Lawrence Buell is the preeminent scholar of literature and the environment in the United States. His publications include The Future of Environmental Criticism; Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond; and the foundational The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Two books, Shades of the Planet and Environmental Autobiography as a Necessity of Life— and Ecological Survival are forthcoming. The Robert Knoll Lecture is sponsored by the Department of English, the Center for Great Plains Studies, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Honors Program.