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Tony Hiss

Writer
Tony Hiss

Tony Hiss is the author of fifteen books, including Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth, about staving off the mass extinctions crisis, and the award-winning The Experience of Place, about how we’re affected by our surroundings, both in cities and the countryside.  E. O. Wilson’s foreword to Rescuing the Planet calls it “as clear a picture of humanity’s impact on Earth’s natural environment as any ever written.”

After graduation from Harvard, Hiss was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine for more than 30 years and a visiting scholar at New York University for 25 years; he has lectured around the world and is a consultant on planning, conservation, and biodiversity issues.  He co-authored the Third Regional Plan for the New York City area, and wrote the report that led to New York State’s 150-mile-long Hudson River Valley Natural Heritage Area.  Hiss has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and has written about other special landscapes, about travel and trains, about Hunanese cooking, and about his family, among different topics.  The National Recreation and Park Association’s National Literary Award praised him for a lifetime of “spellbinding and poignant” writing about “how our environments, modes of travel, and other aspects of the American landscape affect our lives.”  Hiss lives in New York with his wife, writer Lois Metzger.