Pacific Northwest College of Art    Portland, OR

Writer-in-Residence Barry Sanders Nominated for Two Oregon Book Awards

PNCA faculty member and writer-in-residence Barry Sanders was honored with two 2011 Oregon Book Awards nominations for his books Unsuspecting Souls: The Disappearance of the Human Being and The Green Zone. PNCA students provided illustrations for the The Green Zone, a book about the environmental cost of the U.S. Military, and the text was incorporated into classroom lectures by professors throughout the College. Sanders was recently the subject of a multimedia Oregonian feature that highlights his Oregon Book Awards nominations and includes a video that conveys his warmth and personality that endears him to the PNCA community.

Unsuspecting Souls

In Unsuspecting Souls, Barry Sanders examines modern society’s indifference to the individual. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when care for human beings began to disappear slowly, and ending with the modern era, when societal events require less person-to-person interaction and introduce radical changes in common attitudes toward death and life, Sanders laments that what makes us most human is slowly dying. Our days are filled with a continuous bombardment of “information” that demands our attention and brings us out of our messy, physical world and into a sterile sphere of inhumanity and abstraction.

We’ve also, Sanders writes, lost the original sense of a collective consciousness. This loss has been building for two centuries now, dating back to the rise of European powers and worldwide colonization. Sanders warns that we pick our poisons among several forms of radical fundamentalisms, each one not only a threat to the other but a threat to humanity itself.

The Green Zone

In the midst of the movement to save the earth, The Green Zone presents a sobering revelation: until we address the attack that the US military is waging on the global environment, the things we do at home won’t change a thing. This investigation examines in detail the environmental impact of US military interventions overseas. In today’s period of unprecedented scrutiny surrounding the social and economic impacts of the defense policies of the U.S. government, Sanders explores a completely different aspect of the situation and positions military activity as the single-greatest contributor to the worldwide environmental crisis, looking at everything from fuel emissions to radioactive waste to defoliation campaigns.

Based primarily on research culled from documents released or leaked by the military itself, The Green Zone is the first book to provide a comprehensive examination of the relationship between militarism and ecological destruction.

About the Oregon Book Awards

The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in genres of poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, drama and young readers literature. All finalists are promoted in libraries and bookstores across the state, and invited to take part in the Oregon Book Awards Author Tour, which brings finalists to public libraries and independent bookstores in towns including North Bend, Eugene, Newport and Astoria.

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