Writings by Jenny Price

Books by Jenny Price

Stop Saving the Planet!
An Environmentalist Manifesto

official release (WW Norton)—April 20, 2021

Why aren’t we cleaning up the messes we’ve already made? And why do so many people hate environmentalists? The book offers trailblazing answers, along with powerful ideas for how to stop saving the planet & start making a difference. MORE

Order

“In this moment of reckoning, Jenny Price calls us out to call us in and does so with humor, insight and an in-your-face attitude that is informed and dare I say, hopeful about our capacity to change how we think, see and ‘do’ green” —Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces

“Pithy, funny, exasperated, and informed…you cannot read a more important fifty pages than Stop Saving the Planet.” — Richard White, The Republic for Which it Stands

Flight Maps
Adventures with Nature in Modern America

Basic Books, 1999

Flight Maps records my travels through American history and culture to pursue what began as a simple question: “What does nature mean to me?”

...[and] at the book’s physical, chronological and interrogative center...I have planted a brief history of the plastic flamingo, because I am now convinced that the checkered postwar chronicle of the infamous pink lawn creature speaks more forcefully than most any other thing, person or text about the powerful definition of Nature.

Excerpt: The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History (American Scholar, 1999)

Order

“Humor, self-scrutiny, & a passion for ideas light up [its] pages” — LA Times

Price’s willingness to engage with [nature] anywhere she finds [it] is a refreshing change” — NY Times

Essays

Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.

The Believer, 2006

What the crisis of nature writing amounts to…is that Thoreau really, really needs to Get on the Bus. And my own list of favorite representative topics for a more on the bus nature writing in Los Angeles would have to include mango body whips, the social geography of air, Zu-Zu the murdered Chihuahua, and Mapleton Drive near Bel Air. And, of course, the concrete L.A. River…

Read Part 1 & Part 2

Stop Saving the Planet!—and Other Tips Via Rachel Carson for 21st-Century Environmentalists

Perspectives—2012 keynote talk, American Society for Environmental History

And shouldn’t we fight as fiercely as we can to change the [20th-century nature rhetorics]—with all the skill, passion, and rock-solid integrity that Rachel Carson brought to the cause?

Read

Remaking American Environmentalism: On the Banks of the L.A. River

Environmental History, 2008—Lynn W. Day Distinguished Lecture in Forest & Conservation History, Forest History Society

I’d like to nominate an icon for a future environmentalism. An icon that’s new and dramatic. An icon for everyone. An icon that’s entirely, overwhelmingly inspiring—the Los Angeles River.

The concrete sewer-like thing in all the movies and TV shows. The site of the scene in Terminator 2 where Schwarzenegger flees on a motorcycle from a liquid-metal alien driving a tractor trailer. It’s the most famous forgotten river in the United States.

Read

New World Fables

North American Review, 1992

If you are like me, the trip to the Cocha Cashu research station in the southern Amazon begins of its own accord, a couple of weeks before you leave. You find yourself traveling the neighbors’ lawns late at night, circumnavigating lampposts and waking up birds, losing roughly equal measures of sleep to what you do and don’t know about the jungle.

Read Part 1 & Part 2