From the archive
4 Sep 2026
Before the editorships, Jason Mark spent a stretch on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California. He got there by an odd route: a start in the late 1990s at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a muckraking weekly, then six years as a human rights campaigner at Global Exchange, helping organise protests against the World Trade Organization and the Iraq war. The farm was the second swerve, and the one that stuck. Backpacking had made him fond of wild places; farm work made the attachment physical.
From there he rebuilt a journalism career around food and agriculture, then spent some eight years editing Earth Island Journal and nearly a decade as editor-in-chief of Sierra, the Sierra Club's magazine, with close to a million readers. The reporting took him to the Arctic, the Sonoran Desert, the Alberta tar sands and the aftermath of hurricanes. He is candid about having a point of view - pure objectivity, in his words, is a crock - but insists the work rests on accuracy, thoroughness and fairness, facts first.
His 2015 book, Satellites in the High Country, was boots-on-the-ground reporting: a search for the remaining pockets of untamed land in a human-dominated biosphere. The new one, The Earth Said: Remember Me, is more contemplative, though anchored in profiles of citizen scientists and grassroots activists. Its argument is that memory is not a private comfort but a tool - that what a culture remembers about the living world shapes what it bothers to defend or restore, and that forgetting is itself a mechanism of loss.
He is careful to add that the human pull toward other species - the coyotes, river otters and red cedars he names as kin - is innate but not self-sustaining. It has to be cultivated, or people stay sealed inside their screen-bound lives. That cultivation, more than any single campaign, is what the new book is trying to do - its very subtitle promises a route to reviving memory in order to restore the planet.
Ask the oldest person on your street or in your parish what the place used to hold - which birds, which fish, where the water ran. Write it down with names and dates, and add your own record each season. A dated notebook is a baseline, and a baseline is hard to argue with at a planning meeting.
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