Eoghan Walls: Field Notes from an Extinction
Poet and naturalist Eoghan Walls blends lyrical prose with ecological urgency in meditations on species loss and vanishing worlds.
Why we picked this
This is nature writing that earns its grief -- Walls is a working naturalist whose prose carries the weight of having watched species disappear firsthand.
Eoghan Walls presents Field Notes from an Extinction at Politics and Prose, in conversation with Leeya Mehta. Walls brings an unusual combination of credentials to the literature of ecological loss: he is both a published poet and a trained naturalist, and his writing reflects both disciplines.
Field Notes from an Extinction moves between lyrical meditation and scientific observation, documenting what it means to witness species loss not as abstraction but as lived experience. The book avoids the twin traps of environmental writing — despair that paralyzes and optimism that deflects — in favor of a more honest accounting of what we are losing.
For readers who care about how language can carry ecological truth without simplifying it, this is an evening worth attending.