Keynote Address: Max Oelschlaeger, author of The Idea of Wilderness, Caring for Creation, and Frances B. McAllister Chair of Community, Culture, and Environment, Northern Arizona University

Plenary Address: Gary Nabhan, author of The Desert Smells Like Rain, Cultures of Habitat, Director of NAU's Center for Sustainable Environments, and Professor of Biology at Northern Arizona University

In The Idea of Wilderness, Max Oelschlaeger proposes that "an alternative idea of wild nature as a source of human existence is gaining public hearing," and he reminds us that we must learn to think of nature as a continuum, "where it is, at one end, little more than a romantic anachronism, and, on the other, a category intrinsically bound up with the emergence of an evolutionary viewpoint on cosmological process." Environmentalism and the study of environmental literature seems to vacillate around Oelschlaeger's three points of concern: nature as a source for human existence, nature as a romantic anachronism, and nature as a cosmological process.

The Association welcomes proposals which focus expressly on Robinson Jeffers, but also hopes to receive papers that locate Jeffers in the overall environmental debate (in other words, proposals that focus on art forms other than poetry in environmentalism), that address Jeffers along with other environmental figures, including non-literary ones, or that use Jeffers as a beginning point from which to formulate wider arguments in regards to environmentalism.

Proposals should be relatively brief. The conference has a number of different formats and includes opportunities for standard academic talks (15-20 minutes), longer plenary presentations (30-45 minutes), responses to longer talks (5-10 minutes), roundtable discussions (proposals should be for the roundtable itself: include names of all participants and subject to be discussed), panel chairs, participation in discussion sections, and poetry readings (20-30 minutes).