Dear colleagues in ASLE (and elsewhere), 

Greetings! I want to invite any interested persons to join a new e-mail 
discussion group on what is just now emerging as a new 
interdisciplinary field, environmental life-writing - i.e., biography, 
autobiography, memoir, oral history, fiction, poetry, and theoretical and
empirical studies that explore and express an individual's relationship
with his or her natural and built environment(s) over time. The two
distinguishing marks of the field are (a) a focus on individual lives,
rather than general cultural, social, or historical patterns; and (b) attention to
the processes of development over a life-time, the sense that an individual's
patterns of experience emerge out of a simultaneously personal and
sociocultural context of past and future, relationship and selfhood, body
and imagination, memory and hope - and that this applies to environmental
experience as much as to any other dimension of human life. 

Thus conceived, environmental life-writing may draw upon the work and
insights of a wide variety of fields (including history, literature,
psychology, humanistic geography, philosophy, anthropology, and
religious studies) in the service of understanding a common theme, that of
individual environmental development - and of creating and exploring the
particular stories that embody that theme. Of course, many of those stories
are found in writings by and about the major historical figures who have
shaped the environment and our perceptions of it: nature writers,
environmentalists, scientists, agriculturalists, artists, politicians, planners,
landscape and urban architects - even industrialists, exploiters, and other
nasty but exceedingly powerful folks. At the same time, I hope that we
will also give some thought and attention to the lives of "ordinary" people
(including those of us writing our own environmental autobiographies and
memoirs), and to reflection on the more general patterns of experience and
development that mark individual relationship with the environment. 

Sound interesting? To subscribe to the list (I'm thinking of it as the "ELF"
list, by the way, for Environmental LiFe-writing), simply send an e-mail
to the following address: holmes@fas.harvard.edu. This isn't an automatic
server (except when I'm zoned out on coffee or whatever), so you don't
need to put "subscribe" in the body of the message etc.; just make sure
your intentions are clear. I'll send back an introductory message, and
we'll get things rolling! If you have any questions, please contact me at my
personal e-mail address, 76463.1165@compuserve.com (note that this is
different than the address for the group). And please pass this invitation
on to anyone else you think might be interested!

Steven J. Holmes
Lecturer, History and Literature Department, Harvard University
Barker Center 122, Cambridge, MA 02138
Home address: 170 Walter St., #1, Roslindale, MA 02131
(617) 323-9764
76463.1165@compuserve.com