Eight years ago, I drove to Sag Harbor and sat down for tea with Maria Matthiessen, telling her I wanted to write a book about her late husband, Peter. She warned me against it: a Sisyphean task! I pushed on anyway. (Maria was right.) And today, miraculously, is publication day for TRUE NATURE.

This is one of the sharpest, most thoughtful adventure memoirs I’ve read in years. Reminded me of McPhee’s Coming Into The Country, but written in a time of melting glaciers and melting brains. www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ben-w...

🧵 I see my book Becoming Earth as one part of a larger emerging movement: a resurgence of holistic, planetary-scale thinking; an evolving Gaia as a modern coevolutionary framework for understanding Earth; and a renewed recognition of the animacy, agency, and rights of more-than-human living systems

This is the kind of review every good author dreams of one day receiving—deep, careful, tough, but ultimately geared not toward scoring cheap points but rather toward illuminating the dark spaces between the sentences and the author’s corpus as a whole. A real feat.

I finished this book two weeks ago and have been thinking about it ever since—a brilliant, turbulent, troubling feat of planetary writing. There are passages in here that will freeze the air in your chest, and ideas that will crack your dead, calcified heart right open.

A big deal. And if you want to understand how a bunch of Virginians re-engineered Dominion's incentives such that building the country's biggest offshore wind project made more sense than building Appalachia's biggest fossil gas pipeline, I've got a book for you...

@bsaxifrage.bsky.social Love your work. I have a quick q: when you write “the number one use of harvested wood in Canada is burning it for energy”—is this a reference to firewood to heat homes, or wood-pellet/biomass power plants? Or both combined? And of the two, which emits more net c02 annually?

When it comes to climate change, industrial logging in Canada is part of the problem, not the solution.

People all over the world—in Japan, Germany, Australia, and the US—have begun asking a simple question: Why be buried in a traditional cemetery, when your body can be placed in a forest instead? My latest, for @outsidemag.bsky.social www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adve...

I was searching for the Thoreau passage when he lost his marbles on Mt Katahdin, and look what I found! This old gem from @robertmoor.bsky.social, which evidently I republished ages ago. I feel like an ouroboros ... www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2016-...

I think most of who have worked in writing or entertainment know that piracy is a fact of life, and has been for a long time now. But there’s a difference between a broke student downloading a PDF of your book, and a multibillion dollar company stealing your work for its own bullshit purposes.

This is an abysmal, brutally reverse-engineered instance of mega-corp fossil-fuel lawfare waged against Greenpeace. It’s a strategic takedown of a deep-rooted, rare-growing force for good on Earth. A(nother) desperate day for justice and the planet.

Word of the day is ‘cumber-world’ (14th century): a person or thing that encumbers the planet.

If activist Zain Haq is deported to Pakistan on Saturday, Canada would become the first country in the world to deport a non-violent climate protester, says federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May #ClimateActivism #Canada #InternationalJustice #ZainHaq www.nationalobserver.com/2025/01/20/n...

Great little thread. Some may have missed the odd fact that a black pastor at DJT’s inauguration just passingly referenced one of the most strikingly racist monuments in the US: Stone Mountain, Georgia. There are layers of history and irony hidden within this one phrase, which Cotlar unpeels.

It’s worse than most folks realize. Since last Sept, journos in Canada haven’t been able to post *any* links to their own work on FB, bc the gov passed a (sensible) law that Meta must share some of the profit it makes off those links, & Zuck threw a tantrum. Corporate greed, strangling journalism.

“Lynch enters nightmare worlds like the Eagle Scout he was, as inquisitive about the depths of human psychology as he is about bugs and twigs.”

I would kill to know what happened in the three days between these two tweets.

Debord put his finger on this problem all the way back in the 60s. Isolation—or more specifically, thinner and thinner forms of connection, resulting in “lonely crowds”—is central to the workings of capitalism. Car culture is one (esp damaging) example of this phenomenon. Screen culture is another.

Every once in a blue moon you run across a piece of writing that has clearly taken years and years and years to write—years of not just work but of *life*. A piece of the writer’s very soul. This is one such piece. It’s brilliant, and it’s chilling. Award committees, take note.

I'm currently reading @ferrisjabr.bsky.social's Becoming Earth and it's brilliant. Packed with eye-opening stories about how life made the Earth as we know it, each tale beautifully told

Another great list. Just discovered a whole bushel of beloved writers that I didn’t know had already migrated here…

Books are the best gifts. Highly recommend CROSSINGS for all your ecology-minded friends - or anyone who wants to think philosophically about hitting bugs on the highway. 🦋

An early reminder to apply for the Matthew Power award, which provides $12,500 to support a longform journalism project. Deadline is February 19: journalism.nyu.edu/about-us/awa...

It was a honor and pleasure to edit this whole volume, and especially Sohini's fabulous prose poem. Definitely check it out (and marvel at the layout folks who were able to reproduce the spatial layout of Sohini's text).

I was deeply disappointed by the lack of nature/science/climate/enviro on many major end-of-year book lists—so I decided to make my own! Introducing: ✨🎁📚 The 2024 Holiday Gift Guide to Nature & Science Books ✨🎁📚 Please share: Let's make this go viral in time for Black Friday / holiday shopping!

I first came upon Baudrillard’s AMERICA when it was first published in 1988 (yes, I am that old). At the time, I didn’t really understand it. I was young, living in Canada & seeing a guy (briefly) who was the fortune teller at New York’s Danceteria. He had a kiosk on the roof (1)

Approaching the mighty Skógafoss.

This seems like a good north star for any nonfiction writer (or really, any human being) to aim for. (Wallace Shawn, describing the authorial voice of Jonathan Schell, in the NYRB)

For anyone just getting started here, I created a list to help you find some smart, hopeful, angry, beautiful writing about this watery plant-strewn rock floating in the middle of the cosmos we all happen to live on. Feel free to suggest additions! go.bsky.app/5Z65eat

[stares at Canada]

For @emergencemagazine.bsky.social , I wrote an essay about how trees help us think about time—what we should preserve from the past, what we owe to the future, and how the two bleed over in the bodies of trees. emergencemagazine.org/essay/dendro...