What does it mean to bear witness to a world of immense wonder AND a world in the midst of climate crisis? What does it mean to lose ourselves in nature AND reckon with the loss of the natural world in the past, present, and future?

Two Award-winning authors and journalists, Lauren Markham and Ed Yong, will share their recent work and explore these questions through a joint Q&A facilitated by Golden Gate Bird Alliance Board Member Laurie Sample. Lauren will read from her recent book “Immemorial” about how we memorialize and what this might mean for inspiring action. Ed Yong will share an excerpt from this forthcoming book “Life Beyond Measure: Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale”, to bring us into the vast landscape of nonhuman organisms.

Lauren Markham Bio

Lauren Markham is a writer and journalist based in California whose work on environmental and social issues regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, Orion, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024), which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the California Book Award, and the Northern California Book Award, and Immemorial, longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award and winner of the Northern California Book Award. She is currently working on her first novel.

Ed Yong Bio

ED YONG is the author of two prize-winning New York Times bestsellers, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. He has been a TED speaker, a Best American Science and Nature editor, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Oakland, California, where he’s probably birding right now.