Joshua E. Brown

I’m a science writer, photographer, and writing instructor who explores the wonders of nature—its mechanisms and madnesses. For nearly three decades, I’ve been writing stories and creating images that center on scientific expeditions and conservation.

To find these stories and images, I’ve bashed my way up rivers in Madagascar, with spider taxonomists, hunting for Darwin’s spiders—gathering video footage published by National Geographic and the BBC. I’ve traveled up the coast of Greenland in a helicopter writing the story of four geologists who found signs of ancient forests under a mile of ice—and co-produced a video about the research published by the Wall Street Journal. This trip also led to my photos being published by the New York Times, Wired, Washington Post, and CNN. Closer to home, I’ve peered down into toilets and watched activists in Brattleboro, Vermont, carry bikeloads of piss in buckets—for a story about urine recycling I was hired to write for the Anthony Bourdain-founded magazine Roads & Kingdoms. I’ve bumped in a motorboat—for days—off the coast of Costa Rica chasing humpback whales with a team of biologists who are decoding their eerie songs.

I even wrote a story about the connection between artisanal cheese, crystals that form in the Arctic Ocean, and the origin of life. (Really. You can read the story here.)

My work has also published by the Boston Globe, Wired, US News & World Report, Wild Earth, Conservation, Land & People, Middlebury Magazine, Medill Magazine (Northwestern University School of Journalism), Boston College News, the NASA homepage, and other outlets—including 18 cover stories for Vermont Quarterly, a magazine published by the University of Vermont, where I am a staff writer and photographer.

I spend a lot of time asking scientists: How does that work? How do you know? What’s that mean? Can you say that again, this time nice and slow?

Teaching

Since 2018, I’ve been part of the faculty in the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist graduate program where I teach two courses on science and professional writing. You can read more about the program here.  From 2006 to 2018, I taught an undergraduate course on environmental journalism through the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Education

B.A.-Brown University, Providence, RI, 1990

            Modern Culture and Media

M.Th. (equivalent to M.Sc.)-University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1992

            Intellectual and Ecclesiastical History of the 19th Century: Science and Religion

The Rest of My Life

I'm married to a wildlife biologist, Zoe Richards, the director of Burlington Wildways. We have three delightful kids. I love to run in the semi-wilds of Burlington. Generally, I run fast, telemark ski as much as I can, and eat slowly.