Ben Goldfarb '09
Current Home: Spokane, WA
Place of Birth: New York City (grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY)
Education: BA in English and Environmental Studies, Amherst College; Master of Environmental Management (MEM), Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Why did you choose to come to Amherst?
I loved the intellectual freedom offered by the open curriculum, the intimacy afforded by the small classes, and the hip pastoral vibe of the Pioneer Valley. I also appreciated the copious calzone delivery options.
Most memorable or most influential class at Amherst
When I arrived at Amherst College in the fall of 2005, the Environmental Studies department was nonexistent — a galling absence, given the robust departments at rivals like Middlebury. Amherst students with environmental inclinations had to cobble together their own self-designed majors out of a pupu platter of courses, like statistics and geology, scattered across departments. Fortunately, a few visionary professors — Jan Dizard deserves the lion’s share of the credit here — recognized this hole and began to plug it with new course offerings that together formed a nascent major. There were perhaps a half-dozen of us ES ‘09ers, traveling in a pack from Conservation Biology to the Environmental History of Latin America, and we all seemed to take pride in being at the vanguard of a burgeoning movement. When, just a few years later, Environmental Studies became one of the college’s most popular majors, I think we felt a bit vindicated.
Most memorable or most influential professor
Alex Chee, then a visiting writer at Amherst, was an advisor on my senior English thesis, a kind of angsty, Philip Roth-inspired novella that I’d rather forget. To that point, many professors had helped me learn to write, but Alex, a fantastically talented novelist, was the first interested in turning me into a writer, if that makes sense — in not only improving my prose, but in teaching me how to make a living selling words. Being a writer had always seemed like this impossible, penurious calling, but Alex showed me that it could be a sustainable career, and taught me a bit about the guile and discipline that being a professional entails. I’ll always be grateful.
Three others who deserve mention: Judy Frank was a wonderful writing instructor and an encouraging early advisor; the aforementioned Jan Dizard introduced me to works of environmental nonfiction that remain touchstones today; and Rachel Levin’s Conservation Biology class set the intellectual foundation for my career as a wildlife writer.
Research Interests
Ecology, conservation biology, public lands management, environmental history.
Awards and Prizes
In 2009 I received Amherst’s Peter Burnett Howe Prize for excellence in prose fiction. In 2017 I led a team of journalists that won Top of the Rockies Awards for excellence in Public Interest, Education, Environment, and Health Reporting.
Favorite Book
Am I allowed to name more than one? Within my little environmental nonfiction bubble, David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, Emily Voight’s The Dragon Behind the Glass, and John Valliant’s The Golden Spruce have lately made an impression. Favorite novels in recent years include Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.
Favorite Author
John McPhee is the best in the world when it comes to making readers care passionately about esoteric subjects — oranges, shad, golf balls, the geologic history of Wyoming — in which they had no prior interest. Considering my goal in Eager is to make you give a dam(n) about a giant rodent, I could choose a worse hero.
Tips for aspiring writers?
One of the bizarre and delightful things about being a writer is that you can pick up the phone and ask just about any question to just about any person and, more often than not, they’ll at least attempt to answer it for you. Use that power! Just about every dissatisfying story I’ve ever written has, in retrospect, suffered from a lack of reportorial thoroughness; conversely, I’ve never written an article that didn’t benefit from making one last phone call or sending an extra email. The same advice applies to fiction writing: I just finished Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, for instance, for which the author conducted dozens of oral history-style interviews to recreate the gestalt of the World War II-era New York City waterfront. We often fetishize writing as this solitary, monastic pursuit accomplished using nothing more than a laptop and a coffee pot, but don’t be fooled — every author relies on a small army of researchers, experts, sources, and guardian angels. Don’t be afraid to summon your army.
Tell us a bit about your path to becoming an author
After graduating Amherst I had a couple of field ecology jobs — a rather grisly gig killing invasive trout in Yellowstone National Park, followed by urban tree research in the Bronx — and went to the Yale School of Forestry with the thought of working in wildlife conservation. I remembered pretty quickly that I enjoyed learning about environmental science more than I did conducting it, and that I loved writing about ecology most of all. After earning my Masters, I picked up a couple of magazine internships, which led eventually to a staff writing job at a wonderful publication called High Country News.
During my stint at HCN, I profiled a beaver scientist in Washington and, in the process, became obsessed with the charismatic creatures, defiantly writing a couple of beaver stories despite the eye-rolls of my editors. A year later, Michael Metivier, an editor at Chelsea Green Publishing and fellow Beaver Believer, found my articles and, citing my evident “proud love of the beaver,” convinced me to expand the stories into a book. I suppose the moral, if there is one, is to follow strange passions and say yes to unlikely opportunities — especially when those opportunities involve singing the praises of a semiaquatic mammal.
Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist whose writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Science, The Guardian, Orion Magazine, Outside, Audubon Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. He has spoken about environmental storytelling at venues including Stanford and Yale Universities, the American Fisheries Society, and the North American Congress for Conservation Biology. He is happiest with a fly rod in his hand or a scuba tank strapped to his back.
Learn more about Eager on Ben's website.
Photo Credit: Terray Sylvester