Bart H. Welling

BART H. WELLING {[email protected]} is an associate profes￾sor of English and an Environmental Center Fellow at the Univer￾sity of North Florida in Jacksonville, where he teaches a range of courses focusing on animals and environmental issues in litera￾ture and film, in addition to modern American literature surveys and other classes. He and his wife, Elizabeth Siobhain Murphy￾Welling, are the parents of five children: Autumn, Solstice, Orion, Chora Belle, and Linnea (“Nimi”). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I express appreciation to everyone who contributed valuable feed￾back on early versions of this essay at the inaugural Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference in March 2007 at Brigham Young University, and at the Mormonism and the Environment Conference held a few weeks later at Utah Valley University. I am grateful to the English Department of the University of North Florida for facilitating my travel and research associated with the project, and offer special thanks to George Handley of Brigham Young University and Boyd Jay Petersen of Utah Valley University for making it possible for me to speak at the Utah Valley Univer￾sity gathering. This essay is dedicated with great love to my grand￾mother, Dorothy Dixon Harrison, with whom I had many interest￾ing conversations about Mormonism and the “question of the ani￾mal,” and whose passion for literature and learning never ceased to inspire me, along with countless other young readers.