Michael Branch

Michael P. Branch


Island Press author Michael Branch is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has published five books many articles and essays, including recent environmental creative nonfiction in Utne Reader, Orion, Ecotone, Isotope, Hawk and Handsaw, Places, and Whole Terrain. New installments in his essay and podcast series, Rants from the Hill, appear monthly at hcn.org and iTunes.

Rants from the Hill: After many years of essay writing, a wave goodbye

The Rants from the Hill essay series has appeared in High Country News online every month, without fail, since July 2010. A lot has happened in those (almost) six years as we—my wife, Eryn, and our daughters, Hannah and Caroline—have lived as fully as possible our shared life here on a remote hill in western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. And now, with this farewell Rant, I draw the essay series to a close.

Rants from the Hill: A Christmas tree grows in the Nevada desert

While you might imagine that artificial Christmas trees may be traced back only as far as the glory days of plastic in the 1950s, people actually began making fake holiday trees in the mid-nineteenth century. The practice began in Germany, where extensive deforestation compelled folks to make “trees” out of goose feathers that were dyed green.