Daniel Glick
danielglick.net

Daniel Glick is the author of Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, published by PublicAffairs in Spring, 2003. The book is an account of a five-month, around-the-world trip Glick took with his two children after becoming a single father and losing his brother to breast cancer. Their journey took them to places of great ecological wonder that are threatened by human development, including coral reefs in Australia and Bali, orangutan habitat in Borneo, and the Vietnamese jungle home of the last Javan rhinos in mainland Asia.

In January, 2001, Glick published Powder Burn: Arson, Money and Mystery on Vail Mountain, an investigation into the costliest act of ecoterrorism in U.S. history. Powder Burn was praised as “an alpine Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by Outside magazine, and was a Denver Post bestseller and Colorado Book Award finalist. While he was writing the book, Glick was awarded a Ted Scripps Fellowship at the University of Colorado, one of five journalists chosen annually to spend an academic year researching environmental law, policy and science.

Prior to writing Powder Burn, Glick worked at Newsweek magazine for 13 years; the first six as a Washington, D.C. correspondent and the last seven as a Colorado-based special correspondent covering the Rocky Mountain region. After moving to Colorado in late 1994, Glick covered a rash of high-profile stories, including the JonBenet Ramsey homicide, the Columbine High School tragedy, and the mysterious crash of a fully-armed Air Force fighter jet. He appeared more than 40 times on Larry King Live as a commentator on the Ramsey case, as well as CBS This Morning, NBC News’ Today show and many others. He was also an associate producer of a critically acclaimed documentary entitled JonBenet’s America.

He traveled from the panhandle of Idaho to the bootheel of New Mexico for Newsweek, writing about a broad range of subjects -- from the bison slaughter in Yellowstone National Park to a cover story about the possibility of life on Mars. While a Washington correspondent, he contributed to several Newsweek cover stories during the Gulf War, as well as many others -- including the San Francisco earthquake, the Hubble Space Telescope, gays in the military, and global warming. He has reported about the demise of the Siberian tiger from the Russian Far East and traveled upcountry in Haiti with U.S. Special Forces troops.

Glick has also written for more than a dozen other magazines, including National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Outside, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Sports Afield, National Wildlife and Wilderness. He is currently working on a fourth assignment for National Geographic, but is not currently at liberty to talk about the subject matter.

Before completing his Masters degree in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Glick lived in Asia for three years, teaching French and English in Japan and herding yaks in Tibet. An avid outdoorsman experienced in climbing, hiking, skiing and kayaking, he has lived on four continents. A native Californian, Glick now resides in Lafayette, Colorado.

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(The Fresh Air interview is towards the end of the August 20th show)

Click below for a link to a story about Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, the first U.S. soldier accused of cowardice since the Vietnam War. Pogany suffered from combat stress and quite possibly brain stem damage because of an anti-malarial drug the Army told him to take. This story chronicles his legal and emotional journey back from Iraq. Originally published on Salon.com. You may link to Salon.com here, and can access the entire article after signing up for a free "day pass." Otherwise, you may click to a text version of the story here.

Below are three links to recent Outside magazine articles: The first is a story that debunks a widely printed myth that federal and state wildlife biologists "planted" lynx fur in national forests in an attempt to manipulate the Endangered Species Act; the second is a short piece about a group of scuba divers intent on eradicating a voracious, coral-eating starfish in Australia; and the third is a story I wrote that ultimately became the book proposal for Monkey Dancing.

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Like many journalists I've met, I entered the profession because I wanted to make a difference -- by exposing waste, fraud, mismanagement, abuses of power, and political shenanigans. Joseph Pulitzer's fabled words that journalists should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted" are, as far as I'm concerned, the benchmark by which all our work should be judged.

Making a difference, rising above the cacophany of cable television and home entertainment systems and niche marketing and the general noise of modern life, however, is a damnably difficult thing to do as a writer. Over the years I have tried to choose topics to write about that might help illuminate an injustice or a political subterfuge, but I confess that I have also fallen prey to the relatively easy money of writing a travel piece or gear review. In the current magazine environment, driven by celebrity profiles and scandal, serious journalism has become an increasingly rare commodity.

By writing the two books described here, I have tried to shine a beam of light on our increasingly disturbing relationship with the natural world. In Powder Burn, I try to show how the indiscriminate corporate drive to grow and increase profits has serious social and environmental costs -- even in small towns in the Rocky Mountains. In Monkey Dancing, I seized a time of deep personal transition as an opportunity to show my children some of the world's vanishing wonders -- and hopefully, to show a universal path towards reclaiming our connection to the natural world, and to each other.