Steve Chapple writes the hot HOT GLOBE™ by STEVE CHAPPLE column on Substack
(https://hotglobe.substack.com/embed) and is an award-winning author of many non-fiction books and novels. He produces the national newspaper column Intellectual Capital and writes for the New York and LA Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, Sports Afield, Scuba Diving, and is a Visiting Scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His latest book BREAKPOINT: Reckoning with America's Environmental Crises with co-author Jeremy B.C. Jackson (Yale University Press) is a journey into America's climate crisis and its coming solutions, and set the pace for coverage of climate change in the media over the last several years.
Praise for BREAKPOINT:
“Moving, poignant, and timely, Breakpoint is both a stark reminder of the urgent environmental challenges facing the planet and a hopeful call to action to those in power. This is boots-on-the-ground science at its finest."—Leonardo DiCaprio
“Breakpoint is a stunning book of ecological anthropology from consummate storytellers. The human narratives they bring to light allow us to understand and appreciate how America farmed, drilled, degraded, and overheated the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is fair, compelling, and heartbreaking, as good as anything written by Margaret Mead or Claude Levi Strauss."—Paul Hawken, author of Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
"This is an ambitious and illuminating book"--Carl Safina, author of The View From Lazy Point and Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
"Thought-provoking, informative, and, ultimately, hopeful.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History*
“Breakpoint contains important data for today’s policy-makers. Those who have heard Jeremy Jackson discuss his research at the Naval War College will understand the need to adapt quickly to the multitude of conditions changing all around us. Those who use the science to adapt will be the winners.”—Vice Admiral, USN (ret) James P. Wisecup, former director, CNO Strategic Studies Group
“In a firsthand tour de force, the Jackson and Chapple tag team reveals how America’s environmental challenges and solutions are deeply enmeshed with our daily lives. Breakpoint transforms required reading into a page turner.”—Thomas E. Lovejoy, George Mason University
* "Jeremy Jackson and Steve Chapple travel from Iowa to Louisiana to investigate the connections among some of America's greatest environmental problems—climate change, ocean "dead zones," wetland destruction, and groundwater contamination. The result is at once thought-provoking, informative, and, ultimately, hopeful."—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Chapple's previous books include Kayaking the Full Moon: A Journey Down the Yellowstone River to the Soul of Montana (a NY Times Notable,) and Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to those who Would Save the Earth (David Brower.) He lives in La Jolla, CA, and Alpine, MT.
Chapple is a Visiting Scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCSD, Executive Director of the San Diego Unified Steam Leadership Series, (please see steamleadership.com,) and a Senior Fellow at the Samuel Lawrence Foundation.
LET THE MOUNTAINS TALK, LET THE RIVERS RUN: A Call to those Who Would Save the Earth (HarperCollins) was written with David Brower, the poetically irascible former executive director of the Sierra Club, and savior of the Grand Canyon. "This is the testament of one of the few authentic sages of our time. Brower's voice is passionate, perfectly cadenced, humorous, and very wise,"--Edward O. Wilson. "Nothing I have heard from anybody else has affected my thinking so deeply as what I heard from David Brower,"--Charles Kuralt.--"the path breaker, not given to easy answers or ruinous compromises,"--President Jimmy Carter.
Hear the legendary John Denver song based on the title of the book, "Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run:
https://youtu.be/pQopEL4BUrI
While in Montana, he was the host and producer of the outdoor sports and adventure show "Under A Big Sky," shown in the West on CBS affiliates. Raised in Montana and La Jolla, educated at Yale, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation,) he holds the patent on the "Geospatial News Engine," for the Internet.
KAYAKING THE FULL MOON: A Journey Down the Yellowstone River to the Soul of Montana (HarperCollins) was a New York Times Notable Book, and won a Lowell Thomas Award for best travel book of the year. "A graceful writer with a journalist's sharp eye and a heart as big as his subject," wrote Hampton Sides in the Washington Post Book World. "A sensitive and sensible book in search of Montana's calico soul," said Thomas McGuane.
OUTLAWS IN BABYLON (Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books) tells the origin story of American cannabis and is under development as a streaming series.
Doubleday published his first novel, DON'T MIND DYING A Novel of Country Lust & Urban Decay. It is a joining of San Francisco and Montana and retells the true history of the West.
CONFESSIONS OF AN ECO-REDNECK (Perseus/HarperCollins) was a wild culling from the sporting pages of the NY Times and Sports Afield. Booklist ranked it one of the Top 10 Sporting Books of the Year.
CONVERSATIONS WITH MR. BABY: A Celebration of New Life (Little Brown) is a father-son dialogue with a wise-cracking baby unborn and born.
Studs Terkel called ROCK 'N' ROLL IS HERE TO PAY: The History and Politics of the Music Industry, (co-author Reebee Garofalo,) "the definitive book on rock music as an industry." After withdrawing from Yale College, Chapple put on numerous rock concerts with Bonnie Raitt, Dr. John, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, the Lovin Spoonful, John McGlaughlin, and Allen Ginsberg (these last, decidedly spoken word,) as co-founder of the non-profit foundation, Entropy, Inc. He also briefly produced radio shows on the history of rock, at WBCN, in Boston. After moving to California, he became a staff columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Chapple's op-ed piece in the NY Times, "What Is a River Worth?" kicked off the successful campaign to save Yellowstone Park from a potentially disastrous gold mine at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. He contributes to National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Men's Journal, Outside, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, Conde Nast, the LA and New York Times, Reader's Digest, Hatch, and Scuba Diving. From time to time he lectures at the Smithsonian and the California Academy of Sciences, about various adventures down the Zambezi, the Yellowstone, and the Mighty LA. This last, an historic first descent of the Los Angeles River, is probably his most daunting adventure to date.
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