Susan Zakin

Susan Zakin fills an unusual role in environmental writing. A 70s kid from Manhattan who grew up on New Journalism in Rolling Stone and New York magazine, she brought a freewheeling, novelistic sensibility to covering the environment, along with a healthy dose of New York no-bullshit irreverence. In the 1990s and 2000s, she was the insider's pick for environmental commentary in national magazines and through her syndicated newspaper column. A new edition of Zakin's first book, the cult classic Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement, was released in 2018. In this revised and updated 25th Anniversary Edition, Zakin proposes solutions to the current splits in America's political parties and civic life, and offers a prescription for a revived environmental movement to counter the Trump administration's attacks on the environment. Like her first book, Zakin's career bridges the wonky East Coast establishment with the independent thinking that is the defining characteristic of the American West. After her graduation from Columbia University's journalism school, Zakin moved to San Francisco, and a few years later, she began living in Tucson, Arizona, where she had fallen in love with the desert, and, briefly, with a park ranger who thought he was the reincarnation of Edward Abbey. In the Sonoran desert, Zakin saw the extinction crisis up close. She came to view extinction as the great moral question of our time, but found New York editors more interested in Prada or The New New Thing, which usually had something to do with the stock market. Her desire to see a place where humans had collided with other species led her to Madagascar, where she trained environmental journalists as the Sen. John Heinz Fellow in Environmental Reporting. Her mother told her, "Madagascar changed the way you looked at everything," and for once her mother was right. For the past decade, Zakin has written about Africa and the failure of civil society, sounding the alarm for the current constitutional crisis in the United States. The articles and essays from this period are collected in the book Waiting for Charlie: Mercenary Soldiers, Failed States, and the Love That Means More Than Money. Zakin's stops along her way included a brief stint living in New Orleans. In Hurricane Season: What Katrina Taught America, a Kindle Single, Zakin merges her environmental background with her appreciation for New Orleans' culture in a literary essay that explains why it's so difficult to balance nature and culture, even though the two are intertwined. After publishing widely in nonfiction, she stepped back from journalism to work on a novel based on her experiences in Africa in the University of Arizona's MFA program. Susan has written for numerous magazines, including Vogue, GQ, Salon and Orion, and newspapers including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsday. She has been a contributing writer at the LA Weekly, and somehow landed as a monthly columnist at Sports Afield, where she refused to hunt any critters other than insects. Favorite review: ”Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement'' is a fast-paced, fact-filled, and thorough history of that period. Like the self-styled 'buckaroos' of Earth First!, Susan Zakin's writing is brilliant and irreverent, tough and funny, opinionated and sometimes outrageous," wrote Brad Knickerbocker in The Christian Science Monitor. "But this is also a serious work, the most thorough and thoughtful survey of the American environmental movement I have seen." Even better? "Reads like a new Edward Abbey novel." Thanks for that one, Sierra magazine, even if it wasn't entirely meant as a compliment.