McKenzie Funk is a reporter at ProPublica’s Northwest hub and is based in Bellingham, Washington. He previously contributed to Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Harper’s, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times Magazine, covering everything from oil exploration in Arctic Alaska to private firefighters in the American West to the global race for food and farmland in Ukraine, Brazil and East Africa.
He is the author of two nonfiction books: “The Hank Show” (2023), about the history and hazards of mass data collection, and the PEN Literary Award-winning “Windfall” (2014), about how governments and corporations are preparing to capitalize on a warmer world. A National Magazine Award finalist and former MacDowell, Open Society and Logan Nonfiction fellow, Funk was a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied economics and systems thinking.
He speaks five languages and grew up near his namesake river, the McKenzie, in Oregon.