Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time

In response to the growing scale and complexity of environmental threats, this volume collects articles, essays, personal narratives, and poems by more than forty authors in conversation about “thinking continental”—connecting local and personal landscapes to universal systems and processes—to articulate the concept of a global or planetary citizenship.

Reckoning with the larger matrix of biome, region, continent, hemisphere, ocean, and planet has become necessary as environmental challenges require the insights not only of scientists but also of poets, humanists, and social scientists. Thinking Continental braids together abstract approaches with strands of more-personal narrative and poetry, showing how our imaginations can encompass the planetary while also being true to our own concrete life experiences in the here and now.

Tom Lynch is a coeditor, with Susan Maher, of Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley (Nebraska, 2012). Susan Naramore Maher is the author of Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains (Nebraska, 2014). Drucilla Wall is the author of two poetry collections, including The Geese at the Gates. O. Alan Weltzien is the author of Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes (Nebraska, 2016).