He’s fatter than I thought he’d be, and older, too. That long lock of bottle-blond hair, which no doubt in better days would have been coiled around his head like an old garden hose, dangles almost down his shoulder, another casualty of the cold wind in this goddamned place.

You’d think that after all these years, he’d be used to seeing me trudge up the steep lane, ankle-deep in the County Mayo muck, toward that ancient abandoned shell of a cottage that until just recently passed for a calf barn. After all, I’ve made this… Read More

Bushkill, Pa. — IT was midmorning, and the sun was over my shoulder. A breeze rustled the dead leaves still clinging to the oaks, just enough to cover the sound as I fox-footed my way through the undergrowth. A few dozen yards ahead of me, the doe stop… Read More

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Presidio, Texas, was a thriving farm and ranch town, known around the nation for its cantaloupes and its onions. They even had an onion festival every year and crowned an onion queen. Migrants used to wade across the… Read More

I’m a few days away, riding through the west Texas desert on my motorcycle, but soon enough I’ll be chasing the rains north through country ravaged by cycles of drought and flood and drought and flood. Maybe that will give us something to talk about wh… Read More

BUSHKILL, Pa. — Even now, when I conjure him and he deigns to come, I always see him the same way. He’s encircled in sweet blue smoke, standing on the cool stone of the walkway around midnight. A little man, ancient, almost swallowed by the vivid artic… Read More

“Seamus McGraw takes us on a trip along America’s culturally fractured back roads and listens to farmers and ranchers and fishermen, many of them people who are not ideologically, politically, or in some cases even religiously inclined to believe in man-made global climate change”. “He shows us how they are already being affected and the risks they are already taking on a personal level to deal with extreme weather and its very real consequences for their livelihoods.”

The very last thing the old farmer wanted to do on that rainy Sunday morning in early spring was sit down and talk with me. And he had made it perfectly clear why. “I never met a liberal before,” he had told his daughter, who had volunteered to act as… Read More

I’m pleased that Betting the Farm has been reviewed by J. Scott Donahue for the Sierra Club. “More Americans believe in angels than in climate change, writes journalist Seamus McGraw in his new book, Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories From the Fron… Read More

I’ll never really know where it came from, but just as Sundance and I rounded the barn, something inside me snapped, and I let out a blood-curdling yell from somewhere deep inside me that I had never heard from myself before or since.