Essays and Criticism

“Each Word a Rock: On Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild,” Alta Online (April, 2024)

“A Voice From the Tomb,” Poetry Foundation (February, 2024).

“How to Sharpen a Scythe,” The Yale Review (May, 2023).

“One of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn,” Slate (November, 2022).

“Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks,” Emergence Magazine (August, 2022).

This was a close collaboration with the photographer Brent Mathison. A wider portfolio of his Utah photos can be found here.

You can also find an accompanying bibliographical essay, “Railway Notes,” here.

Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

“All Tomorrow’s Fables: How Do We Write About This Vanishing World?” LitHub, (June, 2022).

“Reading in the Anthropocene,” Guernica (June, 2021).

“Badwater,” in volume four, Persons, of Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (2021).

“Orphan Wells,” essay to accompany photographer Meghan Kirkwood’s photographic portfolio. Places Journal (June, 2021).

“Keep Directions by Good Methods,” essay to accompany photographer Chris M. Forsyth’s photographic portfolio. Places Journal (February, 2021)

“Earthward: Landscape Photography in the Satellite Age,” Places Journal (July, 2020).

You can find an accompanying reading list, “Earthward: The Ecology of Vision,” here.

“Placemaps,” The Learned Pig (July, 2020).

“Their Lands, Our Future: The Indigenous Frontline Defenders of the Amazon,” essay to accompany photographer Laurence Ellis’s photographic portfolio. Document (Fall/Winter 2019).

“Mountain Men: On Hiking with Nietzsche,” The Point (September, 2019).

“Friends Like These: On Thoreau and Emerson,” Los Angeles Review of Books (June, 2019).

“The Powers that Be: On History, Heat, and Killing,” North American Review 304.2 (Spring, 2019)

“The Ballad or the Bullet,” North American Review (May, 2019).

“Toward a Useful Ignorance,” The Point 18 (Winter, 2019).

You can find a bibliographical essay to accompany this piece here.

“The Best Books on Radical Environmentalism,” Five Books (July, 2018).

“Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment,” Bookforum (April, 2018).

“Reading to Children to Save Ourselves,” Public Books (March, 2018).

Also collected in Think in Public: A Public Books Reader.

“On Possibility; or, The Monkey Wrench” in Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Robert Emmett, and Marco Armiero.  University of Chicago Press, 2018.

“Voices in Time: An American Timbuctoo,” Lapham's Quarterly (March, 2018).

“A Future Just, Green and Free, Under a Tree Named Karl Marx,” Aeon (March, 2018).

“A Map of Radical Bewilderment: On the Liberation Cartography of Henry David Thoreau.” Places (March, 2018).

“Elm Street, USA,” Nature, Plants 4,1 (January, 2018).

“11 Books and their 11 Spectacular Trees,” Electric Literature (January, 2018).

“Wild Thing: A New Biography of Thoreau,” The Los Angeles Review of Books (July, 2017).

“The Slide Rule and the Crowbar: Henry David Thoreau in the Anthropocene,” The Los Angeles Review of Books (April, 2017).

“Notes from the Enemy's Camp: On John D'Agata's New History of the Essay.” 3:AM Magazine (October, 2016).

“On Care in Dark Times.” Edge Effects (April 12, 2016).

“Distortion is the Sound of Life Uncontained.” The Hypocrite Reader 53 (June, 2015).

“A Letter to my Son as He Nears his Second Birthday.” Stone Canoe 8 (January, 2014).