Rebecca Lawton

By Rebecca Lawton
Women in boats have been in the news lately, for all the wrong reasons. Ugly reports of misogyny have surfaced from the Colorado River Unit of the National Park Service in Grand Canyon, and commercial boatwomen have stepped forward to complement the tales with some of them own. Today I’ll add a few more thoughts to the mix.
Much of the crappy stuff is true. I know, because I saw it and lived it. Not taking no for an answer from others was basically the approach that got many...

I had just finished digging an outhouse pit on a river in Colorado with a fellow National Park Service ranger when we saw the unexpected: a solo kayaker paddling the rapids that ran past our camp. A law-enforcement ranger who’d been leaning on a shovel had gotten a better look. He pulled out his two-way radio to call a backcountry station 45 miles downstream. ‘Lone kayaker passing Anderson Hole at 1930 hours,’ said the ranger-cop. ‘He’s headed your way.’
All boaters approved to launch that da...

When I was a young girl exploring the deserts of California and Arizona with my family, I learned about dry camping. Each night we had only a finite amount of water that we’d carried in by car or in our backpacks, limited stores not to be wasted by spilling or overuse. In those moments, guided with love by my outdoor-loving mother and father, I made a little go a long way. I felt the value of water as we measured portions out according to weight or volume. Using only what we needed taught me ...

Movie lore says that, in the 1942 movie Casablanca, the actors singing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis in Rick’s Café are shedding real tears. Die Wacht am Rhein, sung by officers of the Reich, and the French national anthem, the response of refugees headed for America, were performed chiefly by Hollywood’s extras of the day–European émigrés. Many were German Jews. Some had been leaders in the resistance back home. Singing Die Wacht at that time in French Morocco provoked both the film...

Rebecca Lawton, a fluvial geologist and former Grand Canyon whitewater guide, is the author of several books about rivers and the boating life. Today she writes about water, climate, and other environmental subjects for journals such as Aeon, Hakai, Orion, Sierra, and Sonoma County papers.

Her debut essay collection, Reading Water: Lessons from the River, was a San Francisco Bay Area bestseller and ForeWord Nature Book of the Year finalist. Her first novel, Junction, Utah, won a 2014 WILLA Aw...

A guest post, in black and white, from Rebecca Lawton:
I’ve long believed that many lines from the Casablanca screenplay (penned by Epstein, Epstein, and Koch) may come in handy to writers as comeback statements. Because I’ve seen the movie dozens of times, all within the last five years, I’m quite familiar with the valuable advice the script provides. Here I have ranked some of the classic film’s pithier statements from tenth to first place in terms of their relevance to us literary types.
1...

Owls. Owls. Owls keep me up at night.
Not in the way you might think, where mating calls and sudden screeches break the night into scudding dreams. Not because I fear some freak attack, where swooping wings and grasping talons are aimed inexplicably at me instead of at the usual gray squirrel or vole.
Instead it is the absence of the owl’s ghostly hoots—alone, in call and response, or in two-part harmony—that I lose sleep over.
When I first moved to my tree-lined neighborhood, owl calls were ...

Postage stamps are lessons in history, politics, science, or geography packed onto a small piece of gummed paper. They’re also beautiful works of art. In Stamped we’re going coastal, with postal.
The biblical story of Christmas brings together an extraordinary cast of characters in an unfamiliar land—Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and a few shepherds all crowded into a modest stable. Christmas Island—one of Australia’s island territories in the Indian Ocean—also assembles diverse company in a small spa...

Everything about them is beautiful. Martin Humphrey Moynihan’s field notes, illuminated with marvelous drawings and inventive symbols, leap off the page. Moynihan (1928-1996), an expert on animal behavior and founding director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, was known for his distinctive, original pencil sketches, and pen-and-ink renderings of birds, primates, and cephalopods. Portraying three disparate groups all known for their complex social interactions, s...

Messages in bottles are the stuff of romantic tales: last goodbyes from shipwrecks, schoolchildren’s notes, and castaways’ scribbled instructions have all been found on beaches around the globe. Scientists are less known for their tendency to cast bottles, but they have done it with Sisyphean persistence to work out complex patterns of upwelling and flow in the world’s oceans. Casting a bottle from Point A and waiting for a note or email with details on where the bottle was retrieved has been...

In the 1950s, when nuclear tensions were at an all-time high, the hands of the Doomsday Clock moved to 11:58 p.m., as close to midnight as they’ve ever been. The world had a brand-new obsession—how to live with the threat of the bomb. Hollywood responded by introducing moviegoers to a cast of misfit monsters released from polar ice and submarine canyons, and coolheaded scientists whose weapons were knowledge and reason. Today, with the threat of nuclear war only slightly reduced, Godzilla—the...

Everything Change, Volume II

Everything Change, Volume II features 10 stories from our 2018 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest, along with a foreword by our lead judge, renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.

Everything Change, Volume II is free to download, read, and share:

The title Everything Change is drawn from a quote by Margaret Atwood, our first Imagination and Climate Futures lecturer in 2014.

Having trouble downloading the book? Drop us an email at imagination A...

One of the many things I think about is what it means to be a writer – particularly a female environment writer. It seems that the sub-genre of nature writing is characterized by a lack of women – not that they’re not out there, but that male writers are more often publicly championed (see Kathleen Jamieson’s comments in this article for some perspective). Looking more closely, this seems more true of nature writers in particular than environment writers as a whole – for example, the Society ...

The stories in Rebecca Lawton’s Steelies and Other Endangered Species are set in motion by a sense of stewardship: a concern for wild places and the beings — human and animal — who inhabit those places. A collection of fifteen linked stories, Steelies finds its strength in the webs of connection between characters as well as between those characters and their environment, ranging across the rivers and deserts of the western United States.

In the first story in the collection, “What I Never To...