In Search of the Sublime with Albert Bierstadt in Brooklyn

February 2016. It was Valentine’s Day, Sunday, February 14th, sunny and clear. But an Arctic blast on Saturday night had sent temperatures below zero in Central Park, making this the coldest Valentine’s Day in New York City on record and the coldest day
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Butterflies in a Blizzard, or Chaos in Colorado and What It Means for Us

January 2016. My flight to Denver from Washington’s Dulles Airport was on time on December 15th, even though the previous United flight had been cancelled by a hard-striking snowstorm in Colorado. A low, white blanket of patterned clouds covered the
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Pondering the Palms of Cape Hatteras

November 2015. A serendipitous trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in early November gave me a personal, human scale for understanding some ecological facts about climate, climate change, and coastal plant communities. I ran the Outer Banks Marathon on
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Travels in Alaska: Seeking the Sublime Among Glaciers and Fjords

September 2015. All but one of the 40 glaciers that flow from the Harding Icefield, which caps the Kenai Mountains on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, spill into a handful of fjords that connect with Resurrection Bay and the Gulf of Alaska. I
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Time Travels in Alaska

After a sunset touchdown in Anchorage, I spent Saturday night in the Puffin Inn, a two-star motel, and after a two-star high-calorie breakfast at Gywnnie’s Old Alaska Restaurant just up the street the next morning, I was finally driving south
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Laudato Si’: The Pope’s Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home

September 2015. Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, DC, this week motivated me to speed up my reading of his lengthy and weighty encyclical on climate change, ecology, and humans and nature, “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.” The document
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My Beer Comes from the Mountains: Watersheds, Wilderness, and Indian Peaks Pale Ale

July 2015. In a previous story about my July trip to the Colorado high country, I got in a dig at Coors beer – well-deserved in my view. In another story from that trip I talked about the relationship between the
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In Search of the Sublime with Albert Bierstadt in Colorado

July 2015. The word “sublime” isn’t used much these days, but it would have been 150 years ago. America’s westward expansion, and the Civil War, embedded in the context of global exploration and a rapid expansion of science, were challenging the
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Colorado Fires and Firemoths

July 2015. Two years ago in June, as the giant Black Forest fire near Colorado Springs, Colorado, was just being contained, I wrote about a tiny, brightly colored, fire-dependent moth, Schinia masoni, the Colorado Firemoth. If you want to see this
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Miombo Magic at Machinga Malawi

June 2015. Another day of testing our methodology for rapid botanical surveys for the “Strengthening the Information Base of Natural Habitats, Biodiversity, and Environmental Services in the Shire River Basin” component of the World Bank’s Shire River Basin Management Program, which
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    Report from a Season at Cascade Head February 2019. My last posting, “Monarch Field of Dreams: Reprise,” came at the end of September. Now I should explain why it’s been so long since I’ve written anything here. I’ve just returned to my home base in a Washington DC suburb after nearly four months at Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast. At the …...
    Monarch Field of Dreams: Reprise In the spring of 2010, I dug up a few milkweed plants along a bike path I often ran along and transplanted them to my garden. As I wrote then in a blog titled “Field of Dreams of Monarchs,” I had a very optimistic “if you plant them, they will come” vision. And, sure enough, …...
    Canoeing Louisiana’s Manchac Swamp with Ecological Aliens and the Voodoo Queen My flight from Washington, DC, to New Orleans on the first Friday of August was delayed for seven hours by mechanical problems, so instead of getting to my hotel in time for happy hour in the French Quarter, I arrived at 1:30 AM, exhausted. The next morning, I headed for Café Beignet on Royal Street, …...
    Walking on the Trembling Prairie As we stepped out into the open marsh after crossing over the tree-covered spoil bank along the canal by which we had reached this place on a large pontoon boat, the feel of the ground was immediately, noticeably different. We pushed our way through chest-high grasses and other marsh plants, watching carefully where we placed …...
    More Colorado Fires and Firemoths and More On a trip to Colorado two years ago, in July 2016, I was driving down from a trailhead in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area after a glorious hike to Arapahoe Pass when I saw the plume of smoke pushing up to the east, high enough to start forming a “pyronimbus” cloud – essentially a thunderhead …...
    The Internalization of a Land Ethic: A Visit to Coon Valley, Wisconsin US Highway 14 drops into the town of Coon Valley after passing through Viroqua and Westby in the scenic landscape of the Driftless Area, a unique pocket of American geology, 85% of which is in western Wisconsin. The repeated pulses of the ice ages that pushed continental ice sheets across most of nearby North America …...
    A Morning at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison “I have to go there!” I wrote in the margin beside this sentence written by Aldo Leopold in 1934: “If civilization consists of cooperation with plants, animals, soil, and men, then a university which attempts to define that cooperation must have for the use of its faculty and students, places which show what the land …...
    Walden: Diving in Deeper “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau In January of 1846, his first winter in his tiny house by Walden Pond, when Thoreau determined that the ice was finally thick and safe, he undertook a survey to determine the depth of the pond, which had generally been …...
    Wading Into Walden April 2018. “Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; … and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?” With those lines Henry David Thoreau conveys his personal relationship with Walden Pond, where he made a formative experiment in observing life that became the basis for Walden, …...
    A Walk on Wachusett April 2018. “Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travelers,” began the first sentence of Henry David Thoreau’s essay “A Walk to Wachusett.” This …...