Stephen Nash

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Grand Canyon for Sale -- Public Lands Versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change, is about political forces that threaten the future of our national parks and public lands and how to oppose them.

Stephen Nash -- I'm that guy -- was born in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles in 1947, but my family moved to Cave Junction, Oregon, when I was 6. It was, and still is, a weedy but charming rural logging town. There were plenty of places to get lost in the woods with your pals all day, and sometimes overnight.

Lucky, I know: all the fascinations of skunks, deer, forest fires, caves, owls...and of demonic, smoking sawmills, ripped-up moonscapes along the ridges of Eight Dollar Mountain -- the legacies of chrome and gold mines -- and near-endless fields of stumps, eroded slopes, and gullies left by clear-cut logging operations. Unforgettable, too: the serene but polluted Illinois River, where we'd swim among floating, cast-off hunks of meat and bones from a rendering plant upstream.

Even then, we sensed how fragile these landscapes were. One way or another that mix gave rise long after to my writing and reporting on science and the environment.

I was worthless as a science student, but I wear that -- not always persuasively, I guess -- as a credential for the job as i see it. I try to translate science research, by talking with its practitioners, into English plain enough to make its importance and its impacts clear. It was encouraging, then, when my book Virginia Climate Fever won the American Institute of Physics award for science writing, and Blue Ridge 2020 earned the Southern Environmental Law Center's Reed Award for "best book on Southern environmental issues."

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