This week we have a 2024 Portland Book Fest conversation about Planet Earth, and remarkable people who are working to understand it and protect its wonders. Our moderator is Zoë Carpenter, a writer and editor who has reported all over the United States and South America for Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, and other publications. She currently teaches for the Writers in the Schools program with Literary Arts.  

Zoë led a conversation with two Portland-based writers. Ferris Jabr is the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, which shifts our perception of the planet from an inanimate place on which life evolved, but instead a planet that came to life and is itself alive. Jabr reveals a new vision of Earth as a vast interconnected living system – and humans are one of the most radical impacts on those systems. Jabr introduces readers to different people who are working to protect Earth’s ecology and find a way to stabilize the planet in the face of the climate crisis.   

Amy Stewart is known for both the Kopp Sisters detective series along with popular works about the natural world such as The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. Her latest book, which she wrote AND illustrated, is The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Stewart profiles fifty remarkable people whose lives have been transformed by their obsessive passion for… trees. This passion comes from a deeper commitment to being in community and radical vision for the future.  

Both books explore both the human relationship to the planet and the things that make it alive, and make it livable. It’s a wondrous conversation.   

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. His work has been anthologized in several editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. Ferris Jabr lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. His book is titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. 

Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants, and several other popular nonfiction titles about the natural world. She’s also written seven novels in her beloved Kopp Sisters series, based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book is titled The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. 

Zoë Carpenter is a journalist and fiction writer from Oregon. Her writing has been published in Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, Narratively, and elsewhere. A recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, she has also received grants and fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the Catwalk Art Institute, Fishtrap, and PLAYA. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a postgraduate Zell Fellow. Prior that she was an editor at The Nation, where she worked on reported features, investigations, and opinion pieces for print and online.