Welcome to the website of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes
I'm a Southern California journalist and author of 17 nonfiction books. My passion is narrative nonfiction and immersion journalism— writing it, teaching it, and spending days, weeks, months or more immersed in hidden worlds researching it. Burrowing deep to uncover the humanity behind the headlines—stories of crime, injustice, and the environment—is what I call The Art of Being There.
I’m happiest when I’m the fly on the wall in the most fascinating places and moments. But when I need to be, I can be the fly in the ointment, too. You can read more about me and my work here. Find my Substack newsletter here. Thank you for joining me.
Total Garbage
How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World
Total Garbage is my latest deep dive narrative, exploring the hidden world of the biggest thing we make: Waste. It has a cast of characters you’ll love to meet—chefs, students, urban farmers, trash geniuses, thrifters, and whole communities. They’re pioneering an astonishing range of commonsense waste solutions anyone can embrace. They’re showing the rest of us that being less trashy isn’t about giving up what we love. It’s about upgrading to stuff we’ll love more.
Their story beings with a simple question: What if the looming calamities of climate change, plastic pollution, the energy crisis and our whole environmental doom-scroll are symptoms of just one disease, and it’s something we can actually fix?
Our planet, in short, has an archvillian called waste. We live in the most wasteful civilization in history. This goes way beyond what we roll to the curb each week. It’s rooted in what we eat and drink and how we cook. Waste is the main thing you pay for in your utility bills and at the gas pump. Forty percent of our food becomes garbage. Micro-plastic trash now in everything around us as well as in us— we are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic every week!
And yet, thinking of such seemingly unsolvable Earth-destroying crises as byproducts of waste is powerful and hopeful. There’s no partisan divide where one side says, “Yay waste!” Instead there are ordinary blue state and red state people at work in our neighborhoods right now, showing us how to tackle waste and the catastrophes it drives — and saving, even making money while doing it. They have grasped the truism at the heart of Total Garbage: what we choose to use is important, but it’s what we squander that’s killing us.
Total Garbage New Paperback Edition—order from your favorite bookseller
What you need to know about plastic pollution, a Total Garbage excerpt
More Total Garbage Links, an excerpt, 5 waste warrior tips that are upgrades, not sacrifices
Waste warriors Jamiah Hargins, CropSwapLA; Sara Nichols, Clynk!; Mayor Kim Learnard, Peachtree City, GA; Electric Chefs Chris Galarza and Rachelle Boucher
The Art of Being There
My New Narrative Nonfiction Newsletter
In my new Substack newsletter, “The Art of Being There,” I write about the importance of narrative journalism right now, the latest on Total Garbage, and the perils of flying with night-vision goggles:
Journalism in a Time Like No Other
As Trump and his regime gut our freedoms, government, democracy and decency, I've been trying to figure out how to adapt my teaching to meet the moment for aspiring journalists in my narrative nonfiction class.
Lesson plans and writing exercises on foreshadowing and character development suddenly seem a pretty fragile bulwark in the face of unfolding threats to journalism and its practitioners. Just this week the AP has been banned by the White House simply for how it refers to a geographic location – the Gulf of Mexico. The job of journalist has not been this perilous for generations, nor less appreciated. A big part of me just wants to warn my students away.
And yet…. I keep coming back to two core beliefs. First: that journalism is a vital calling and part of democracy’s critical safety net–a sacred mission I’ve embraced since my freshman year at Hampshire College. Second: narrative storytelling….
Read the rest of this newsletter, and keep up with my books, events and the world of narrative nonfiction and literary journalism, by signing up for a free subscription to The Art of Being There.