*CFP* "THE LITERARY JOURNALIST AS NATURALIST", CHAPTER BOOK

Nature --or perhaps the way modern capitalism objectifies and destroys nature-- is the topic of our time. It has, thus, been the at the core of an extensive list of long form journalistic narratives in the past century and has spun hundreds more in the past decade. With the narrative of the Green New Deal as a background, the May, 2018 United Nation report about a million species at risk of extinction due to human activity, and the unstoppable increase in global temperatures as a result of human activity, matched with the inaction and incapacity of world governments to stop this process, “The Literary Journalist as Naturalist” aims at compiling a thorough, academically entertaining and comprehensive snapshot of long journalistic narratives about nature in a time of drastic change.

Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, John McPhee, Carl Safina, Elizabeth Kolbert, David Wallace-Wells, some of the names you will read about in this anthology, followed the visionary steps of Rachel Carson, the pioneering environmental journalist and picked up the mantle delivering the harrowing narratives of our dire times.

By discussing the multiple ways in which narrative journalism has portrayed nature, our interactions with it, and our politics towards it for decades, maybe even centuries, this anthology will try to give an academic framework for these narratives of finality, finitude, atonement and conquest, which reached a crucial point of self-awareness in 1962 with Carson’s masterpiece, Silent Spring.

These narratives not only deal with the environment considered as an object removed from us, humanity. They re-insert men and women into nature, and show how our cultures act as one of nature’s many agents.

The text aims to be international in focus and innovative in its approach. New areas of research will be not only welcomed but encouraged.

Call for Contributions from Pablo Calvi at SUNY Stony Brook, who is editing a collection on "The Literary Journalist as Naturalist". 

Deadline for proposed chapters is end-April. His address is pablo.calvi@stonybrook.edu