Madeline Ostrander is an environmental journalist and the author of At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth. Named one of Kirkus Review’s 100 best nonfiction books of 2022, Unruly Planet tells the stories of four American communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis. A vivid and deeply reported work of “searching intelligence and uncommon empathy,” in the words of Pulitzer-prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert, the book reflects on what it means to find strength and resilience in this era of upheaval and transition.
Ostrander is a 2023-24 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT. Her work has appeared in the The Atlantic, The NewYorker.com, The Nation, Sierra Magazine, PBS’s NOVA Next, Slate, High Country News, Audubon, and numerous other outlets. She’s appeared as a guest on a wide range of public radio programs—from Baltimore and Louisville to Salt Lake City and San Francisco—as well as PBS’s The Open Mind. Her reporting on climate change and environmental justice has taken her to locations such as the Alaskan Arctic and the Australian Outback. She’s received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Artist Trust, the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Edith Cowan University in Australia.
Ostrander also teaches narrative journalism, science-writing, essay-writing, and nonfiction at Seattle’s Hugo House and has offered workshops at numerous other venues, including the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Western Australia.
She is the former senior editor of YES! Magazine and holds a master’s degree in environmental science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
