Research Statement

My research is primarily reportorial and journalistic. I have published in magazines including American Heritage, Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, Bicycling, E--the Environmental Magazine, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Sierra, Smithsonian, and the New York Times Magazine, as well as the op-ed pages of Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, and the New York Times.

My recent and current research includes: A series of articles on Russian nature reserves, including articles in Smithsonian (June 2001), Sierra (March-April 2002), and Russian Life (September-October 2003). Reporting on politics and environment in the 2004 presidential election that includes an article in E--the Environmental Magazine (January-February 2005) and co-editing the book Red, White, Blue, and Green: Politics and Environment in the 2004 Election (edited by James R. Lyons, Heather S. Kaplan, Fred Strebeigh, and Kathleen E. Campbell; published by Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2004). A narrative legal history, scheduled to be published by W. W. Norton in fall 2007 that grew out of an article that I wrote for the New York Times Magazine.

Topics on which I have published include: the history and origins of nature writing; the influence of nature on artistic form; the role of the bicycle in China; educational exchange between China and the United States; pressures on the Antarctic treaty system; natural and social conditions in the Falkland Islands; traces of early man in southern Africa; saving whales from fishing nets off the coast of Newfoundland; the impact of environmental issues on the presidential election in 2004, and defending the world's largest system of scientific nature reserves in Russia.