🍃 Reciprocity: the interview
6 questions for Jason Anthony
Nature writer, n. A person who delights in paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it.1
“It's an emotional push-pull, certainly, but it’s where I want to be. I’m writing about what’s important. We’re living (or sleepwalking, really) through a crucial moment in both human history and Earth history, and there’s a lot to be said that isn’t being said enough elsewhere.” ~ Jason Anthony
Welcome to Season 2 of the Reciprocity interviews. My inbox is full of treasure in the form of lovingly observed writing about place, encounters both wild and gentle, imaginative kinship and renewed reciprocity. These thoughtful, talented writers kindled in me the desire to learn more about them.
Today’s guest,
, writes Field Guide to the Anthropocene, a weekly essay/newsletter exploring the fundamental changes we’ve made and are making to the Earth. It’s not possible for me to highlight a favorite essay, because everything Jason writes takes my breath away. He puts ideas together with such intellect and heart. That said, his post-Helène essay about rain is a masterpiece.2
Why are you drawn to nature writing?
I’ve always written about nature in one way or another. The small strange lyric poems I wrote in college and grad school were rooted in the natural world, often with an unsure “I” wandering an entropic green world. But it was a young man’s unconscious/intuitive “nature writing,” rather than based on any research. I was spending a lot of time hiking/walking and canoeing in Maine and New Hampshire, and the built world always seemed weird to me as I emerged out of the woods. It still does.
When my life shifted to Antarctica (thanks to someone I met in grad school), my writing quickly shifted too. Poetry didn’t last long in that environment. The lines and stanzas became lyric essays that played and wrestled with the lunar, empty, overwhelming Antarctic landscape. Like so many writers before me in desert landscapes (Antarctica, though a continent covered in ice, is a desert), I fell hard for the sense of endlessness and timelessness in that place. I’ve often described the ice as “the nature before nature,” better described by physics than biology.
I taught myself how to write straightforward prose with my book Hoosh, a quirky but comprehensive narrative history of the human experience of Antarctica through the lens of food, but there’s very little that I’d call nature writing in the book.
I’ve had an idea percolating for a decade or more for a book that bridges my Antarctic landscape writing with my increasing awareness and interest in the Anthropocene (working title: Unnatural Earth), but I discovered Substack along the way and saw pretty quickly that I could scratch a lot of itches with it: nature writing, essays about the loss of the community of life, explorations of the aspects of human nature that have led to that decline, the links between Antarctica and the Anthropocene, etc. It’s kept me busy for nearly four years now.
How does writing about nature affect you, in your work or personal life?
I often joke that with the Field Guide I’m in the bad news business. I do a lot of reading across the gamut of climate/biodiversity catastrophes, lightly spiced with all the wonderful small-scale efforts to patch the real world back together. So on one hand the Field Guide work can weigh heavily on me, but despite the sense of decline that I’m mapping, essay by essay, I know also that I’m paying attention to what’s real and beautiful, both in terms of the Earth itself and the billions of people who care about it.
It's an emotional push-pull, certainly, but it’s where I want to be. I’m writing about what’s important. We’re living (or sleepwalking, really) through a crucial moment in both human history and Earth history, and there’s a lot to be said that isn’t being said enough elsewhere.
While outside, have you ever experienced feeling small, lost or in danger?
All of the above.
I was lost for several desperate, frantic hours on a hunting trip with my father when I was a young teenager. It was only by a significant bit of luck that I stumbled across a logging road in that remote part of northern Maine just in time for a rare vehicle to stop and take me back to where my father was. Otherwise it might have been a much longer episode.
If you don’t feel small in Antarctica, you’re not paying attention. It helps that I spent quite a bit of time away from the large U.S. research base, living in a small tent on an empty continent larger than China and India combined. Most of Antarctica isn’t the charismatic coast with mountains, icebergs, and penguins; it’s an endless undulating snow-dressed block of ice up to three miles deep. There’s no life up there other than microbes blown in on the jet stream and a few visiting humans. To imagine it, picture a sailboat in mid-ocean. Then freeze the ocean solid – including the waves – and turn the boat into a tent.
As for danger, I experienced some interesting Antarctic weather, and managed to get a bit half-drowned on a very ill-conceived New Zealand bushwhack, but never felt closer to death than I do driving a busy highway on a wet night.
What’s a favorite memory of nature from your childhood?
At 10 or 11, I scrambled atop a big brush pile here in Maine and found a nest-like hollow that I could settle into. I curled up inside and spent a long while looking up through the branches at the sky. After a bit, a few birds came along and flitted around the pile looking for bugs to eat. They paid no attention to me, even while perched right above me, and it felt like I’d crossed a threshold into their world.
What do you hope for, for your writing?
I hope to reveal as many aspects as I can of the world we’ve made (and are still making) to the readers who are willing to see them. I want to help people to see the world as it is, to see past our day-to-day concerns and our ecological amnesia to what life on Earth actually looks like in the wake of our impacts, and to offer my best sense of how we got here and where we might go next.
I want people to understand that climate change, for all of its existential importance, is only a symptom of a larger transformation, to understand that the continents and the oceans are as altered as the atmosphere, and to understand that biological activity on this planet has hard limits, many of which we have transgressed.
I hope to convey the idea that Earth is our only home, that it is far more astonishing and beautiful than we realize, that the community of life is our community. I hope to convey the beauty of the world we must now act to protect, restore, and rewild.
I want to write as beautifully and as charismatically as I can while still conveying the necessary information. I hope that the attention I pay to the writing helps motivate readers to understand the content and to act on that understanding.
A writer or other creative artist who makes you hopeful for humanity and the earth.
There is a very long list of writers/artists who help connect us to the natural world. I think often of Barry Lopez, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, Elizabeth Kolbert, Thoreau, and others in the history of folks who have written about the real world and our relationship to it. And as you well know, here on Substack there are wonderful writers continuing in the various traditions of writing about nature, from journalism to photoessays to poems. All of them, in one way or another, remind me that most of us care about the planet and the community of our fellow species. I’m reminded again and again by these writers that so much important, wonderful, vital work is being done to counteract the ravages of the Anthropocene.
But are there any who make me feel like things are going to work out well for life on Earth? Not in the short term, certainly. We’re too far down the path, even now, for the array of species that have accompanied our own evolution to come through unscathed. The extinction rate is too high, the atmosphere is too warm, the oceans are too acidic, and governments are too distracted. Large-scale tipping points seem likely to tip.
What I and you and these other writers can do is raise awareness of both problems and solutions. The hope we can offer is to be our better selves in relation to the more-than-human world, and to advocate for a better path. As I often say, how bad things get is entirely up to us. That, in part, is the definition of the Anthropocene.
A bit more about Jason: In addition to writing about the transformed Earth in his newsletter, he is the author of Hoosh, an award-winning history of Antarctica; the ghostwriter for The Little Things: A Memoir of Paralysis, Motivation, and Pursuing a Meaningful Life; and has published essays in Orion, VQR, The Best American Travel Writing 2007, and more. Hoosh will be reissued in March, 2025, under a new title, The Roast Penguin Chronicles: Hoosh, Scurvy Days, Sleeping with Vegetables, and Other Adventures in Antarctic Cuisine.
Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s the Center for Humans and Nature, where they explore what it means to be human in an interconnected world. Track past and current recipients here.
What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!
Notes and links
If you’d like to participate in this interview series, please DM me on chat, or reach out via email: gabrielli-dot-julie-at-gmail. Find previous interviews here.
For more inspired nature writing and artwork from the best of Substack, check out the articles in NatureStack journal.
In further service to Substack’s nature writers,
curates this lovely directory of nature-focused writers:
thanks, Mary Oliver
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