Selected Journalism and Essays

Megan Mayhew writes environmental and cultural journalism about climate, conservation, power, gender, and the American landscape. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Recent work on Human Exceptionalism and Ecological Grief in the Guardian, and a podcast on Rachel Carson’s environmental storytelling and the lasting power of Silent Spring for Mongabay.

Climate, Ecology, and the Environmental Imagination

Essays and reporting on climate change, biodiversity, environmental ethics, and the future of the natural world

• Vermont Was Supposed to Be a Climate Haven

• We’re Watching Them Die: Saving the Last Right Whales

• Using Stem Cell Technology to Save the Last Northern White Rhinos

• Protecting Biodiversity and Restoring Indigenous Fishing Rights in Hawaii

• When Environmental Racism and Climate Change Collide

• Hunters & the Power of Non-Traditional Environmentalists

• In Search of the Sacred - Reconciling the Scientific and Spiritual

• Beautiful, Damned: Tracking Beauty in a Wounded World

• The American Lawn as Camp

Women, Power, and Cultural Memory

Recovering overlooked women and examining gender, ambition, artistry, and historical erasure

• The Improbable Life of Helen Jones Woods & the International Sweethearts of Rhythm

• The Vibrant Life and Quiet Passing of Dottie Dodgion

• The USWNT and Closing the Gendered Wealth Gap

• The Feminine Heroic

• Lhakpa Sherpa’s Record-breaking 10th Everest Summit

• “We Loved Each Other” - America’s First Racially Integrated, All-Girls Swing Band

• Marlene Dietrich’s Marginalia

Culture, Place, and the American Landscape

Writing on place, regional identity, memory, architecture, and the cultural meanings of landscape

• The Joy of Roadside Americana

• The Precarity of North Carolina’s Highway 12 - Driving the Outer Banks

• A Visionary Designer, the 60s, and the Artistic Darkness of Bennington

• Decades Ahead of His Time: History Catches Up with Visionary Jimmy Carter

• The Lobsterwomen of Maine

Literary Criticism and Cultural Commentary

Criticism and essays on literature, aesthetics, and the role of art in public life.

• How Allan Gurganus Became a Writer

• A Wild Flag: The Contemporary Resonance of E.B. White’s Wartime Editorials

• Rewilding and Beauty: A Conversation with Jeff VanderMeer and Lili Taylor

• Lydia Millet’s We Loved It All

• Museums, Accessibility, and Environmental Justice

Ethics, Institutions, and the Future of Public Life

Writing on science, environmental ethics, public institutions, and the changing terms of collective life

• Weighing Parenthood in the Climate Crisis

• The Moral Imperative for Alternative Seafood

• Food Security and an Amphibious Shelter for the Gullah Geechee of Hilton Head Island

• Protecting Biodiversity and Restoring Indigenous Fishing Rights in Hawaii