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Be True to the Earth - Plenary Speakers

David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon, 1996), for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician who has lived with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, his essays have appeared in such journals as Tikkun, Orion, Environmental Ethics, Wild Earth, Parabola, Resurgence, and The Ecologist, as well as in over thirty edited anthologies. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Watson and Rockefeller foundations, and was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. He is the founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics in his home terrain of New Mexico, and he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication and the rejuvenation of oral culture.

Miriel Lenore was born in Boort, Victoria and was educated there and in Bendigo and Melbourne. She worked as a plant breeder and student counsellor before moving to Fiji where she was involved in adult education as well as teaching in schools. After twenty-two years there, and a brief period in Sydney, she moved to Adelaide where she still lives. She has visited communities in the Ngaanyatjarra lands of WA for over twenty years, resulting in her second book, Sun wind & diesel. She has published five books of poetry and provided the text for a multimedia performance at Adelaide and Perth Festivals.

Freya Mathews is a philosopher and writer who divides her time between academia, writing-in-place and journeying. She teaches philosophy and environmental enquiry at La Trobe University and has published widely in the field of ecological philosophy. Outside the university she has helped to establish discussion circles and bush schools and has served for a time as "community philosopher" at CERES, the environment park in Melbourne. Her books include The Ecological Self (Routledge, 1991), For Love of Matter: Towards a Contemporary Panpsychism (SUNY, 2003) and Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture (SUNY, 2005). Freya is the co-editor with Kate Rigby and Sharron Pfueller of the journal PAN(Philosophy Activism Nature).

Greg Garrard began work on ecocriticism as a postgraduate at the University of Wales Swansea before going on a complete a PhD on Friedrich Nietzsche, DH Lawrence, Martin Heidegger and Seamus Heaney at the University of Liverpool. He currently teaches Canadian and European literature and ecocriticism at Bath Spa University College. His published research includes work on British and American Romanticism and Irish literature. He is the author of the 'Ecocriticism' title in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series, and is Chair of ASLE-UK.

Martin Harrison's latest book of poetry is the award winning collection Summer (Paper Bark Press, 2001). His collection of essays about Australian poetry, contemporary writing and an ecological concern for place and environment Who Wants to Create Australia? (Halstead Press, 2004) was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement's international Books of the Year 2004. He was awarded an Established Writers fellowship from the Australia Council in 2003-2004. His international writers' residencies include the B.R. Whiting Library in Rome and Yaddo Artists Colony in up-state New York. A former producer and presenter of ABC Radio's Books and Writing program, he has worked as a writer and producer for ABC Radio. He teaches writing and poetry at the University of Technology in Sydney where he is a Senior Lecturer. He is currently at work on a new collection of poetry.

Richard Kerridge is Subject Leader in Postgraduate Studies in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University College. In 1990 and 1991, he received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing, and his work was broadcast on BBC national radio. He is now writing a novel on an environmental theme. Writing the Environment (1998), which he co-edited with Neil Sammells, was the first collection of ecocritical essays to appear in Britain. His new monograph, Beginning Ecocriticism, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2006. He has written the chapter on ecocriticism in The Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism: An Oxford Guide, edited by Patricia Waugh, to appear in 2005, and many other articles. In 1998 Richard was co-organiser, with Greg Garrard, of the first ASLE conference to be held in the UK, and was elected founding Chair of ASLE-UK, a post he held until 2004.

Deborah Bird Rose is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (CUP, 1992) and Country of the Heart(Aboriginal Studies Press, ANU, 2002). She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU. She has worked extensively on Aboriginal claims to land, and her work in both scholarly and practical arenas is focused on entwined social and ecological justice. Her newest book is Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004).

Mark Treddinick is a writer, teacher and critic, who lives in Katoomba and Lavender Bay. He has published an anthology of Australian and North American essays of place, A Place on Earth (UNSW Press, 2003), and he is currently completing The Blue Plateau-a natural history of home, a lyric essay about the high sandstone country around Katoomba, west of Sydney. Mark has taught at the University of Sydney and teaches now and then at the University of Western Sydney in the school of Social Ecology. He runs writing workshops in lyric nonfiction, nature writing, grammar and professional writing at writers' centres across Australia. He was the Camden Head pilot station's first resident nature writer in January 2002. In April 2002 he spent a month in Sitka, Alaska, as the Island Institute's writer in residence. Mark is currently the Vice President (Australia) of ASLE-ANZ.

Rosaleen Love writes about science in a variety of ways, from nature writing to science fiction. Her most recent books are the non-fiction Reefscape. Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef (Allen and Unwin, 2000 and Joseph Henry Press, 2001), and the fiction collection,The Travelling Tide (Aqueduct Press, 2005). She is an honorary research associate at Monash and Latrobe Universities, Melbourne.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, poet and essayist, began adult life as a cadet metallurgist. His latest collections are By and Large(Carcanet) and the small-press A Representative Human (Gungurru), which includes his own drawings. He has just completed the long poem, "The Universe Looks Down", which will appear from Brandl & Schlesinger in 2005. His Selected Poems 1956-1994 (O.U.P.) won the D.J. O'Hearn Prize for Poetry and the Age Book of the Year Award. He works with Bruno Leti on artists' books, and is Professor Emeritus in The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.

Louise Westling, a past President of ASLE in the USA, is Professor of English and former departmental Chair at the University of Oregon. Her fields of interest include 20th century American fiction, autobiography, and ecocriticism. Her publications include Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (U of Georgia Press, 1985) and The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender and American Fiction (U of Georgia Press, 1996), as well as numerous articles. She is the editor of He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice (1989) and Witness to Injustice by David Frost, Jr. (1995). She is currently writing a study of the intersections among modernism, twentieth-century science, and environmental philosophy.

"Be True to the Earth"