For thousands of years, people around the world have drawn on the plants and animals with whom they shared their environments as the inspiration for stories, myths, and visual art; symbols of religious devotion; and models of how to organize social relations and pursue traditional lifeways. With this interdisciplinary conference, we hope to bring together a wide range of scholars, storytellers, interpretive naturalists, and educators to consider these and other ways in which plants and animals have fired the human imagination throughout the ages.

Special topics will include:

• animals in war
• literature, art, and humane education
• using puppets in storytelling
• roundtable discussion of how to incorporate scientific and cultural knowledge of plants and animals into scholarship, teaching, and storytelling (with an optional "Story Hike" outing in a local park)

NILAS invites submissions of abstracts of scholarly papers, discussions of practical experience or work in progress, or creative presentations (e.g., performance of stories, folksongs, or poetry) related to these topics, or to any other areas broadly related to the conference theme of "Plants, Animals, and the Human Imagination." Abstracts should be no more than 500 words long, and should include the title of the proposed presentation and the names of all authors, as well as an e-mail address for the corresponding author. Abstracts are due by Friday, January 31, 2003 and should be submitted by e-mail (Microsoft Word attachments OK) to David S. Wilson at the email address below. (Paper proposals will be accepted or rejected by no later than early March; if institutional or grant constraints require that you receive earlier notification, please let us know when you submit your paper.)

For more information about NILAS or this conference, please visit *http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~nilas/*. For more information about ISAZ or their conference on August 15 to 16, whose theme will be "The Social Lives of Animals: Cognition, Interactions, Relationships," please visit *http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/CCAB/ISAZ.htm*.