Call for Book Chapters
Temperate Rainforests in Literature and Culture:
Text, Image, Sound

Editors: Dr. Vera Fibisan and Dr. John Miller

Deadline for abstracts: 1st April 2025

While the word ‘rainforest’ might conjure images of tropical environments, their less heralded temperate
counterparts are also significant habitats, featuring cooler temperatures and an array of deciduous plants
adorned with epiphytes (Orians et al., 2013). These are complex webs of life above and below the
ground, the diversity of plants and animals taking up every available space. Bryophytes such as mosses
are prominent, representing a ‘boundary layer’ between the outer world and the temperate rainforest’s
inner network (Burnett, 2023, 41). Temperate rainforests can be found in The United Kingdom, Ireland,
Norway, Japan, South Korea, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Tasmania. The vast temperate rainforest
of the Pacific Northwest – extending from Alaska to California – is a globally noteworthy ecosystem with
a long and intimate relationship with Indigenous lifeways. By contrast, the remaining rainforests of the
UK and Ireland are small, fragmented and little known. For Eoghan Daltun, this ‘self-willed land’ (2022,
195) is quite capable of looking after itself, but its future is also dependent on the anthropocentric
vagaries of economics, the possibilities and limits of conservation, and the looming threats of invasive
species and climate change. As with other types of forest, these rare and distinctive ecologies have
undergone a rapid decline. With land repurposed for agriculture, development and commercial forestry,
today many temperate rainforests are either in poor health or mere ghosts.

In the UK interest in temperate rainforests has been ignited most notably through Guy
Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022). This pivotal text was developed alongside a campaign
to map Britain’s remaining temperate rainforests by helping the public to identify indicator species
(Shrubsole, 2022). The result has been the enhancement of plans to protect these rare environments. There
are multiple conservation and restoration avenues currently in place, including The England Woodland
Creation Offer (EWCO), the Keepers of Time Policy, Landscape Recovery, Rainforest Lichen Recovery
and the Environmental Improvement Plan (Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, 2023).
Elsewhere conservation of temperate rainforests is better established; a partnership between First Nations
and Crown governments to protect Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, for example, originated in the 1990s.

This volume aims to develop growing interest in temperate rainforests with the first collection of
academic essays exploring their portrayal in literature and culture across the globe. Temperate rainforests
have been both characters and settings, and writers may include them in their work without being aware
of it. We are interested in the depictions of specific locations as well as the imagining of places beyond
geography that show the hallmarks of temperate rainforests, such as the magical Forest of Fangorn in JRR
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954). We are open to formal academic approaches, creative and
creative-critical essays, engagements with any form of literary or visual representation, including
reflections on the soundscapes of temperate rainforests. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

● Temperate rainforests in art and literature
● Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
● Indigenous literatures
● Deforestation and land management
● Extinction and conservation
● Rewilding
● Deep time, dendrochronology and cycles
● Epiphytes, bryophytes and lichens
● Habitats and dwelling places
● Forest bathing and mindfulness practices
● Biophilia and solastalgia
● Posthuman, More-than-human, Transcorporeality
● Land sharing and land sparing
● Coastal erosion and submerged temperate rainforests
● Deep listening and forest soundscapes

Please send 400-500 word abstracts and 100 word bios by 1st April 2025 to verafibisan@yahoo.com and
john.miller@sheffield.ac.uk.

Final chapter manuscripts will be 7000 words long, including citations and bibliography. The deadline for
final chapters is 31st January 2026.

References
BORMANN, F. & LIKENS, G. 1979. Pattern and process in a forested ecosystem :
disturbance, development and the steady state based on the Hubbard Brook
ecosystem study, New York, Springer-Verlag.
BURNETT, E.-J. 2023. Twelve Words for Moss, UK, Penguin Random House UK.
CONAN DOYLE, A. 2007. The Hound of the Baskervilles, London, Penguin Classics.
DALTUN, E. 2022. An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of
Rewilding Dublin, Hachette Books Ireland.
DEPARTMENT FOR ENVIRONMENT FOOD & RURAL AFFAIRS 2023. A plan to
recover England's temperate rainforests. In: DEFRA (ed.). gov.uk.
ELLIS, C. J. 2016. Oceanic and temperate rainforest climates and their epiphyte
indicators in Britain. Ecological Indicators, 70, 125-133.
ORIANS, G., SCHOEN, J., FRANKLIN, J. & MACKINNON, A. 2013. Introduction. In:
ORIANS, G. & SCHOEN, J. (eds.) North pacific temperate rainforests : Ecology
and conservation. Washington: University of Washington Press.
RITCHIE, H. 2021. The world has lost one-third of its forest, but an end of deforestation
is possible. OurWorldinData.org. [Accessed 14/09/2024]
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests#article-citation.
SHRUBSOLE, G. 2022. The Lost Rainforests of Britain, London, William Collins.
SHRUBSOLE, G. 2022. Lost Rainforests of Britain. Google Maps.
TOLKIEN, J. 1995. The Lord of the Rings, London, HarperCollins