Noah Charney is an assistant professor of conservation biology at University of Maine, where his research includes spatial ecology and unisexual salamanders. His first book, Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species, published in 2010 by Stackpole Books and co-authored with Charley Eiseman, won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title (OAT) award and a National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA). Charney’s most recent book, These Trees Tell a Story: The Art of Reading Landscapes was published in 2023 by Yale University Press. He lives in Maine with his wife and children.
Why do you write?
In part, I write to hold on to things: moments, stories, creatures that I don’t want to lose. It’s a desperate attempt to cradle these spirits a bit longer in the face of inescapable impermanence. And to pass them on to others to hold.
What are you writing these days? What do you hope to write in the future?
Mostly I’m writing scientific papers on ecology and conservation research; these are really just to keep afloat in the publication-driven game of academia. I’ve long wanted to write a book on the various perspectives and handling of uncertainty across fields. I’ve talked with another Noah Charney – an art history author born one day after me, who writes books about “reading” paintings similar to my “reading” of landscapes – about a book of art and nature mysteries.
If your adolescent self could comment on the fact that you’re a biologist, author, and professor, what would he say?
He would be most excited about my contributions to field guides. As a kid, I would lie on the rug in my room thumbing through my collection of field guides thinking about the people who took the photographs and yearning to get out into the field and be that person. He’d definitely be proud, maybe not fully internalizing why achieving such goals is separate from feelings of fulfillment and happiness. He may also be disappointed by how little time I spend playing with animals or wandering the woods as a biology professor.
What is your writing process? You co-authored Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. What was the co-author experience like for you?
I wrote the insect guide with my friend and long-time tracking buddy, Charley Eiseman. We traveled the country for 40 days and nights taking pictures of little critters – it was an intense experience. I was in the middle of graduate school, on a mission that defied the advice of my advisors. When we got back home, we worked late into the nights to pull it all together. Charley was the brains behind most of it; I can’t, or don’t have the patience to, hold all those facts in my head the way he does. So a lot of the writing was me trying to prove my worth or carve out some little contribution I could feel proud of in the presence of someone with better control of the core content.
I think of myself as a binge writer. I store up experiences and let ideas sinter until the route through makes sense. Then, ideally, I sit down while everyone else is asleep and let it all pour out. Phrases haunt me while I try to fall asleep, and I reformulate them in my head until I have to get up and write down the new configuration, lest I forget by morning.
Perhaps the only time I’ve prepared a physical outline before writing was for the last chapter of These Trees Tell a Story, about tracking in an old orchard. I threw all the pieces up in a cloud on a whiteboard and linked the narrative in a winding, crisscrossing path of arrows and used it to guide the chapter.
What writing advice do you give most often to your students?
Delete the vacuous fluff. I teach writing in my course Field Ecology and Scientific Communication, and students struggle to write simply. My students are tasked with writing about ecological concepts that are often a bit beyond their grasp, so their words end up pacing back and forth ineloquently searching for the way out. The lesson is to fully understand what we’re writing about before we begin. Or, to be open to seeing a spiraling piece of writing as simply a process to find our own way to an idea and not necessarily a product for communicating outward.
One will have to read These Trees Tell a Story for the full story, but can you summarize the message?
Sure, get outside. Look closely at the world; it is complex and deep and beautiful. Everything you do sends concentric ripples outward as nature responds. Responds to you, to every other creature, to every other physical force in the world. It’s fun to find these stories as they bring meaning to our lives and help us feel connected to creation. Things in nature are not random, but informed by context that society is forgetting how to see, and it all makes for great metaphors. So go read the patterns in your backyard. And stop staring at your phone.
What’s your favorite forest? Why?
My childhood backyard. It’s my oldest friend.
What’s the best little-known nature book you’ve read?
I have a strange love of the opening pages of the chapter on Periodical Cicadas by Robert Evans Snodgrass in Volume Five of the 1930 Smithsonian Scientific Series. Most of the books that pop to mind are those I’ve read with my kids over the last few years, like Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems by Joyce Sidman. Also, Salamander Sky by Katy Farber and Meg Sodano captures the magic of spring amphibian migrations.
In your opinion, what’s the most fascinating species in New England?
Am I allowed to say anything other than the unisexual salamanders that I study? Defying any standard species concept, they are an almost entirely female, mostly clonal, probably 5-million-year-old monophyletic lineage that borrows sperm from five other “regular” species. They can have triploid or tetraploid nuclei combining whole genomes from multiple species and have no unique nuclear genes of their own. They are of conservation concern throughout their range, dominate the ponds they live in, are almost never seen because they live underground most of their lives, and are big, cute, and personable.
What’s your favorite way to enjoy the forest?
Napping barefoot in leaflitter in the sun.
Are you listening to anything great right now? Music? Podcasts?
Local radio.
What gives you hope?
Local communities. We live in a town where we walk the kids to school past a store, “The Store,” where we have a family tab written with pen in a paper notebook. The kids can walk in and get fresh baked cookies on the tab from owners we know. We walk home over the river lined with trees and filled with turtles, beavers, fish, and birds. The international order may be burning, social media may be a manufactured nightmare, but when we get back home, the tadpoles are still swimming in our pond. The species may shift from human-caused global change, but there will be bugs and plants and trees in our yard. And, for now, the little notebook sits in The Store with our tab.