Author Craig Childs on What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us During the COVID-19 Pandemic

KFFR’s Steve Skinner interviews author Craig Childs on Monday, April 13th, 2020. Craig talks about how the pandemic has impacted his life and how he is getting to spend a lot of time at home instead of his usual outdoor adventures. He also shares his research about how current human activity mirrors the activity of ancient civilizations. Listen to the interview below.

Craig Childs lives and observes life at its most extreme, so we don’t have to. He is a renowned author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including, Apocalyptic Planet, which won the Orion Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, and Outside.

The New York Times proclaims, “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.” The LA Times says his writing is like pure oxygen, and “stings like a slap in the face.” In addition to the Orion Book Award and two Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards, he has won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Rowell Art of Adventure Award. His most recent book, Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, examines the dynamics of people moving into an uninhabited hemisphere in the late Pleistocene, documenting arrivals from Alaska to Florida to southern Chile.

Childs writes about the relationship between humans, animals, landscape, and time. His stories come from visceral, personal experience, whether in the company of illicit artifact dealers or in deep wilderness. A commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, Childs is camping tonight in the harshest of conditions so he can report his findings back to us while we enjoy our coffee. Lauded as an adventurer and desert ecologist, he lives off the grid in Colorado.

Listen to the interview here:

Visit Craig Childs’ website here: http://www.houseofrain.com