Selected Work

FEATURE Meet the Fire Starters Restoring One of North America’s Greatest Forests, Audubon Magazine, Fall 2023
In the American Southeast, the fates of longleaf pines and red-cockaded woodpeckers are inextricably tied. To save both, we must embrace “good fire.”

FEATURE Shaky Ground, Science, July 27, 2023
A fast-growing industry is paying farmers for carbon stored in soils. But some doubt the science is ready for prime time.

ESSAY Could one of our most important trees disappear with barely a whimper?, The Nature Beat, Feb 22, 2023
A mysterious disease aided by an apathetic bureaucracy could doom the American beech.

NEWS For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest, New York Times, Feb 16, 2023
A biotech company has tweaked a tree to photosynthesize better. But can it be a major climate solution?

Marketplace interview based on this story

FEATURE Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s In Dispute., New York Times, Nov 7, 2022
The wood-wide web is everywhere. But some experts fear the public excitement is outpacing the science.

FEATURE Urban Oasis, Science, Nov 3, 2022
In Berlin, pioneering research into urban ecology has found surprising biodiversity in the city’s green spaces. Increasingly, the world’s cities are emerging as potential refuges for species losing habitat elsewhere.

ESSAY Are There Better Places to Put Large Solar Farms Than These Forests?, New York Times, Sept 21, 2022
Conflicts over land are rapidly becoming one of the biggest impediments to deploying clean energy.

OBITUARY Overlooked No More: Regina Jonas, Upon Whose Shoulders ‘All Female Rabbis Stand,’ New York Times, August 19, 2022
The remarkable and long-hidden story of the world’s first woman rabbi.

FEATURE Ditch Your Grocery Store. Go Foraging Instead. Washington Post Magazine, August 15, 2022
A romp through the world of wild foods and the people who forage and cultivate them – and a call for all of us to get to know the amazingly various and fascinating edible plants that we live among.

FEATURE A fungal safari, Science, July 7, 2022
I followed a team of “myconauts” into the ancient forests of Chile for the beginning of a quest to map the world’s mycorrhizal fungi — a group of organisms thought to play a key role in sustaining ecosystems and protecting the climate.

ESSAY The D.C. area, with planning, can be a climate refuge, Washington Post, July 1, 2022
The region where I live – a place no one moves to for the weather – may have some surprising climate advantages in the decades to come.

NEWS Is the world’s oldest tree growing in a ravine in Chile?, Science, May 20, 2022
Scientist claims oldest tree record — and warns that the record-breaker may die without further protection

FEATURE Bringing Back Fire: How Burning Can Help Restore Eastern Lands, Yale E360, April 7, 2022
Almost every part of what is now the United States used to burn regularly. I reported on people trying to bring fire back, why they do it and what makes burning in 2022 so hard.

Supported and co-published by the Food & Environment Reporting Network

Republished by Wired and Mother Jones

ESSAY Can a Hidden World Be Saved From an Invasive Scourge?, New York Times, February 21, 2022
A collaboration with Leslie Brice Bustamante to document the valuable yet threatened ash wetlands of Maryland.

Learn more about our project.

FEATURE Where Berlin’s infamous wall once stood, humans and nature now flourish, Washington Post, December 3, 2021
A travelogue of my bike ride along the 100-mile trail tracing the route where the Berlin Wall once stood.

See a complete list of my writing.

I am an award-winning science and environmental writer. My work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Science, Quanta and many other outlets.

I look for the story that isn’t being told, the angle that isn’t being considered. I like writing about underdogs and the unexpected, about places others don’t go to and people whose voices aren’t being heard. Trees and forests have a special spot in my heart.