nature-writing

Henry David Thoreau is a lot of things: a father of nature writing in 19th century America; a radical thinker who challenged societal norms; the subject of homework assignments for bored 21st century high school students.The transcendentalist’s legacy is the subject of a new three-part documentary. We’ll speak with the filmmakers behind the project.

Henry David Thoreau is a lot of things: a father of nature writing in 19th century America; a radical thinker who challenged societal norms; the subject of homework assignments for bored 21st century high school students.The transcendentalist’s legacy is the subject of a new three-part documentary. We’ll speak with the filmmakers behind the project.

For more than two decades, award-winning science and nature writer David Quammen has traveled to Earth’s most far-flung and fragile destinations, sending back field notes from places caught in the tension between humans and the wild. "The Heartbeat of the Wild" features 20 of those assignments: elegantly written narratives, originally published in National Geographic magazine and updated for today, telling colorful and impassioned stories from some of the planet’s wildest locales.

In The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills, naturalist Leslie Sharpe trains her eye and narrative gifts on these and other New York…