Jonathan Evan Maslow, the founder of this Web site, died yesterday, February 19, 2008, after an eight-month battle with stomach cancer. He was 59 years old.

Jonathan was a brilliant and innovative writer, a world-traveler, a passionate environmentalist, a filmmaker, a newspaperman, and a devoted husband.

As a naturalist and author he was widely praised and awarded (by, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation) for a variety of books including The Owl Papers; Bird of Life, Bird of Death; Sacred Horses; Torrid Zone; and Footsteps in the Jungle: Adventures in the Scientific Exploration of the American Tropics.

I met Jonathan roughly twenty years ago through my then wife-to-be, Kate Bernhardt, who had gone to school with him at Marlboro College in Vermont. His first words to me, on a street in Manhattan, were: “If you're going to get involved with her, you're going to be seeing a lot of me!”

But although I was tremendously fond of Jonathan, I didn't see a lot of him. Not nearly enough. He was sometimes a house-guest if he happened to be in the Boston area, but we weren't pen pals or phone pals, and long stretches went by with no contact at all.

Several years ago, when I hadn't heard from him in quite a long time, I found out from Kate that he had started a personal blog on energy issues and climate change. I praised him for this, and encouraged him to consider doing a full-blown Web site on these topics. He liked that idea, and since he was now making his living as a newspaperman, he conceived of it as a Web-based newspaper combined with an online community.

Close to a year went by before Jonathan visited me in the summer of 2006. We chatted for about three hours before he revealed that he had come to ask me to be his partner in this venture and to build that Web site for him.

I did not have the time to do this. But many of you will smile when I say that it was simply not possible to say no to Jonathan. So I said yes, agreeing to handle the technical side of The Energy Independent, and to leave writing and editorial matters to him.

Despite his great energy and passion, Jonathan, too, found it difficult to give the site enough time. We both felt frustrated by the challenges of creating a serious publication with limited resources, breaking through to a larger audience. We often discussed strategies for expanding the site, recruiting more contributors, hosting events, and eventually using the site as a platform for activism and consulting.

It's not an exaggeration to say that The Energy Independent was one of Jonathan's biggest dreams. He had high hopes for this thing—for using the power of the network to change the world and his own life, too. As Kate said to me today, this Web site made him excited and happy.

That he lost his health so suddenly and so young, before he could see at least some of those ambitions realized, is heartbreaking. Yet his last post to this site is only about two months old. He never stopped dreaming, hoping, believing.

"He disappeared in the dead of winter..." begins W. H. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats, and I feel that way today about Jon Maslow.

He and I last spoke on the telephone nearly three weeks ago, before the sudden downturn that led to his death. He knew by that time that his months of chemotherapy had not put his disease into remission. He was facing more therapies and a most uncertain future. We both knew it would be tough. But he was a fighter and we didn't talk much about illness that day. For about a half-hour, he told me some things about how the newspaper business works. Then he felt tired and needed a nap, and we said goodbye.

I expected many more phone calls and visits with Jonathan. I did not expect him to disappear in the dead of this winter, and I won't pretend I was ready. I miss him terribly.

Jonathan is survived by his wife, Liliya Khobotkova; his stepson, Arseniy Khobotkova; his sister Jane Maslow-Cohen of Austin, TX; and his mother Clara Maslow, of Concord, MA. A public memorial is planned for sometime this summer, in Cape May, NJ.

If you are one of the many people who knew and loved Jonathan, please contribute by adding a comment to this posting. You do not need to register or log-in to do so. If you’d like to write a post of your own on this site, send a note to admin at theenergyindependent dot com.

Update, February 24, 2008: Articles and obituaries:

The Herald News (Passaic) (obituary). Jonathan was assistant city editor and reporter here at the time of his death.

The New York Times (obituary).

The Cape May County Herald (obituary). Jonathan was a reporter here, 1997-2002.

ZineZone interview, “Come Rain or Come Shine” (approx. 1999). Extensive inteview on the occasion of Jonathan’s film “A Tramp in the Darien.”

Request for materials:

Curator and writer Tom Fels knew Jonathan from his stay at Montague Farm, near Amherst, MA, around 1969-1970. Tom had gotten back in touch with Jonathan in recent years, and was planning to include him in an anthology now in development. Tom has a new book on the 1960s, Farm Friends, based upon his four years at Montague Farm. The book is due out in March, 2008, and Jonathan is in the bibliography. Finally, the farm group documented in that book is supported by an archive called Famous Long Ago at UMass Amherst. Jonathan is considered part of that group, and Tom notes that the archive would be very interested in any papers, photos, letters, etc. of Jonathan’s that might be looking for a home.