Stephen Robert Miller | An Island Press author

Stephen Robert Miller

Stephen Robert Miller is an author and journalist whose reporting and essays on climate change, conservation, and agriculture have appeared in National Geographic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Guardian, Discover Magazine, Sierra Magazine, Audubon, Huffington Post, High Country News, Undark, and many others.

Miller was born in Pittsburgh, educated in life and academia in Tucson, Arizona, and has since bounced around the American West, seeking out out complex stories and imperfect heroes. Whether writing about invasive pigs in the American South, dengue fever in Bangladesh, drying farms in Arizona, Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel development in the Arctic, plastic pollution, electric trains, gemstone mining, the green revolution, or wildfires, he strives to present the perspectives of people who live the stories as much as those who call the shots.

Miller was a 2018-2019 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he also teaches science writing. He served previously as senior editor of environmental justice for YES! Magazine and as editor for a Washington State-based newspaper publisher. His work has earned accolades from the Society of Professional Journalists, NASA Space Grant Consortium, Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, Mark Finley Gold Pen News Writing Competition, and Native American Journalism Association. He studied journalism at the University of Arizona and now lives in northern Colorado, with his wife, son, and an old motorcycle.

Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature by Stephen Robert Miller | An Island Press book

Over the Seawall

Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature

In March 2011, people in a coastal Japanese city stood atop a seawall watching the approach of the tsunami that would kill them. They believed—naively—that the huge concrete barrier would save them. Instead they perished, betrayed by the very thing built to protect them. Erratic weather, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse now affect every inch of the globe. Increasingly, we no longer look to stop climate change, choosing instead to adapt to it.

Never have so many undertaken such a widespread, hurried attempt to remake the world.