Renata Golden

An Earth Song: A Letter from Aldo Leopold to Ta-Nehisi Coates

This essay imagines a letter Aldo Leopold might have written to Ta-Nehisi Coates about resonances Leopold—forester, conservationist, and author of A Sand County Almanac (1949)—might have found with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the National Book Award winning book Between the World and Me (2015). Resonances explored in this essay include race as a construct, the land ethic, and violence done to Black bodies as well as to the Earth.

Selected Works

Personal essays

An Earth Song: A Letter from Aldo Leopold to Ta-Nehisi Coates

This essay, in the Strange Wests issue of About Place Journal, imagines a letter Aldo Leopold might have written to Ta-Nehisi Coates about "reflections between the Earth and me."

Hammer Test

In the battle between Chiricahua leopard frogs and American bullfrogs, the only available options are to kill American bullfrogs directly or kill Chiricahua leopard frogs indirectly. We are responsible by doing something, and we're responsible by doing nothing.

Mountain Time

From the Chiricahua Mountains in the desert southwest to Cnoc na dTobar in County Kerry, the heartbeat messages a mountain carries continue an ancient conversation.

What the Two Percent Are Saying

"Studies have shown that prairie dogs have one of the largest vocabularies in the animal kingdom, with more sophisticated language skills than whales, dolphins, or parrots. Prairie dogs have ... a call for human and can add syllables to that call to say tall human in a blue shirt and thin human in a white shirt and short, fat human in a yellow shirt. A prairie dog in Utah can invent a new call for something she has never seen before, and a prairie dog in Colorado will understand what that call means the first time he hears it. Prairie dogs do not need dictionaries."

Groundhog Days

This essay looks at the Bosnian War in the context of a power outage in in Texas in February, 2021 that left 4.5 million homes and businesses powerless and almost 15 million people with either dirty water or none at all, some for several days. The "massive electricity generation failure" even has its own Wikipedia entry. More than a hundred people died, including an eleven-year-old Conroe boy who froze to death in his bed.

Bird Families

"Birds are born knowing that some day they will leave everything familiar and travel, sometimes thousands of miles, to a place they have never been, to eat foods they have never tasted."

Poetry

How I Spend My New Summers

"How I Spend My New Summers" in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher's Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration

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