To poetize birchbark, floodwaters, crawfish chimneys, the Great Comet of 1811. To write knowingly about trapping swamp rabbits in the hollowed trunks of gum tupelo and the whistling sound of an earthquake in water: Not unlike the... Read More

SCUBA Cuba is fun to say, but the two words are also oxymoronic—a communist-minded acronym might better be: Smoking Cigars Underwater Begets Anarchy. In any case, Cuba’s political and economic struggles have had one remarkable... Read More

If Tarzan and Jane Goodall met for a drink at an eco resort in Ghana, would he have the good sense to shower first, and then thank her for putting Africa, conservation issues, and humane animal research on the map for hundreds of... Read More

Woe is Earth. Drilled silly, dumped on, farmed out, fished out, and cloaked in a burka of carbon—who does the planet have to thank for this dire state of affairs? Only its most highly evolved species, of course. But woe is for whiners.... Read More

As a genius nature writer, Henry David Thoreau made good use of his New England backyard and didn’t choose to explore the wild frontier that beckoned to the west in the mid- 1800s. He loved the way nature ceaselessly encroached on... Read More

Over the centuries, Americans have held conflicted feelings toward North America’s vast, treacherous, majestic wilderness, headed up by the cocksure, heavily-armed desire to subjugate—level the forests, eradicate the indigenous... Read More

A bobcat needs a wristwatch like a cactus needs a calendar. Yes, we have time, that peculiar human tendency to grid our existence into segments of seconds, minutes, hours, et cetera. But at what cost? What’s the tradeoff? We can be... Read More

We live in the age of stand-up paddleboards and kayaks the color of molten lava. Rare now to see the graceful reach and pull of two paddlers guiding their canoe along a lazy stretch of an American river, drifting for a moment then... Read More