Edited by Bill McKibben with a foreword by Al Gore.

“Every important advance in American environmentalism,” according to writer and activist Bill McKibben, “has coincided with—sprung from—some piece of writing, some book. We can’t afford those voices to die out.” Now, as America and the world grapple with global ecological challenges, McKibben ensures that these voices will be heard with his unprecedented and timely anthology gathering the best that has been thought and said about the interconnectedness of the natural world, our place in it, and our responsibility to it.

This April 22nd, The Library of America marked Earth Day 2008 with the release of the first definitive anthology of American environmental writing: AMERICAN EARTH: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (hardcover, $40.00), edited by McKibben with a foreword by Al Gore. Touchstones of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—are set alongside the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered narratives of pioneering campaigns for wilderness conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches.