About M.R. O'Connor: M. R. O’Connor is a journalist who writes about the politics and ethics of science, technology and conservation. Her work has appeared online in The Atavist, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Nautilus, UnDark and Harper’s. Her first book, Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) and was one of Library Journal and Amazon’s Best Books of The Year. Her second book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) is an exploration of navigation traditions, neuroscience, and the diversity of human relationships to space, time and memory. Its writing was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan’s Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, & Economics. She recently wrote a book called Ignition (September 2023, Bold Type Books) on fire ecology and prescribed burning, for which she became certified as a wildland firefighter.
In 2008/2009, O’Connor was a reporter for The Sunday Times, an English-language newspaper in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her investigative reporting on topics like disappearances in Sri Lanka’s civil war, global agriculture trade in Haiti, and American development enterprises in Afghanistan have been funded by institutions such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Phillips Foundation, and The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. For a long time, she made her bread and butter as a stringer covering crime, courts, and breaking news in New York City for publications such as The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, and covered the criminal justice beat for the online investigative site The New York World. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a 2016/17 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner, the screenwriter Bryan Parker, and their two sons.
Critters of Interest: Rats, Rabbits, Skunks & Ants
A Forester’s Perspective with Randy Kelly
Sustaining Local with Hoppy Quick
Kiln Drying Lumber with Gary Mead
NYS Wetlands Regulations Update with Ed McTiernan
A Business Owner’s Perspective on Inflation, Supply Chains, & More with Bob Conyea
Clear-Cutting vs. Land-Clearing
Flowering Trees with Gary Mead
Trees Near Your Home
Portable & At-Home Sawmilling with Mike Porter
Alternative Food From the Forest Roundtable Discussion
Tree Bark with Gary Mead
Meet Whitetail Landscape’s Jon Teater
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Carbon Markets for Small Landowners with Finite Carbon’s Matt Smith
Meet TimberWorks Forest Management’s Nathan Waterfield
The Age of Wood with Gary Mead
Forest Improvement for Deer & Wildlife with Gary Graham
Backyard Maple Sugaring
Smoky Bear, Climate Change & Projected Maple Decline
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