Environmental critic Scott Slovic scheduled for lecture

By Marc Speir
University News Service
October 12, 2007

Scott Slovic

Slovic grew up in Eugene, Ore., where he spent his youth hiking in the Cascades and training for competition as a long distance runner. Currently, he is professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada in Reno, where he chairs the graduate program in literature and the environment.

Slovic is author and editor of 12 books and was director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at Nevada from 1995 to 2002. His research specialties include American environmental literature, the relation between narrative discourse and environmental values, environmental experience and rhetoric, and autobiographies of environmental writers.

Slovic studies such contemporary authors as Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, John Daniel, Rick Bass, Gary Paul Nabhan and Alison Hawthorne Deming.

His current work focuses on the psychological, philosophical and rhetorical aspects of environmental literature, extending the work of his first book, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. He is also preparing two collections of his revised articles from the past decade, as well as a book on Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste repository in southern Nevada.

Slovic and Great Basin National Park Ranger Roberta Moore recently co-edited Wild Nevada: Testimony on Behalf of the Desert. His other works include What’s Nature Worth: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values, Literature and the Environment, The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003, and Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest, among others.

Events are sponsored by the Therese Kayser Lindsey Chair of Literature in conjunction with the Department of English.