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Michelle Nijhuis on Muck Rack

Michelle Nijhuis

Verified
(She/Her)
Washington
As seen in: High Country News, Apple Podcasts, MSN, MSN UK, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Washington Post Opinions, Yahoo Canada, Aol, BuzzFeed and
Covers:  biodiversity, environment, american west, climate, energy
Author of BELOVED BEASTS, tinyurl.com/belovedbeasts. Editor @HighCountryNews, bylines @NatGeoMag, @nybooks &c.; Find me @ Conservation Works on $ubstack.

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Michelle Nijhuis’s Biography

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Michelle Nijhuis writes about science and the environment for National Geographic and other publications. She is also a longtime contributing editor of High Country News, a magazine known for its in-depth coverage of environmental issues in the American West. Her work has won several national awards and been included in three Best American anthologies. After 15 years off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, she and her family now live in White Salmon, Washington.

Michelle Nijhuis’s Journalist Portfolio

When the Snows Fail

When the Snows Fail

The American West faces persistent drought, whether or not relief comes this winter. When will the hard choic…

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Can Coal Ever Be Clean?

Can Coal Ever Be Clean?

Coal provides 40 percent of the world's electricity. It produces 39 percent of global CO2 emissions. It kills…

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Hacking the Breast Pump - The New Yorker

Hacking the Breast Pump - The New Yorker

At the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck! hackathon, roughly a hundred and fifty engineers, designers, midwives, …

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How Dying Fish Populations Affect the Stability of All Life

How Dying Fish Populations Affect the Stability of All Life

A story about how everything really is hitched to everything else in the universe.

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Rethinking the Keystone Pipeline - The New Yorker

Rethinking the Keystone Pipeline - The New Yorker

One of the recurring arguments in favor of Keystone XL—the hard-fought "bullet pipeline" that would create a …

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How to Laugh at Climate Change - The New Yorker

How to Laugh at Climate Change - The New Yorker

Tragedy marches inexorably toward the end, but comedy keeps us guessing at our fate.

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Articles

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By Michelle Nijhuis Verified
| Columbia Insight
Wrapped her: Actually, the sex of this young osprey is unknown. But it’s doing better now. Photo: Port of Hood River By Michelle Nijhuis. August 20, 2026. At about 7:15 am on Wednesday, Aug. 5, Angela Alberg was driving south on the Hood River-White Salmon Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River when she noticed the vehicles ahead of her swerving around an obstacle. “I got to it and saw it was this huge bird—wings flapping, mouth open, freaked out,” she says.
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Building a Science of Recovery

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By Michelle Nijhuis Verified
| Substack
“I’m tired of being only an archivist of loss,” Becky Chaplin-Kramer, a lead scientist for the World Wildlife Fund, told the Fourth World Biodiversity Conference in mid-June. The scientific effort to document the biodiversity crisis, she told her listeners, had successfully forced political leaders to recognize the crisis as an existential threat. But to solve the crisis, she said, the “science of decline” must be accompanied by a science of recovery.
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El futuro incierto del río Mekong

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By Michelle Nijhuis Verified, David Guttenfelder Verified
| Dialnet - Universidad de La Rioja
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Interview

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What was your first job as a journalist?

High Country News intern, class of 1998.

Have you ever used a typewriter?

Yes!

What does it mean to be a journalist?

To make sense of complex, important issues for intelligent but distracted people.