I write about wilderness, conservation, and the history of environmental thought, especially in the American West. I’m a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University in Tempe, where I teach courses in environmental ethics & the history and philosophy of conservation.

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~Coming in August 2024~

The Heart of the Wild brings together some of today’s leading scientists, humanists, and nature writers to offer a thought-provoking meditation on the urgency of learning about and experiencing our wild places in an age of rapidly expanding human impacts.

These engaging essays present nuanced and often surprising perspectives on the meaning and value of “wildness” amid the realities of the Anthropocene. They consider the trends and forces—from the cultural and conceptual to the ecological and technological—that are transforming our relationship with the natural world and sometimes seem only to be pulling us farther away from wild places and species with each passing day. The contributors make impassioned defenses of naturalism, natural history, and nature education in helping us to rediscover a love for the wild at a time when our connections with it have frayed or been lost altogether.

Praise

Falling in love with the world around us—a world from which we’re too often abstracted and distant—may be the first crucial step toward saving some of that creation. The essays in this book, from some of the wisest and most eloquent voices on the planet, should summon us to this vital work.

Bill McKibben, editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau

This richly reflective book alerts us that conserving nature’s diversity will take more than political will and conventional pieties. It will take some sharper thinking. We can’t honor or save the ‘heart’ of the ‘wild’ until we better understand, and agree more broadly upon, what those two words might mean.

David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo and Breathless

The Heart of the Wild is a wonderful collection—a rich conversation that challenges orthodoxies, makes unexpected connections, and reminds us of the value of even the humblest forms of life

Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts

In the enduring words of Aldo Leopold, the ecologist lives alone in a world of wounds—but The Heart of the Wild makes for awfully good company. The eclectic essays in this collection probe and challenge conservation’s deepest-held beliefs, lament all our planet has lost, and outline provocative visions for a future in which nature persists, albeit in a much-changed form. By turns heartbreaking and inspiring, this book finds wildness in the Anthropocene’s rubble, and alleviates our loneliness along the way

Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings and Eager

This star-studded compendium of writing by some of the world’s leading thinkers and researchers belongs in every nature lover’s library. These essays will thrill and challenge and maybe even upset you—but there is no way you will come away from this book unmoved.

Sy Montgomery, author of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

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Zoos have always had a troubled relationship to what is considered the “real” wild. Even the most immersive and naturalistic zoos, critics maintain, are inherently contrived and inauthentic environments. Zoo animals’ diet, care, and reproduction are under pervasive human control, with natural phenomena like disease and death kept mostly hidden from public view. What would a “wilder” zoo―one that shows the public a wider range of ecological processes―look like? Is it achievable or even desirable? What roles can or should zoos play in encouraging humanity to find meaningful connections with wild animals and places?

A Wilder Kingdom is a provocative and reflective examination of the relationship between zoos and the wild. It gathers a premier set of multidisciplinary voices―from animal studies and psychology to evolutionary biology and environmental journalism―to consider the possibilities and challenges of making zoos wilder. In so doing, the contributors offer new insights into the future of the wild beyond zoos and our relationship to wild species and places across the landscape in an increasingly human-dominated era.

Praise

What are zoos for, and what should they be like? In the Anthropocene era, long-held distinctions between human and natural, managed and wild are blurring. A Wilder Kingdom asks how zoos might be reimagined to represent and support wild nature. This delightful and diverse book offers thoughtful and challenging ideas for the future of zoos in an increasingly human-dominated natural world

Bill Adams, Claudio Segré Professor of Conservation and Development, Geneva Graduate Institute

This remarkable collection of essays addresses the shifting and conflicted missions of zoos in the modern world. The central theme of the chapters is the possibility of enhancing the experience of wildness for zoo animals and visitors. Along the way, the authors address a host of fascinating questions. For example, what would a wilder zoo look like? Is a baby rhino who was conceived via in vitro fertilization a wild animal? Can zoos prepare animals for life in the wild? This book changed the way I think about zoos, and I suspect it will pave the way for the zoos of the future.

Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals

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Foreword by Roderick Frazier Nash

Our ideas of the wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable “place apart” to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation.

Wild Visions: Wilderness as Image and Idea (Yale University Press) is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

The volume was developed in collaboration with photographer Mark Klett and historian Steve Pyne. It’s inspired in part by the “exhibit format” series popularized by David Brower during his tenure as executive director of the Sierra Club in the 1960s. Wild Visions employs this classic photographic essay format to consider the continuity and change in these traditional American views and images of the wilderness, taking stock of the swirl of changing representations, values, narratives, and faces of the places we call wild in the 21st century.

Praise

A thought-provoking and informative exploration of the idea of wilderness in the U.S. It is a pleasure to see so much smart photography, across multiple generations of production, gathered in one volume.

Rebecca A. Senf, author of Making a Photographer: The Early Works of Ansel Adams

‘Wild Visions‘ is not simply a compilation of landscape photographs, but an argument for the power of imagery to enhance our evolving understanding of wilderness and its preservation, something peculiar to the identity and values of Americans.

Laura McPhee, author and photographer, River of No Return

In essays, dialogues, and photographs, this eloquent book circles through historically shifting definitions of the word ‘wilderness.’ The authors draw on their lives in the American West and decades of analysis to challenge our perceptions.

Anne Wilkes Tucker, Author of The Woman’s Eye

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Page background image: William Henry Holmes, 1882. Panorama from Point Sublime (looking east), from the Atlas to Clarence E. Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District. Monograph 2, U.S. Geological Survey.

“New and Recent Books” background image: Ansel Adams, 1937. View of Valley from Mountain, “Canyon de Chelly” National Monument, Arizona. US National Archives.