Who knows where ideas come from, they just appear

new book a'comin

Author

Jaime Green
July 11, 2025

Two and a half years ago, an editor from the NYT Magazine asked if I had an essay idea to pitch about orbit. Huh, orbit, I don’t usually think about human space exploration, but lemme see. Two months or so later, this piece came out.

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Last fall, I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. In it, a Mars-loving geologist argues against terraforming, against almost all human incursion: “I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it—I destroy what it is, what I love in it. This road we made, it hurts me to see it!” I loved her, and I loved her ideas, and I loved the philosophical arguments around terraforming. I wanted to spend more time in them.

*

Ten years ago, or maybe eleven, I was teaching first-year comp at Columbia. As a budding science writer, I applied to teach one of the themed sections. The closest to science was Sustainable Development. One of the common texts used in that class was “The Trouble With Wilderness,” by William Cronon. In it, Cronon argues that “wilderness” is a cultural construct, the lovechild of the frontier and the sublime. It blew my mind more than it ever did my students’, over the many years that I taught it.

Two and a half years ago, the section on Cronon in my essay on orbit had to be cut. Stuff like this:

Space, then, isn’t a frontier to be settled or wilderness to be preserved, but instead truly wild, a manifestation of nature that has nothing to do with us at all. Among the wild, Cronon writes, “otherness compels our attention. In forcing us to acknowledge that [wild places] are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our continued existence, they recall for us a creation far greater than our own.” It’s an ethos that easily expands beyond Earth—what greater creation than the whole cosmos? Space is not there to be tamed. It’s not there for us at all.

*

A couple of summers ago, looking for new readings for my comp class (now at Smith), I read Holmes Rolston III’s essay “The Preservation of Natural Value in the Solar System.” (Rolston would cut from the NYT Mag piece, too.) In it, he writes things like this:

The question is whether this astronomical world can belong to us; there is no question how we belong to it, and no question whether it belongs by itself.

and this

It is hubris to believe that everything else in the universe, in all its remotest corners, either has some relevance to our being here or has no value. Nature displays multiple fields of uncontained exuberance, and why should the parts irrelevant to us trouble us?

and this:

To ask what these worlds are good for prevents asking whether these worlds are good in deeper senses.

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A year and a half ago I read Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways and thought, How do I do this but for space?

*

Back to last fall. Reading Red Mars. I sent my agent a slightly manic email, not at all about the book proposal I was at the time ostensibly writing. Subject line: A different sample chapter. Attachment: An expansion of my NYT Mag piece, putting all the wilderness and theory back in. A bit of the email:

I've had the horrible thought: "Maybe I should be writing a different book." Or maybe this is an excellent thought. The [redacted] sample chapter has been feeling like pulling teeth, the closest I've ever felt to writer's block. And then this morning a new idea coalesced.

It comes out of my several years of teaching a nature-and-wilderness themed comp class, which has decently immersed me in the scholarship around environmental ethics. And of course, in teaching and in my own thinking, I connect that to space. My piece for the NYT Mag last year was originally pitched in this vein, applying ideas about wilderness to low Earth orbit, but most of that thinking got stripped out in edits.

But last night I was reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and there's a debate between characters about terraforming, and I wanted to wade into it with them, armed with all this thinking and reading I've been doing for years.

So essentially, I want to write a book that does that. Looking at space as an environment, at how various approaches to nature, wilderness, environmental ethics, etc, extend to specific controversies and questions about space. If space is nature, wild, an environment for humans--what does that all mean, and how can we think about it, 1, so as not to fuck it up, and 2, so as to better understand our place in the cosmos.

Which brings us to today, and the announcement of that book, hatched as a fever dream, stealthily cooking for a decade (a fever in the oven, go with it), the beneficiary of a lot of kismet and luck and generosity, as all ideas always are.

On a background image of stars and dust from the Hubble telescope, this text (a book deal announcement): "Science/Technology. Best American Science and Nature Writing series editor and author of the LA Times Book Prize finalist The Possibility of Life Jaime Green's AT HOME IN THE STARS a narrative journey into the promise and peril of our future in space and what it might mean from a scientific, philosophical, and cultural lens to expand into the cosmos, again to John Glynn at Hanover Square Press by Caroline Eisenmann at Francis Goldin Literary Agency. (World)."

Now comes the hard part, and the fun part, and the best part: the writing of the thing. It goes back underground for a couple of years, as do I, to turn from ideas and promises and a proposal into something that, right now, for all that I can tell you what the book is going to be, is actually unimaginable. Until it gets imagined. :)

If you’re reading this, you’re in the right place to get news and updates, to hear when the book is being published in… some number of years.

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