This website’s goal is to collect, digest, and distribute crucial information on environmental and social justice conflicts around the world. It takes an explicitly political stance on today’s issues. As such, we hope to encourage anyone, be they journalists, academics, students, or activists, or someone with a story to tell, to contribute to the debate.
How to submit a piece
To submit a piece, please send a query to info[at]unevenearth.org.
Your query should include a possible title, type of article (news, opinion, field notes, or feature), length, and approximate date of final product (if you have something already, please say so), and a three-sentence biography. If your submission is time-sensitive (i.e. is a response to a current event or if it’s an urgent news piece) please include this in your email subject line.
If you’re interested in contributing to the website, but don’t know what to write, please contact us and we have lots of ideas for possible pieces! If you have an idea for something but aren’t sure where to take it, that’s ok and we’ll try to give suggestions. You can also send several ideas, and we can suggest which ones sound the most interesting to us.
If you do not have much experience with writing articles or queries, you can follow the following links for inspiration:
- Marya Jan, 7 golden rules of writing and editing. Lifehack.
- Lynne Barrett, What editors want. The Review Review.
- Al Giordano, How to Write a News Story, Narco News (School of Authentic Journalism), February 24, 2010
- Justin Podur, Left wing punditry: Doing & presenting political analysis, Killing Train, October 23, 2008
- Patrick Dunleavy, How to write a blogpost from your journal article in eleven easy steps, LSE Comment, January 25, 2016.
- Jordan Teicher, How to get a byline in the New York Times. The Freelancer, March 27, 2015.
- Alex Crevar, The art of the pitch. Paste Magazine, March 26, 2015.
- Tim Radford, A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists. The Guardian, January 19, 2011.
- Amitava Kumar, 10 rules of writing. Indian Quarterly, March, 2014.
Editorial principles
Our goal is not just to make reading about environmental and social conflicts accessible, but also to make documenting those injustices more accessible. To achieve this goal, we hope to edit in such a way that anyone—at any level of writing or journalism experience—can contribute. This means working with authors to create the pieces that they want to create, allowing for rough drafts, and working one-on-one with authors. It means working toward a piece that both the author and editor can be proud of. In the spirit of slow academia and degrowth, we hope to respect the diverse needs of authors and give people time and space to develop their writing. As editors we believe in being accountable to our readership and authorship, and will try to practice these guidelines to the best of our abilities.
Code of conduct
We want to develop a safer space where people who may not be able to publish their views elsewhere get the chance to do so. More specifically, this means non-hateful, critical, and self-reflective discussion. We wish to avoid a sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive environment on our website. We encourage avoiding personal attacks: focus on what people do or say rather than who they are or where they come from.
A note on academia
Uneven Earth hopes to provide an informal space to critically discuss important issues within environmental and activist research. Here academics can broadcast their research, give reports on conferences, or discuss the work of their peers. As we know all-too-well, academics are trained to use specialized language that may often seem dense to outsiders. As editors, we want to work with researchers to make their articles more accessible while keeping their intended meaning intact. This would have the triple benefit of helping to get the research out there, helping researchers to develop valuable skills to write pieces that can be understood by outsiders, and providing the necessary space for in-depth, but accessible, discussion on a specific topic.