All stories have a beginning; mine has its roots somewhere in the farm fields and woods of my book-filled childhood home in rural upstate New York, where, in the fifth grade, I discovered Walden on the shelves of our local one-room library. That was it—I’ve been chasing words and ideas ever since.

I chased them into the academy (I earned my MA and PhD in history from Cornell University; afterwards, I was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), and, when the walls of the Ivory Tower proved too restrictive, back out again.

I write about all sorts of things—from fatherhood and cancer to monkey wrenches and trees and photography. My first book, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, was published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press. Ultimately my thoughts always return to the hold the past has on the present and the way that we shape both to fit the world we want to inhabit.

I’d like that world to be green, healthy, just, and free, for me as well as for you.

I serve on the editorial advisory board for Humans and Nature Press Books and am the communications chair for the Professional Staff Union at UMass Amherst.

I live in the woods, in the Hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, with my wife and two perfect, feral children.

Photography courtesy of Talia Miller