column for High Country News “Rants from the Hill”included 69 essays from 2010-2016,which were then collected into two books,Raising Wild and Rants from the Hill. [12] With over 200 publications and 300 invited talks,lectures,and workshops,Branch's work has aided in founding ecocriticism. [13] A selection of his work in ecocritcism includes:
A selection of his work in creative nonfiction includes:
The Michael P. Branch Papers are curated in the Special Collections and University Archives,University of Nevada,Reno. Established in 2014. 44 boxes to date. (Collection Identifier #2014-05). [14]
John Muir, also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America.
Edward Paul Abbey was an American author, essayist, and environmental activist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies. His best-known works include Desert Solitaire, a non-fiction autobiographical account of his time as a park ranger at Arches National Park considered to be an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing; the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by environmentalists and groups defending nature by various means, also called eco-terrorists; his novel Hayduke Lives!; and his essay collections Down the River (1982) and One Life at a Time, Please (1988).
Ellen Meloy was an American nature writer.
J. Baird Callicott is an American philosopher whose work has been at the forefront of the new field of environmental philosophy and ethics. He is a University Distinguished Research Professor and a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies and the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. Callicott held the position of Professor of Philosophy and Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point from 1969 to 1995, where he taught the world's first course in environmental ethics in 1971. From 1994 to 2000, he served as vice president then president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Other distinguished positions include visiting professor of philosophy at Yale University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Hawai’i; and the University of Florida.
Environmental journalism is the collection, verification, production, distribution and exhibition of information regarding current events, trends, and issues associated with the non-human world. To be an environmental journalist, one must have an understanding of scientific language. The individual needs to put to use their knowledge of historical environmental events. One must have the ability to follow environmental policy decisions and environmental organizations. An environmental journalist should have a general understanding of current environmental concerns, and the ability to communicate information to the public in a way that is easily understood.
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It was first originated by Joseph Meeker as an idea called “literary ecology” in his The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972). The term 'ecocriticism' was coined in 1978 by William Rueckert in his essay "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism".
Nature writing is nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment. Nature writing encompasses a wide variety of works, ranging from those that place primary emphasis on natural history facts to those in which philosophical interpretation predominate. It includes natural history essays, poetry, essays of solitude or escape, as well as travel and adventure writing.
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), also known as ASLE-USA, is the principal professional association for American and international scholars of ecocriticism and environmental humanities. It was founded in 1992 at a special session of the Western Literature Association conference in Reno, Nevada for the purpose of "sharing of facts, ideas, and texts concerning the study of literature and the environment."
John Tallmadge Ph.D., is an author and essayist on issues related to nature and culture. He is currently in private practice as an educational and literary consultant after thirty-year career in higher education, most recently as a core professor of Literature and Environmental Studies at Union Institute and University (TUI)(?) in Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and director of the Orion Society. He is a U.S. Army veteran.
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities.
David Rains Wallace is an American writer who has published more than twenty books on conservation and natural history, including The Monkey's Bridge and The Klamath Knot. He has written articles for the National Geographic Society, The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and other groups. Wallace's work also has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, Sierra, Wilderness and other periodicals.
The nature fakers controversy was an early 20th-century American literary debate highlighting the conflict between science and sentiment in popular nature writing. The debate involved important American literary, environmental and political figures. Dubbed the "War of the Naturalists" by The New York Times, it revealed seemingly irreconcilable contemporary views of the natural world: while some nature writers of the day argued as to the veracity of their examples of anthropomorphic wild animals, others questioned an animal's ability to adapt, learn, teach, and reason.
David Gessner is an American essayist, memoirist, nature writer, editor, and cartoonist.
Frank Bergon is an American writer whose novels, essays, anthologies, and literary criticism focus primarily on the American West.
Kent Ryden is a Professor of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine. He is known for writing and teaching in the fields of regional literature, cultural geography, folklore and environmental humanities.
Brooks Ashton Nichols is the Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair Emeritus in Sustainable Studies and Professor of English Language and Literature Emeritus at Dickinson College. His interests are in literature, contemporary ecocriticism, Romanticism, and nature writing. Nichols taught courses in Romanticism, 19th century literature, literature and the environment, and nature writing. He is especially well-known for his study of James Joyce's literary concept of "epiphany," his definition of Romantic natural histories, and his coinage of the phrase "Urbanatural roosting," an idea which links urban with natural modes of existence and argues for ways of living more lightly on the earth, for inhabiting our planet the way animals do, by altering our environments without harming those same environments.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Serenella Iovino is an Italian cultural and literary theorist, and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is considered one of the main environmental philosophers of Italy.
Ecofiction is the branch of literature that encompasses nature-oriented (non-human) or environment-oriented works of fiction. While this super genre's roots are seen in classic, pastoral, magical realism, animal metamorphoses, science fiction, and other genres, the term ecofiction did not become popular until the 1970s when various movements created the platform for an explosion of environmental and nature literature, which also inspired ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. Environmentalists have claimed that the human relationship with the ecosystem often went unremarked in earlier literature.
Joni Adamson is an American literary and cultural theorist. She is considered one of the main proponents of