Environmental journalism, by and large, reflects not just news of the day (and an underlying theme) but also the zeitgeist. For example, when I made ecology my beat in the late 1990s, stories about the biodiversity crisis were prevalent in mainstream media and in environmental magazines–one of which I worked at through most of the…Continue Reading…
As a child of the suburbs, my first real contact with raw nature was in 5th grade, when a friend and I built a treehouse in the woods behind the apartment complex we lived in. (This was a two-year pit stop after my parent’s divorce.) No adults helped us. It was pretty awesome. I used…Continue Reading…
Last week, Carl Zimmer’s NYT science article began this way: To study evolution, Jason Munshi-South has tracked elephants in central Africa and proboscis monkeys in the wilds of Borneo. But for his most recent expedition, he took the A train. To those of you unfamiliar with the NYC subway, this would be the A train…Continue Reading…
Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: In wildness is the preservation of the world. Since the late 1800s, the notion of wilderness as nature incarnate has been an animating force in American culture. A host of seminal, hugely influential environmental writers and activists, from John Muir and Aldo Leopold to David Brower and Edward Abbey, have…Continue Reading…
There are two stories in the current issue of New York Magazine that are of great interest to me, particularly this one by Robert Sullivan, titled, “The Concrete Jungle.” I’m teaching an Advanced Reporting course this Fall at New York University, called Hidden New York: Where the Wild Things Are, and incredibly, Sullivan’s wide-ranging survey…Continue Reading…
Several days ago, Andy Revkin wrote a Dot Earth post about what I would characterize as an ecotopia for conservationists: After three years of meetings and study, a broad array of conservation groups, government scientists and other experts on North American wildlife policy have produced a road map for restoring some large free-roaming populations of…Continue Reading…