Featured Writing Projects

Pawpaws Becoming a Viable Crop for Northern Farmers as climate warms

The pawpaw is the largest native North American fruit and has a legendary flavor—like a cross between a banana and a mango. Pawpaws are commonly available in the heart of their original range, from the Gulf Coast to the Lower Midwest and east to the Mid-Atlantic states, but they’ve approached mythical status in the North due to the shortness of their growing season. That’s changing thanks to climate change, as I wrote about for sustainable agriculture journal Civil Eats, here.

Commentator's Curse: essaY for soccer magazine Howler

Ever want to watch TV sports without the distracting play-by-play from the broadcast booth? Can you imagine just hearing the thump of the ball, barked commands of coaches & captains, the songs of the fans? This 2017 essay makes the case for commentary-free soccer coverage, because too often the announcers talk over the most interesting & exciting moments of a match, bringing new meaning to the term 'commentator's curse.' It appeared in the pages of indie soccer magazine Howler (in glorious print format & online) -- read it here.

Exploring a Great White Shark Nursery in the Shadow of New York City: News Deeply feature

With one of the ocean’s iconic predators globally threatened, a shark tagging program off the shores of Long Island is an effort to understand behaviors of the young of the species in a region where their numbers are increasing. Read my report from two days at sea with a team of white shark researchers here at Oceans Deeply.

Other Recent or Noteworthy Publishing Credits

Spring 2023: interviewed “Trees with Edible Leaves” author Eric Toensmeier about his interesting free guide to the most nutritious greens on earth, which happen to grow on trees.

Autumn 2022: new report about the windfall of federal support coming into the most climate- and biodiversity-positive agriculture sector, American agroforestry accelerates with new funding

Summer 2022: interview featuring two photographers who have been documenting the massive clear cutting of natural forests in Sweden in the decade since my investigation for Yale Environment360: How unsustainable is Sweden’s forestry? ‘Very.’

Spring 2022: new photoessay in Northern Woodlands magazine, “Stone records in a rewilding landscape.'

Summer 2021: of all the features I published at Mongabay.com in 2021, this one was a favorite for its positivity in terms of development of a promising new conservation technology, Big bioacoustics boost: Cornell University program receives $24 million donation

Summer 2020: a personal reflection on growing pawpaws for World Ark.

Spring 2020: a new report updating my 2019 visit with French agricultural researchers who are showing how agroforestry could help winemakers adapt to climate change, see “Better wines among the pines.”

January 2020: a feature about pawpaws becoming a viable crop for northern farmers and gardeners due to climate change, for Civil Eats.

Winter 2019: an analysis of slave labor in Southeast Asia’s garment industry for Atmos magazine.

Fall 2019: a report on new federal support for agroforestry in the U.S., which was then reported on by Public News Service and broadcast on 49 radio stations.

Summer 2019: an interview I did with a member of the popular Chilean band Newen Afrobeat about the environmental and social themes of their latest record.

Spring 2019: A report from Montpellier, France where I was an invited speaker for the World Agroforestry Congress.

Winter 2019: I asked forest ecologists about Trump's misleading statements on forest management causing the CA fires, they suggested that indigenous practices like prescribed burns make actual sense, read here.

Fall 2018: Op-ed for the Washington Post here on an unheralded method of combating climate change. Also a feature in Cultural Survival magazine arguing that agroforestry, the world’s most climate- and biodiversity-friendly agricultural method, should be called an indigenous technology.

Summer 2018: a reported feature for News Deeply about a research project on great white sharks off of Long Island.

Summer 2018: interview with author Philip Ackerman-Leist about his book on the Italian town that voted to ban pesticides & sparked a global wave of action, here for World Ark magazine.

Spring 2018: a conversation I had with the founding organizer of Earth Day, Denis Hayes, for Mongabay, here. 

Fall 2017: essay for indie soccer magazine Howler about the need for commentary-free sports coverage, here.

July 2017: original report for Mongabay about business owners in Belize calling for greater protection of mangrove forests, here.

May 2017: a solar cooking product test with kids for World Ark magazine, here.

April 2017: conversation I had with 2016 Harry Potter film star Alison Sudol about her role as an IUCN goodwill ambassador, meeting Jane Goodall, and the need to connect with nature, here.

August 2016: a conversation at Mongabay.com about carbon farming, agroforestry, silvopasture, and more elements of 'carbon farming' that can fight climate change while producing food, building soil and water resources, increasing biodiversity, and more benefits, view that here.

June 2016: new photo-essay from a seabird research station (Great Gull Island) for Sierra magazine, here.

April 2016: profile of visionary solar cooking entrepreneur Dr. Catlin Powers in Sierra, here.

February 2016: an interview with ethnobotanist, author, and MacArthur Genius Award-winner Gary Nabhan on strategies for growing food in a hotter, drier, climate-changed world that he's learned from traditional arid-land farmers all over the planet, here.

November 2015: a conversation for Orion with revolutionary thinker and author Paul Hawken about his latest book, Project Drawdown, an encyclopedia of the 100 most effective ways that societies can remove climate-warming carbon from the atmosphere, here.

October 2015: a new Guardian feature on how the effort to save millions of lives and forests globally by switching people away from smoky cook fires to clean burning stoves is, paradoxically, late to adopt solar cooking as an option, here.

September 2015: a feature on 'land grabs' by large agribusiness enterprises which too often evict residents of rural communities in the developing world, leading to hunger and homelessness, here.

August 2015: a conversation with popular cultural philosopher Stephen Jenkinson for The Sun, read that here.

Spring 2015: interview for OnEarth with Top Chef star Tom Colicchio about reinventing the American diet to benefit public health and the environment, here.

Spring 2015: conversation in World Ark with researcher Gautam Yadama about the thorny questions surrounding the need for cleaner cooking options in the developing world. Every year global forests are cut heavily and almost 5 million people die from the resulting smoky cook fires, but solutions to this problem are anything but simple. See it here.

Fall 2014: the Guardian published my findings about the watering down of the fair trade label on coffee, tea, and other products, and the power of cooperatives to make lasting change, here.

Spring 2014: conversation with author Judith Schwartz about her book Cows Save the Planet, and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth for World Ark magazine. See the text here plus a short video I shot.

Winter 2014: discussion of problems within the food system with TV's Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, for Grist, here.

Fall 2013: interviewed by Mongabay, one of the biggest independent online conservation news outlets in the world, about environmental journalism, here.

Summer 2013: review of the book Living With the Trees of Life for World Ark, here, about how agroforestry (a kind of permaculture) can be a key tool both for feeding people worldwide and slowing climate change.

Spring 2013: update to my investigative report on the Swedish Forestry Model and the failures of the Forest Stewardship Council in that country was posted at Earth Island Journal, here, alongside a gallery of previously unpublished images of the Swedish 'biodiversity hunters.'

Also, land trusts in the U.S. have been doing great conservation work for decades through the purchase and stewardship of natural areas, but an exciting new trend is their work to support local agricultural efforts in numerous locales through land conservation. Feature for Grist, here.

Winter 2012: conversation with permaculture author Eric Toensmeier for World Ark. Go here to see the Q & A, images, and video shot in this fascinating garden, and learn how permaculture relates to the work of the global hunger relief project Heifer Project International.

Spring 2012: interview for World Ark, with the founder of ARCHIVE about his group's efforts to combat disease through environmental design (i.e. healthy housing") in Haiti and Cameroon.

I was in San Francisco in April to help celebrate a person whose work I'd covered for Grist, Russian forest activist Evgenia Chirikova. She was being honored with a Goldman Environmental Prize, the 'green Nobel,' and it was my privilege to take her and her husband out of the city to Muir Woods for an afternoon to see ancient redwoods. My email postcard about that trip was later published by Andy Revkin in the New York Times, here.

Winter 2011: my investigative report "Sweden’s Green Veneer Hides Unsustainable Logging Practices" appeared in the award-winning publication Yale e360, here, and then appeared at National Geographic News Watch, here.

Also: an image from my Hunter/Gatherer series appeared as a 2-page spread for an article on the culture of hunting in Northern Woodlands magazine. See the online version here.

Summer 2011: gallery of images from the Ghost Nests Project was part of Terrain.org's Summer 2011 issue, here. This fantastical photo series imagines the nesting behaviors of extinct animals, or perhaps birds and animals of a future Earth.

Spring 2011: "How far are we willing to go for Canada’s ‘tar sands’ oil?" Essay about tar sands development in Canada for PBS program Need to Know, here.

Winter 2010: feature story on the Bialowieza Forest, an enormous old growth forest inhabited by bison, wolves, lynx, and more, that sprawls across a wide swath of Belarus and Poland. I traveled the region and reported on the situation for Earth Island Journal, here. Despite its unique status as the last and largest such forest in Europe, its health is in decline, but a band of dedicated activists has been able to keep it from being totally degraded.

Summer 2009: cover story on the work of Heifer Project International which is redeveloping heritage breeds of farm animals in Poland to save them from extinction, while lifting small-scale farmers out of poverty. Story appeared in World Ark  accompanied by glorious black and white photos, and the cover also featured an image from the trip. View the beautiful digital version of the issue here.