DEEP IN THE FORESTS of the southern coastal plains are places where trees rise up straight out of the ground, sometimes one hundred feet, their branches splayed all near the crown in a wide, high ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

RICK HANEY, GANGLY AND GARRULOUS, paces in front of a congregation of government conservationists, working the room for laughs before he gets to the hard data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture soil ...

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean ...

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long ...

I OWE MY CAREER to Robert Redford. The list of people who can say that is long, but not many of those work at environmental organizations. I first met Bob in fall 2003 at the dedication of The Robert ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

MAYBE IT’D BE a stand of trees encircling a ground soft with pine needles, out of view of neighbors so as not to scare them, but close enough that, should danger come, there might be a witness. That’s ...

IF A PARENT WORRIES FOR THEIR CHILD, what do the childless worry about? This is not a question that has been put to me yet, but it is one that I have imagined a few times. Every time you hear of a ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, ...

THE MUSHROOM BURIAL SHROUD that covered Luke Perry’s face and famous forehead was black as night, or perhaps it was white as bone, made of organic cotton, and inlaid with white crochet tubes that ...