Draft:Ruby McConnell

• Comment: In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, I disclose that I have been paid by my employer for my contributions to this article. Librarian M (talk) 18:44, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

---

Ruby McConnell (born 1978) is an American author, registered geologist, and environmental advocate based in Eugene, Oregon. She has authored two critically-acclaimed outdoor guidebooks, A Woman’s Guide to the Wild and A Girl’s Guide to the Wild. Her book Ground Truth: A Geologic Survey of a Life was a finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Awards. She developed the concept of Post-Millennial Environmentalism in her book Wilderness and the American Spirit: Mapping the Route to Post-Millennial Environmentalism.

Biography

McConnell was born and grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a first generation American. Her mother was an Australian-born Irish immigrant and her father immigrated from Northern Ireland to Oregon in the 1960s. McConnell’s father experienced anti-Irish sentiment from his parishioners in Eugene, Oregon. Because Siobhan is a difficult name for Americans to pronounce and remember, McConnell changed her given name to Ruby. Her family lived in Seattle, Washington during the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. At 13 she became a speaker, activist, and youth leader of the peace movement against the Gulf War before moving into environmental advocacy working with groups like Greenpeace and the Cascadia Forest Alliance in the 1990s.

A registered geologist and adventurer, McConnell has studied The Trans-Mexican Volcano Belt, backpacked in Alaska, and hiked the Grand Canyon. She was on site during Mount St. Helen’s continuous eruption from 2004–2008, working as a volcanologist. Sexist comments, the small number of women in outdoor fields, and a lack of published information for outdoorswomen motivated McConnell to write her first book, A Woman’s Guide to the Wild (2016). It was the first wilderness guidebook to specifically address women’s needs and sold over 25,000 copies.

McConnell has authored articles in national and regional periodicals including Ms. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and High Country News. Her most recent book, Buried: The Toxic Truth About Our Soil and Groundwater, addresses the harms of PFAS and toxic industrial waste infrastructure. Through the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project, she travels throughout the Pacific Northwest leading public conversations on environmental justice, asking how human identity is directly dictated by geology.

Bibliography

• McConnell, Ruby. (2016). A Woman’s Guide to the Wild. Sasquatch Books. ISBN 9781632170057.
• McConnell, Ruby. (2019). A Girl’s Guide to the Wild. Sasquatch Books. ISBN 9781632171719.
• McConnell, Ruby. (2020). My Nature Journal & Activity Book. Sasquatch Books. ISBN 9781632172471.
• McConnell, Ruby. (2020). Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life. Overcup Press. ISBN 978-1732610323.
• McConnell, Ruby. (2024). Wilderness and the American Spirit. Overcup Press. ISBN 9798985652765.
• McConnell, Ruby. (April 6, 2027, forthcoming).  Buried: The Toxic Truth About Our Soil and Groundwater. MIT Press. 9780262058698.

Awards & Recognitions

In 2016 McConnell was awarded an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for her essay writing. Judges noted that her work is “timely, significant, and daring”. Her 2020 essay collection, Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life, was selected as a 2021 finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Oregon Book Awards. McConnell won first place in the General News, Print category of the L.A. Press Club Entertainment Journalism Award (2024) for her investigative article The Missing Mouseketeer published in Alta Journal.

McConnell’s books have been positively reviewed in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times, and Publisher’s Weekly. Wilderness and the American Spirit was named a book of the year by Ms. Magazine.