ASLE 2007 Plenary Sessions
A List of Confirmed Speakers and Panel Discussions

8:00 - 9:30 pm Tuesday, June 12. Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is one of the preeminent environmental writers in the United States. His bestseller, The End of Nature (1989), was one of the first major works to dramatize the problems of global climate change. His other books, which include The Age of Missing Information (1995), Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1997), Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families (1998), Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2004), explore many of the most pressing environmental issues and challenges confronting us today. His newest book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, will be published in 2007. He is also a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Natural History and Rolling Stone. Currently a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he makes his home in the Adirondack Mountains.  You may want to read "A Deeper Shade of Green," a recent feature article that Bill wrote for National Geographic Interactive Edition.

9:30 -11:00 am Wednesday, June 13. Cecelia Tichi

Cecelia Tichi, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is author of Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Spaces (Harvard UP, 2001), Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), and New World: New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (Yale UP, 1979), among other books.

3:00 - 4:30 pm Wednesday, June 13. Nalini Nadkarni

Nalini Nadkarni is a faculty member at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, where she teaches in the Environmental Studies program. Her research is focused on the ecology of tropical and temperate forest canopies in Washington State and in Monteverde, Costa Rica, and she is the author of two books and over 55 articles in her field. Her newest book,Trees and Humans: Intimate Connections to the Arboreal World, is forthcoming from University of California Press. She is President and co-founder of the International Canopy Network, a non-profit organization that fosters communication among researchers, educators, and conservationists concerned with forest canopies. She spends a great deal of energy on outreach to the general public, children, and policy-makers on matters concerning forest canopies and forest conservation. In 2001, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue her interests in communication of forest canopy research results to non-scientists with collaborations of artists, musicians, physicians, sports figures, and religious leaders.

8:00 - 9:30 pm Wednesday, June 13. Home Ground Panel

Panel on Home Ground : A Literary and Scientific Collaboration

In this plenary session, we’ll discuss the collaborative and interdisciplinary process of creating the book project Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. A New York Times science columnist recently wrote that, "the book is a way of reclaiming the language that gives definition to landscape from the denatured terms of modern public discourse." Such a reclamation required four years, the imaginations of forty-five American writers—particularly their powers of descriptive and metaphorical expression—and the scientific thinking of the geographers, geomorphologists, folklorists, and linguists who made up our advisory board.

Home Ground’s writers each defined about twenty land and water terms, words such as Detroit rip rap, gore, looking glass prairie, nubble, yazoo, and zig-zag rocks, which represent human culture’s encounter with physical geography; our board members ensured a level of scientific accuracy essential to the book. As Home Ground’s editor Barry Lopez describes, the people who worked on the project "have come to feel that what we say now about landscape is critical to our economic and political future." The spirit of collaboration and the writers’ and scientists’ mutual respect for each others’ imaginations inherent in Home Ground speak to the larger issue of citizenship, the ongoing inquiry into the nature of place, and the legacy of American writing that has beautifully woven place into narrative.

        Moderating the discussion will be managing editor, Debra Gwartney with the following panel of contributing authors:

Elizabeth Cox is a writer and teacher who’s novels include Familiar Ground, The Ragged Way People Fall In And Out of Love,Night Talk, and The Slow Moon  (2006, Random House). She has also written essays and poetry, and the short stories she has written have recently been collected and published in Bargains in the Real World.

Will Graf is the Educational Foundation Endowed Professor at the University of South Carolina, in the department of geography, where he specializes in fluvial geomorphology. He is the author of many articles and books including Fluvial Processes in Dryland Rivers, and is the recipient of the John Wesley Powell Award from the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, from Her Majesty, Queen of Great Britain and the Royal Geographical Society, 2001.

Jan DeBlieu is the author of dozens of articles and essays about people and nature, which have appeared in publications including The New York TimesMagazine, Audubon, and Orion. Her books include Hatteras Journal (Fulcrum 1987), Meant to Be Wild (Fulcrum 1991) , which was a Nature Book Club main selection and was chosen by the Library Journal as one of the three best natural history books of the year, Wind (Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Shoemaker & Hoard 2006), which was the recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing in 1999, and Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars (Shoemaker & Hoard 2005). She is a longtime environmental activist.

9:30– 11:00 am Thursday, June 14. Orion Magazine Panel On The New, New Environmental Writing

What's next for environmental writing? Who's redefining what it is and how it intersects with the rest of American culture? In this plenary panel, the editors of Orion magazine bring together several writers who are helping to inspire the kind of cultural change that is so desperately needed in the world today.

The moderator: H. Emerson Blake is editor-in-chief of Orion magazine, where he has been a member of the editorial staff for fourteen years. He has also served as editor for numerous book projects, including many during his two-year tenure as publisher for Milkweed Editions.

The panelists:

David Gessner is the author of several books, including The Prophet of Dry Hill, Sick of Nature, and Return of the Osprey (named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year by the Boston Globe). In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize. He taught environmental writing at Harvard and is currently an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the Editor of the national literary journal Ecotone.

Derrick Jensen is the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, Listening to the Land (a USA Today Critics Choice for one of the best nature books of 1995), and Railroads and Clearcuts. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun, among many others. He lives in northern California.

Ginger Strand is the author of the novel Flight and the forthcoming nonfiction book Unnatural Niagara (Simon & Schuster, 2008). Her essays have appeared in Orion, Harper's, Swink, Raritan, and she frequently writes for The Believer. She lives in New York City.

8:00 - 9:30 pm Thursday, June 14. Di Brandt and Fred Chappell

Di Brandt is an award-winning Canadian poet, author of five collections of poetry: Now You Care (Toronto: Coach House, 2003), Jerusalem, beloved (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1995), mother, not mother (Toronto: Mercury, 1992), Agnes in the sky (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1990), and questions I asked my mother (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1987). She has also published a collection of creative essays and a critical study of contemporary Canadian women’s writings. Her recent work also includes collaborations with musicians.

Fred Chappell, Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002, is the author of thirty books, including seventeen collections of poetry, eight novels, two books of short fiction, two of essays, and a multi-genre reader. He was born in the North Carolina mountains around Canton in 1936, and this area serves as the setting and inspiration for much of his poetry and fiction. His numerous awards include the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers from the Academie Francaise (1972), the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University (1985), the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry (which he received eight times between 1972 and 2003), and the Thomas Wolfe Prize (2005).

9:30 -11:00 am Friday, June 15. John Biguenet and Robert Bullard on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Robert Bullard is Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. He is a leading expert in environmental justice, both in academic and political circles, and his numerous publications include Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (Westview, 1990, 1994, 2000), Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (South End, 1993), Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (Sierra Club, 1994), and Just Sustainabilities (MIT, 2003). 

John Biguenet is the Robert Hunter Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans and an award-winning writer. His series of columns about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, "Back to New Orleans," appeared in The New York Times in fall 2005. He is also the author of Oyster, a novel, (Ecco/HarperCollins) and The Torturer's Apprentice, a collection of stories (Ecco/HarperCollins). His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, Esquire, Granta, Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, DoubleTake, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Ploughshares.

3:00 – 4:30 pm, Friday, June 15. Coastal Carolina Panel

Jan DeBlieu is the author of dozens of articles and essays about people and nature, which have appeared in publications including The New York TimesMagazine, Audubon, and Orion. Her books include Hatteras Journal (Fulcrum 1987), Meant to Be Wild (Fulcrum 1991) , which was a Nature Book Club main selection and was chosen by the Library Journal as one of the three best natural history books of the year, Wind (Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Shoemaker & Hoard 2006), which was the recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing in 1999, and Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars (Shoemaker & Hoard 2005). She is a longtime environmental activist.

Bland Simpson is the author of The Great Dismal, The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, Into the Sound Country, and most recently, The Inner Islands. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a member of The Red Clay Ramblers, the internationally acclaimed string band.

Ann Cary Simpson, a photographer, has collaborated with Bland on several of the publications listed above. Ann has worked for a number of conservation groups and is associate director of development for the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill.