American Earth Edited by Bill Mckibben

An Anthology of Environmental Writing Forwarded by Al Gore

Sep 23, 2009

American Earth is comprised of essays, excerpts, poems, song lyrics,classic cartoons, color photos and a chronology of the American environmental movement.

American Earth editor Bill McKibben has compiled an anthology of the intellectual and artistic evolution of American environmental writing. In the forward to the book former Vice President Al Gore explains that McKibben's early writing about the impact of chlorofluorocarbons dramatically reconfigured his perceptions of our natural world, consequently altering his life.

American Earth Environmental and Nature Writing Differences

American Earth goes further than nature writing which is composed of accounts of the natural world. According to McKibben, "The body of writing anthologized in American Earth drove the political side of the movement more often than the other way around. Marsh and Muir gave us national parks, and Marshall and Zahniser the Wilderness Act."

American Earth Authors

American Earth introduces 101 individual authors, bridging his or her work to both earlier and more contemporary environmental thought. For example, Mary Austin was among the first to write about the desert, laying the groundwork for Ed Abbey and how W.H.H. Murray's nineteenth-century writing on the Adirondacks spurred ecotourism.

Among the pre-1970 authors are John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. Also included is Susan Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth-century record of the vanishing Eastern wilderness; P.T. Barnum's resentment of roadside advertising's intrusion into scenic landscapes; science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's warnings on the hazards to human values by technology.

American Earth Bias

American Earth's editor has shown some bias for post-1970's works because he believes "...these contemporary writers are doing the necessary work of seeking out ideas and images that will help America, and then to the world, to confront the very much deeper problem we now face."

The post-1970's writers include Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and Terry Tempest Williams. Authors such as Lois Marie Gibbs depicts the direction of more recent environmental thought with her account of the tragedy of Love Canal. McKibben believes that her writing of how working-class activism against toxic conditions gave birth to the Superfund Program. Visionaries like Buckminister Fuller, Amory Lovins, and contemporary activists/writer also include Barry Lopez, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Paul Hawken as well as Calvin deWitt, the co-founder of the Evangelical Environmental Network

About Bill McKibben

American Earth editor Bill McKibben has written more than a dozen books. In 2007. He and a handful of Middlebury College graduates organized the largest grassroots environmental protest since the original protest since the original Earth Day in 1970.

McKibben's goal in creating American Earth is to shift the consciousness of readers as he traces the development of environmental thinking.

McKibben, Bill, editor, Forward by Al Gore. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Des Moines, IA: The Library of America, 2008.

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The copyright of the article American Earth Edited by Bill Mckibben in Resources for Writers is owned by Martha R. Gore. Permission to republish American Earth Edited by Bill Mckibben in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.