It feels as if the world is on fire—and it is. In the last days of the Trump administration, U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms.

Cascading disasters could become the new normal, the background to our lives. Or we could try to stop the dominoes from falling. But if we are to make the kind of sweeping systematic changes that could stop climate change from getting worse, end the truly dystopian inequities in our country, and crush the pandemic before hundreds of thousands more are dead, we cannot allow our baselines to shift. We cannot forget that these are disasters.

This essay describes the double claustrophobia of being trapped at home by the pandemic and wildfires. The sense of restriction feels strange for a Westerner who is used to being able to get up and go–to always have the option to escape into the millions of acres of public land in our region.

In this piece, which was commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, I wrote about what 2070 might look like if we do everything right on climate and conservation. I really enjoyed imagining a genuinely good future, and sketching out a road map to get there. Read this if you need a clearer sense of what you’re fighting FOR, not just what you are fighting against.

In this feature I take on organic farming, GMOs, and ‘regenerative agriculture’ and propose we mash the best of all these approaches together to create something that can not only adapt to climate change but can help ameliorate it. It also features me eating peanut butter sandwiches on a 7-hour California road trip.

I got a really fantastic response from this op-ed, in which I offer readers a simple five-step plan to move past anxiety and depression over climate change and become an active part of the solution. Hint: the secret to improving your mental health, as well as the health of the planet, is collective action, not individual sacrifice. Read and share!

I had mixed feelings when I was asked to write a piece about getting arrested during a sit-in at Oregon’s Governor’s office protesting a fossil fuel project. I didn’t want to center myself when many others face far more risk and impact and have fought harder and longer. However, I did want to share my experience for those who might be considering civil disobedience and want a sense of what it is like. So in the spirit of “service journalism” I decided to go ahead and share my own story. But I want to be super clear that others—notably Indigenous people along the Klamath and impacted landowners—have been fighting way longer than I have and have put way more on the line. I risked arrest in part because I have lots and lots of layered privilege that made doing so easier and less risky for me. There are infinite ways to fight for climate justice and this is just one approach that makes sense for some people. If civil disobedience makes sense to you and you are considering it, I hope my experience is useful. But this fight isn’t about me—it is about US—a wonderful, hopeful group of people who love the land, from Southern Oregon Rising Tide to Rogue Climate to tribal youth to ranchers and fishers.

For this piece about humans creating soil, I got to delve into myth and emotion and write about soil nutrient cycling like a poet. I really enjoyed the process! Illustrations by the very talented Jia Sung.

This story is very different from my usual work. It is not about the environment, except insofar as it is about how the environment of a remote part of Eastern Oregon led to violence. Ultimately, it is about how two men, off the grid, outside the shadow of law enforcement, both armed and ideologically committed to self-reliance, decided to solve their problems. Hint: it ended in blood.

In this story for National Geographic, I toured Manhattan with a rat expert, cuddled a rat on Long Island, watched terriers hunt rats in Washington D.C. and tried–and alas, failed–to eat rats in New Zealand. I came away with a profound respect for these clever, kind synanthropes.

In this story for Outside Magazine, I write about a little boy who got lost in the Oregon woods in the 1980s–and then walked some 16 miles to safety, on his own, in the dark, in near-freezing temperatures. He was six years old.

Today, Cody is nearly 40. To write the story, we met up with his mother Marcie and a member of the search party to figure out his route through the Blue Mountains. Then we hiked some of the way with my own six-year-old son.

Invasive species are sometimes trapped, poisoned, and shot in large numbers to save native species from extinction. Some scientists say the bloodshed isn't worth it.

I wrote this op-ed with Don Gentry, Chairman of the Klamath Tribes. We oppose a pipeline project that would endanger the Klamath River and the ancestral homelands of the Klamath people, as well as contribute to climate change.

How far are we willing to go to save species? Are we willing to kill? To meddle in evolution? This feature in Wired magazine looks at conservation at the dawn of the CRISPR gene editing age. What if the only way to save the wild is to engineer it?

This is one I am really proud of. A look at one wolf and one man over nearly a decade in Eastern Oregon. In their story are all the tensions of wildlife management in the Anthropocene, plus bone piles.

The Seasteading movement is getting close to building its first prototype, an artificial archipelago where people will live, play and do research. I report, from Tahiti!

Should environmentalists embrace technology or get closer to nature? Both, duh. This essay paints a picture of a future in which humans have lightened our impact on the rest of Earth's species but deepened our personal engagement with non-human nature. Plus, my brother drew the sketch of Utopia that accompanies it!

This story was reported quite near my home in Klamath Falls. I spent some time with John Stephenson tracking wolves and talking about what makes some wolves famous and others anonymous.

We’re in a motorized canoe on our slow way to the Matsigenka village of Tayakome—unreachable by any road, deep in the heart of Manú National Park in Peru…

Elias Machipango Shuverireni picks up his long, palm-wood bow and his arrows tipped with sharpened bamboo. We're going monkey hunting in Peru's Manú National Park—a huge swath of protected rain forest and one of the most biodiverse parks in the world.

Klamath Falls, Ore. — DROUGHT in the West is an ugly thing. Rivers trickle away to nothing, fires rage, crops fail, ranchers go broke, tribal people watch fish die. As Westerners fight over the little water left, tempers crack, lawsuits fly and bitterness coats whole communities like fine dust.

Creating haute locavore cuisine in Tassie has its challenges. The island has a robust fishing fleet—but no fresh fish market. Nearly everything is sent to Sydney and Melbourne. “Tasmanian” wines are nearly all produced off island with Tasmanian grapes—though Moyle lives on one of the few vineyards that makes its own wine. Imported produce is sprayed against pests, which icks Moyle out. And the foraging is somewhat slim. A keen backpacker told me that he’s extra careful to bring enough food rations when he heads out on a Tasmanian trek. “There’s hardly any bush tucker at all; you’d starve out there.”

A feature on the increasing momentum behind looking for the first Americans in the west–including offshore in the Pacific. I went to Idaho to visit Loren Davis's Cooper's Ferry dig for this story and got to see them pull wolverine teeth thousands of years old out of the sediment.