When Stephanie Foote was the Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University, she was moved to create a book series for environmental humanities scholarship and in 2017, the Salvaging the Anthropocene Series was announced with West Virginia University Press. Its objective – books about daily intellectual, artistic, social, and aesthetic responses to global environmental degradation through transformative practices rather than simply managing despair. Foote called for works on and for a broad range of social actors from artists and designers to knitters and activists.

Foote, now a professor at University of Vermont, has kept a steady flow of books through the Salvaging the Anthropocene Series and she continues to push the envelope. The first book in the series, Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, appeared in 2022 as the first nonfiction anthology of solarpunk writings. 2023 brought us Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene by Serpil Opperman, which envisions innovative models of knowledge for deeper understanding of Anthropocene ecologies through “Anthroposcenarios.” Salma Monani’s Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments, which has just released, introduces us to d-ecomedia, a shorthand for ecomedia projects that foreground decolonial methodologies.

Spring 2025 will bring us The Doom of the Great City, William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella of urban apocalypse in London, with a critical edition by Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty Mizin.

Foote was no stranger to making space for new ideas. In 2014, she co-founded the scholarly journal Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities with Stephanie LeMenager. (In 2023, the journal underwent a transformation and now operates under the name Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities.) Earlier this spring, Foote, along with Dana Luciano and Anthony Lioi, launched a new journal with the Open Library of Humanities – Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture and its inaugural issue was released in August. The three objectives for this new journal are open access publishing, multimedia capacity, and collaboration. We look forward to working with Foote and seeing how we can incorporate these values into Salvaging the Anthropocene Series moving forward!