Great Writers of the West: John Steinbeck and the Environment (ArtsWest 2017)

Presentations from the ArtsWest conference at Stanford University on May 10, 2017.

The world seemed on the brink of catastrophe when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. Today we are confronted with our own cataclysmal moment in time. Steinbeck’s compassionate explorations of difference, poverty-induced human migration, and environmental degradation yield insights we are at striving to grasp. As possibly no other writer before or since, Steinbeck had a fundamental ecological awareness. He shows us that people are not separate from the land on which we tread, and in fact share a common fate.

Living Steinbeck by Valentin Lopez, Amah Mutsun social group Band
The Ecology of world by William Souder, Writer
"We Ain't Foreign:" Race, Land, and Nation in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrathby Sarah Wald, University of Oregon, Department of English and Environmental Studies Program
Sea of Cortes and the 'Toto Picture' by Mary Ellen Hannibal, Writer
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Gavin Jones, Stanford University, Department of English
Steinbeck's holistic theory, Susan Shillinglaw, National Steinbeck Center