Robert Langellier

Area(s) of expertise

Robert is a magazine writer and field botanist from the Missouri Ozarks. After being fired from a hometown job waiting tables, he decided to become a long-haul trucker, a confused tangent that became a feature story for Esquire. Throughout his 20s, he oscillated between stints in freelance writing – publishing stories with National Geographic, The Nation, and New York Times Opinion – and conservation work, which has included field botany in the Northern Rockies and the Ozarks. Much of his natural resource work is informed by fire, either on a hotshot wildland firefighting crew in northern California or running prescribed fire crews in Missouri. A throughline of his work has been a deep love for Ozark flora and the written word. Two of his reporting projects have taken him to the war in Ukraine, one of which was nominated, weirdly, for Best American Sports Writing 2017. Entering the Field Naturalist Program, Robert has managed to delay the choice between a writing career and a botany career even further.