Howdy. Thanks for stopping by.
I’m a San Francisco Bay Area-based environmental journalist and the author of Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.
From 2007 to 2015, I was the editor of the award-winning quarterly Earth Island Journal. Since 2015, I have been the editor in chief of SIERRA, the bi-monthly magazine of the Sierra Club. My writings on the environment have also appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The American Prospect, among many other publications.
In the course of my writing career, I’ve covered a wide range of topics—from climate and energy, to food and farming, to wildlife conservation—that illustrate the intersections between industrial civilization and wild nature.
Well before most people had heard of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, I traveled to Fort McMurray, Alberta in the depth of winter to investigate the social and ecological impacts of the Canadian tar sands. During the 2010 BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, I criss-crossed the Louisiana bayou to talk to Indigenous families and fishing communities hurt by the oil spill. While on the trail of a story, I’ve tracked jaguars on the US-Mexico border, visited big corporate farms as well as small organic ones, and trekked into the after-burns of forest fires.
I’m also something of an advocate. In 2005, I helped to revive San Francisco’s largest urban farm. I continue to keep my hands in the dirt at Alemany Farm, and I still often write and speak about the value of sustainable agriculture.
I have a degree in international relations from Georgetown University and a certificate in ecological horticulture from the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC-Santa Cruz.
I live with my daughter, Lily Miel, and my partner, Nell, in Oakland, California.