National Fisherman was kind enough to raise my pay from $50 to eventually $250 an article and I began selling stories about these issues to the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times and soon, to magazines.
In 1986, I was asked by the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association and the Hudson River Foundation to develop a magazine on the ecology of the Hudson River. River looked at life along the Hudson with an eye to the environmental issues facing the river. The magazine lasted two years—a short run, but during which time we covered major stories that affected a great deal of work on the river.
In 1986 I also became a senior editor at Natural History magazine, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. After three years at Natural History, I received a grant from the American Littoral Society and left Natural History to begin writing a book on the natural and cultural history of the Delaware River Valley.
My research for the book took a full year during which time I developed a network of researchers working on the river and traveled with them into the field. These were biologists, geologists, palynologists, botanists, and archeologists studying diverse aspects of the river’s ecosystem. The book that resulted...
Natural Lives, Modern Times was as much history as natural history, as much about culture as about science.
In 1991, following the book’s publication, I became features and contributing editor at Audubon magazine and began traveling often—home and abroad—writing on how the loss of natural places results in a loss of the cultures that live in them. I wrote on the New River in Virginia, the Peruvian Amazon, and the natural history of the Jordan River Valley. This article, Water and Peace, and another, The Landscape of Hunger dealing with the relationship of environment to hunger, have since been used extensively in university courses on the environment.
I became Editor-In-Chief of Natural History magazine in 1996. During my time at the magazine I focused on moving the magazine away from strictly behavioral science and into more broadly reported stories. I brought in journalists to cover stories and photojournalists to shoot them. The magazine won several international photojournalism awards. I continued to write and travel, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, to meet scientists, learn about their research, and with them, develop articles for the magazine.
During this same period I taught as an adjunct professor in the New York University graduate program in Science and Environmental Reporting. I left Natural History in 1999 to return to writing but heart surgery to repair a bad heart valve took me on another journey that I wrote about in “Chasing Spring,” published in January, 2006, by Scribner.