We are thrilled to welcome the extraordinary Ed Yong as the Guest Judge for our 2026 Environmental Writing Competition, sponsored by Patagonia! Yong is the author of two prize-winning New York Times bestsellers, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. His newest book is Life Beyond Measure, "revealing the astonishing ways living things operate at different scales." We had the wonderful opportunity to interview him in an exclusive Q&A about his process in the art of environmental writing, his achievements as a journalist and writer, and what he's searching for in a winning entry.
I'm going to refer everyone to some advice that I wrote for the National Press Club Journalism Institute in 2020. It's all there.
How do you balance the human experience with empirical research in your work? What advice do you have for young writers looking to blend, say, personal experience and scientifically valid information?
Above all else, understand that this is not an issue of balance. Science is not a product–some set of purely objective facts and results–but a practice. It is a human endeavor, subject to all the quirks and foibles that characterize all human activities. It's full of stories, driven by values, and inescapably political. You cannot extricate the human experience from empirical research–and nor should you.
In 2021, you received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in recognition of a series of seven pieces that you wrote on the COVID-19 pandemic. Write the World connects teens across 190 countries. No matter where they are from, the pandemic impacted all of our community members at a young age. How did writing about the pandemic help you to process it, and, if young writers wanted to address the topic through their writing, what advice might you share?
The pandemic was an omnicrisis that frequently made no sense, and in trying to make sense of it for my readers, I also made sense of it for myself. In particular, it showed me that the pandemic was about so much more than science and health, and so much more than the result of the present political moment. To fully understand it, I needed to draw from anthropology, sociology, history of medicine, bioethics, and much more. I would encourage young writers to try and do the same. Don't be content with describing what is happening; try and find out why such events are playing out.
A devastating consequence of COVID-19 was the isolation that it forced us to endure. By 2020, loneliness was already a significant issue among young people, and lockdowns exacerbated the problem. Many people turned to the natural world for solace. What are your thoughts on this relationship between nature and wellbeing? How have these themes come up in your work?
We live in an age of contraction and fragmentation. If it isn't a virus confining us to our homes, then it's a social media algorithm feeding us more of what we already looked for, AI regurgitating slop at us, or authoritarians rising to power on the politics of fear and division. I think the natural world is so compelling in part because it offers the opposite. It is expansive, and endless in its variety and beauty. In my work, I try and show how much of that world lies beyond our perceptions, and how much we stand to gain from appreciating its full scope. And in my life, through birding, I try and experience that grandeur for myself.
What are you looking for in a winning entry? Do you have any other advice for teen writers, especially those who are new to environmental writing?
I'm looking for work that makes me feel something powerful, whether that's curiosity or indignation, grief or hope. I want my horizons expanded and my perspective shifted. I want to be impressed by both the words on the page and the heart behind them.