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Oliver de la Paz reviews The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, edited by Alison Hawthorn Deming and Lauret E. Savoy
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Rafael Otto reviews Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State, edited by Helena Mattsson & Sven-Olov Wallenstein |
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Derek Sheffield reviews God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens |
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Andrew C. Gottlieb reviews Story Problems: Poems, by Rob Carney |
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Tom Leskiw reviews The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation, by Daniel J. Lebbin, Michael J. Parr, and George H. Fenwick
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Playground of the Autocrats: The Russian Empire and How Terrain Shapes Society
A Hypertext Narrative Gallery by Anne Bobroff-Hajal, with Audio
 Playground of the Autocrats is a series of whimsical/serious mixed media triptychs I’ve been hatching over the last few years. They express my belief that the openness of Russia’s vast steppe terrain has been the spawning ground of its highly centralized state. Like comic books and graphic novels, Playground of the Autocrats tells stories through pictures. Playground’s tales are “narrated” in song.
Full Hypertext Narrative Gallery >>
Under the Open Sky: Poems on the Land
by Pattiann Rogers
A male hippopotamus, living in the Milwaukee County Zoo, is submerged in his outdoor pool, resting. Gradually the water starts to swirl, and it’s possible to see his huge girth beginning to rise from below. His small flippy ears appear and now his eyes open just barely above the surface. On the bank in a corner beside the pool, inscribed on a large stone, is Les Murray’s poem, “Dreambabwe.”
Full Article >>
Sprawl Repair: From Sprawl to Complete Communities
by Galina Tachieva
The promise of suburbia has been eroding for decades, but reached a critical point with the mortgage meltdown of 2008. A record number of homes went into foreclosure and entire subdivisions and commercial developments began to fail. Yet the expanse of sprawl represents a vast investment, and cannot be simply abandoned or demolished. Pragmatism demands the reclamation of sprawl through redevelopment that introduces mixed uses and transportation options.
Full Article >>
Disc Image: Wham-0, Frisbee, and the Modern Age of Plastic
by Susan Freinkel
My search for an answer to that question started one dreary winter day with a visit to the corporate headquarters of Wham-O, a company built on the wild, bouncy, springy, squishy, floaty possibilities presented by plastics. Wham-O introduced some of the most iconic toys of our age, from Hula-Hoops to Slip ’n Slides to its top-selling product, the Frisbee. Since the flying discs were introduced, in 1957, the company has sold more than a hundred million.
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River Flying in Winter: The Sheyenne River
Essay by W. Scott Olsen, with Audio
Image Gallery: NOAA Aerial Photographs
 Here is a truth, perhaps a secret, about the northern prairie: winter is the most beautiful season. Beautiful in the way hoar frost hangs from trees. Beautiful in the way snow can fall so gently you believe, for more than just a moment, you’ve entered a place both sacred and deep. Beautiful in the way that cold air can kill you fast.
Full Essay and Image Gallery with Audio >> |
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Serenbe
Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia
by Megan Kimble
 Located 30 miles southwest of Atlanta, Serenbe is a 1,000-acre community of three hamlets nestled in 40,000 acres of forest — now incorporated as the City of Chattahoochee Hills — protected by a development plan that preserves 70 percent of the area’s green space. With a 25-acre organic farm and pedestrian-oriented village cores that consist of retail, restaurants, galleries, and office space, Serenbe is projected to include 1,000 to 1,200 homes and live/work units and up to 250,000 square feet of commercial among miles of trails, stables, pastures, wetlands, and woods.
Full Case Study >> |
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Faith in a Forgotten Place
by Julian Hoffman, with Audio and Image Gallery
2011 Nonfiction Contest Winner
 On the far side of the lake basin where I live in Greece is the Albanian village of Zagradec. Though I can’t see the stone houses and narrow lanes themselves, tucked up on a boxwood slope behind the knuckle of a limestone hill, the view toward it never fails to stir me. It is dramatic, evocative — often drowned in a wild and compelling light. I’m looking not only at the end of a lake, but also the mysterious beginning of another country.
Full Essay with Image Gallery and Audio >>
New Orleans, The Gulf Coast, 2010
by Catherine Schmitt, with Audio and Image Gallery
2011 Nonfiction Contest Finalist
At first, I see the lake, and then the wetlands, splotches of green amid the blue as far as I can see through the tiny oval airplane window. After the hurricanes, after the oil — we are late. The first random dot stereogram was invented by Dr. Bela Julesz in 1959 as an experiment to test stereopsis, the ability to see in three dimensions.
Full Essay with Image Gallery and Audio >>
Hill of the Sacred Eagles
by Katie Fallon
2011 Nonfiction Contest Finalist
 There are no eagles at Thirukalukundram’s Eagle Temple. The famous pair of large white birds vanished years ago and hasn’t returned. They were not, in fact, eagles, but Egyptian vultures, Neophron percnopterus, scavengers that soar on five-and-a-half-foot wings above dry landscapes from southern Europe to central Africa.
Until the mid-1990s Egyptian vultures were common throughout India.
Full Essay >>
The Fire This Time: Down the Charles River
by David Gessner
I paddle through the afternoon on the Charles River, watching the pulsating light on the under branches of trees. Somewhere on the other side of this living green wall cars are rushing to and from the city, but that doesn’t concern me. How many types of weather can I name from the day? Too many to count. The wind comes up, the water ripples, the clouds blow over and create a chill, then disappear; after the sun bears down, the wind stops, and a short rain falls.
Full Essay >>
Pitanga
by Eleanor Stanford, with Image Gallery
When I left for college in central Virginia at 18, my mother gave me a guide to the wildflowers of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I remember flipping through the pages, savoring the rich language of the plants’ common names: Blazing Star. Mayapple. Heal All. Since then, I’ve taken the book with me from one place I’ve lived to another: Florida, West Africa, Wisconsin, Texas, and most recently, Brazil.
Full Essay with Image Gallery >>
Swimming Among Sharks: A Photo Essay
by Marie-Elizabeth Mali
I remember the first time I saw reef sharks underwater. I was in the Galapagos and my heart raced. I hung back, watchful. But they don’t seem that interested in us, certainly not as food. Shark attacks on humans are more rare than lightning striking humans, yet we still step outside during thunderstorms.
Full Photo Essay >> |
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 Song of the Turkey Vulture
by GE Tallant, with Audio : 2011 Fiction Contest Winner
Cara knew the secrets: a certain tilt to the vine, distance from the mother plant, an early need for phosphorus. She hand-pollinated in May; her fruit was set by June. Now it was October and two dozen giant pumpkins waited in her fields, as surprising and tympanic as pregnant bellies. Two dozen was record and most of them were sold. Designers drove all the way from Atlanta to buy her pumpkins. She’d had one on the gold-domed capitol’s steps, another on the lawn of the governor’s mansion.
Full Story with Audio >>
 Driveaway
by Erica Olsen : 2011 Fiction Contest Finalist
This was in San Francisco in 1999. I’d left Salt Lake without my belongings. At the Catholic thrift shops on Sutter I’d found some shirts and pants in my size, and a pair of shoes that were still shaped like someone else’s feet. Only later did it occur to me that these clothes had probably belonged to some young man who had died, and I was walking around the city dressed as his ghost.
Full Story >>
 Controlled Burn
by K. L. Barron : 2011 Fiction Contest Finalist
The first time Pearl saw the prairie, it was on fire. It was late at night and she was driving west on Highway 40 as fast as she could through Kansas when she saw bright orange bands of flames sweeping across the hills on either side of the highway and pulled onto the shoulder to watch. She rolled down the windows and smelled the seductive odor of smoke, heard the dry grass being consumed by the roar of the heat, the velocity controlled entirely by the wind.
Full Story >>
 Kenley's Watch
by Malka Davis : 2011 Fiction Contest Finalist
“I’m not in trouble — am I?” The sweat on Penelope’s body had long since evaporated, leaving a sticky residue on her skin that gave her the feeling of having run headlong into an enormous spider web. Detectives Holowinko and Mansfield exchanged blank expressions that she interpreted as the self-evident nature of her innocence. If not innocence, then blamelessness. At 46 she was still naïve enough to believe that only a guilty person needed a lawyer.
Full Story >>
 Diné Bikeyah (Navajo Reservation)
by Lorie Adair
My memory weaves it this way Shi’yazhi: morning mist burning off the land, the sun warming MacDougal’s back and his horse picking through goat head thorns on his way to our place. He passed by cooking fires that were a mingle of mesquite and cedar, of corn mush heating in a pot. He was riding out to a low mesa east of my in-law’s land where there was an outcropping of rock not at all remarkable.
Full Story >>
 Neighboring on the Air
by Caroline Patterson
But what Daisy envied most about Rose was her ease. Rose sat at the microphone and recipes, news, and advertisements seemed to flow from her. How did she keep all that in her head, Daisy wondered. How did she move so smoothly from cakes to coupons, from weddings to club news? Daisy could hardly remember what her children had for breakfast, much less the slogan for the Hamilton Merc.
Full Story >>
 Ditch Lilies
by Werner A. Low
He confessed that he’d also tried to bring in some purple lady slippers, and a couple clumps of wood violets that were actually — he loved the irony in this — cadmium yellow, but neither of them had made it, either, and he’d come to think that maybe that was just as well. He knew where all the wildflowers were in the Reservation, and when they would be out — for example, that the hepatica and blood root flowered early, before the canopy leafed them into shade.
Full Story >>
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Jeremy Frey : Big Bang: An Online Chapbook with Reactive Drawings by Ten Artists + Audio
