San Francisco–based author Mary Ellen Hannibal is coming to Port Townsend to give two lectures based on her new book, “Citizen Science: Searching for Heroes in an Age of Extinction.”

The first talk at the Port Townsend High School Salon Lecture Series is 2 p.m. Friday, Dec. 9 at the auditorium, 1500 Van Ness St.

The second talk, part of the Port Townsend Marine Science Center’s Future of Oceans lecture series, is 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 11 at the Fort Worden Chapel.

The Salon Lecture is free; admission for the PTMSC lecture is $10 for non-members and $5 for PTMSC members.

And award-winning journalist, Hannibal wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains to collect data on threatened species; she also discovers the power of a heroic cast of volunteers – and the makings of what may be our last, best hope in slowing an unprecedented mass extinction, according to a press release.

Digging deeply, Hannibal traces today’s tech-enabled citizen science movement to its roots: the centuries-long tradition of amateur observation by writers and naturalists. Prompted by her novelist father’s sudden death, she also examines her own past – and discovers a family legacy of looking closely at the world. With unbending zeal for protecting the planet, she then turns her gaze to the wealth of species left to fight for.

Combining original reporting, meticulous research, and memoir in impassioned prose, Citizen Scientist is a literary event, a blueprint for action, and the story of how one woman rescued herself from an odyssey of loss – with a new kind of science.

“One of Hannibal’s themes in this ambitious new book is the ‘double narrative,’ or the contradiction between what we tell ourselves we are doing every day and what is really going on,” according to Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of population studies at Stanford University.

“She explains that empires have been built on a biotic cleansing of species the loss of which now threatens the very foundation of our lives.