Freelance journalists toil in isolation and obscurity.  The isolation comes with the territory: After the excitement of the research – travel to exotic destinations, interviews with specialists, online exploration – it’s you, a blank screen and one word at a time.

I found an immediate home with the Society of Environmental Journalists when I first joined in 1997.  Since then this international organization has provided colleagues, assignments, training in the craft, and true friends.

Years ago a Sacramento Bee editor went looking for a correspondent and found me, an erstwhile east-coast academic living at the end of a paved road in rural Plumas County.

I’m in a show!  Listen to Your Mother is a national series of live readings celebrating Mother’s Day and dedicated to mothers: having, being, enduring…

I work alone.  I have almost always worked alone.  That’s the nature of freelance writing – or so I assumed.

East of the Tehachapi Mountains, east of the jumbled junction of five ecoregions that forms one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, Joshua Tree offers yet another unique convergence.

Chernobyl is most remarkable for what it does not reveal: radiation.  You cannot see, hear, smell or feel the region’s best-known product.

I don’t generally get jazzed by bridge construction but the Spanish Creek Bridge is an exception. 

Spending a week in Owens Valley is humbling.  With Mt. Whitney looming to the west at 14,505 feet above sea level, and Death Valley off to the east at 282 feet below, it puts mere humans into perspective.

I have been following Eureka-area Veterans For Peace and their progress restoring the Golden Rule, a 30-foot wooden boat that in 1958 sailed toward the Marshall Islands atomic test area to protest nuclear weapons

I will be attending the University of Oregon law school’s conference to moderate a panel, “Native American Land Acquisition for Federally Unrecognized Tribes.”