Local Writer McKay Jenkins Spreads the Environmental Gospel Through Both Action and Words

For McKay Jenkins, no week is complete without getting his hands in the dirt.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the local writer and educator shuffles up and down I-95 in his electric pickup to the University of Delaware, where he teaches journalism in the English Department. But on afternoons in between, he is busy planting trees at the Stillmeadow Peace Park in Southwest Baltimore or tending to the vegetables growing at his Rock Rose Food Justice Project urban farm in Woodberry.

During warm-weather months, he’ll drop off more than 100 pounds of radishes in the spring or sweet potatoes in the fall to community kitchens across the city.

At 62, Jenkins has rooted himself squarely between both worlds, using his professional writing and physical labor to become an environmental steward of the Mid-Atlantic. Though as he sees it, they’re one and the same.

“I never thought of myself as an academic scholar,” says Jenkins, who began his career as a staff reporter for newspapers like the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. “As a journalist, I was always engaged with the world and writing about it, so the transition to doing the work was a very thin line.”

A native of Yonkers, New York, Jenkins knew from early on that he wanted to write books, finding the format of those daily papers constricting. Earning his doctorate at Princeton University, he honed his narrative craft under legendary nonfiction writers like John McPhee, whose meticulous reporting style and interest in nature resonated with Jenkins—a lifelong outdoorsman, who in his spare time can often be found hiking, biking, and paddling down the Susquehanna River. Now an author himself, his books have delved into natural disasters, toxic chemicals, and genetically modified food.

All the while, he’s melded his subject-matter expertise with lived experience. Jenkins, who began working at urban farms during graduate school, has managed various environmental projects in Maryland and Delaware over the past three decades, from working with local Native American tribes on forest regeneration and garden re-establishment to steering food equity initiatives in Baltimore.

Here, in 2019, in a fallow community garden, he launched Rock Rose, where harvests get donated to community partners like Love & Cornbread and Soul Kitchen to be turned into ready-to-eat meals for city residents in need. On the side, he collaborates with other ecologists, educators, and faith-based institutions on a variety of volunteer efforts, from stream cleanups and tree plantings to the removal of invasive plants from local properties and city forests. Oftentimes, he enlists his students to lend a hand, having launched an environmental humanities minor at UD, where he’s taught since 1996.

Altogether, these efforts have helped make his writing feel more actionable—getting “your body into the work itself,” says Jenkins, while also deepening his interest in “peeling back layers” and “trying to reveal systems,” both social and environmental.

To that end, he became a certified master naturalist in 2018 after completing University of Maryland’s certification program, which educates residents on how to identify, maintain, and repair local ecosystems.

That led to his latest book, The Maryland Master Naturalist’s Handbook, an educational guide co-edited with UMD’s Joy Shindler Rafey and published in June by Johns Hopkins University Press. A collaboration with various experts, the Handbook explores the ecological wonders of the Old Line State, from Appalachia to the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore City, which can be used by researchers and laypeople alike to learn about everything from geology, soil health, native wildlife, and invasive species to citizen science, climate change, and environmental justice.

The goal is to inspire others to help spread the environmental gospel, and in turn protect the place which we call home, says Jenkins, using a fitting literary analogy to convey this point: “It’s like painting the fence in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You turn people on to this, and then everybody wants to get on board.”