I write about wilderness, conservation, and the history of environmental thought. My current work explores how the myth of the American West—portrayed across literature, film, and photography—has influenced historical and contemporary concepts of wilderness and “the wild.”
My next book, Saving the Wild Country: Five Visionary Environmentalists and the Struggle for Nature in the American West, will be published by Yale University Press in late 2026.
Recent Books
The Heart of the Wild brings together some of today’s leading environmental scholars, scientists, 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
The scientists, humanists, and nature writers whose essays grace this book present subtle, though sometimes striking, differences in defining the term wild. Their thought-provoking essays not only convey the complexities involved—the tensions among preservation, rewilding, and human access—but often surprise with their unconventional attitudes and perspectives. Yet each essayist seems to share a conviction that having a scientific grasp of the perils facing our planet is incomplete without forging a moral and emotional bond with it.
-Kirkus Reviews
A provocative but closely reasoned argument for including the human element in any discussion of the wild.
—Bill Thompson, The Post and Courier
Inspiring readers to examine what it means to fully appreciate the outdoor world, The Heart of the Wild explores what the future holds for wild places and how we may proceed as individuals to honor the invaluable resources of undeveloped wilderness and native species. Brief and captivating, this is a fantastic book for the casual reader of environmental and conservation literature.
—Outside Bozeman
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
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 history, 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 provides a sweeping yet succinct visual depiction of “the wild,” and lays out a critical context for understanding the evolution of cultural meanings in that imagery.
—Curt Meine, author of Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work
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
A welcome and thought‑provoking reappraisal of the meaning of protecting “wilderness” in American history and culture, pleasingly illustrated with nearly two centuries of photographs and writings.
—John Leshy, author of Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands
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