About

Stephen Robert Miller is an independent journalist, author and editor who covers (mostly) climate change, environmental conservation, and agriculture for National Geographic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Guardian, Discover Magazine, Audubon, Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, Sierra Magazine, High Country News, Undark, CityLab and many others. His first book, “Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature,” will be published by Island Press on Halloween of 2023. It traces the stories of monumental but ultimately doomed adaptations to natural disaster and climate change across three continents.

Miller was born in Pittsburgh, educated in life and academia in Tucson, and has since bounced around the American West from Seattle to rural Colorado. He gravitates toward complex stories with imperfect heroes, and strives to present the perspectives of people who live the stories as much as those who call the shots. His reporting has covered invasive pigs in the American South, dengue fever in Bangladesh, drying farms in Arizona, Indigenous resistance to mining in British Columbia and fossil fuel development in the Arctic, plastic pollution, electric trains, gemstone mining, the green revolution, and wildfires.

Miller was a 2018-2019 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado where he currently teaches feature and science writing. He served previously as senior editor of environmental justice for YES! Magazine where he wrote, edited and photographed for the web and a quarterly printed publication. He also helped produce the magazine’s first multi-award-winning digital special edition, animated video, and a series of comics journalism. Before that, Miller was an editor and then managing editor for a Washington-based newspaper publisher, overseeing the production of six neighborhood weeklies.

His work has earned accolades from the Society of Professional Journalists, NASA Space Grant Consortium, Washington Newspaper Publishers Association and Mark Finley Gold Pen News Writing Competition. He’s most proud of a second place award in environmental coverage from the Native American Journalism Association.

(Photo by Andrew Cullen)