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
Read More

The View from Zomba Mountain: Plants, Water, and People in Southern Malawi

June 2015. We drove up and up and up along the road slashing across the edge of the escarpment above Zomba town, with views expanding across to Mount Mulanje about 70 kilometers east. At the beginning of the dry season burning
Read More

An Afternoon at Slabsides with John o’ the Birds

May 2015. When I checked John Burroughs’s first book of nature essays, Wake-Robin, out of the Stanford Library where I was an undergraduate, I wrote him off as an eastern nature wimp. My hero was John Muir, who described climbing to
Read More

The Art of Ecology: Sketching with Cole and Church

May 2015. Even now, in the second decade of the 21st Century, our view of the relationship between humans and nature, and our identity as a society, is shaped by the artists of the Hudson River School, which was the dominant
Read More

Breaking the Curse of Voodoo Economics and Designing an Ecological Economy

May 2015. A recent front page story in the Washington Post was headlined “Growth suffers winter freeze: Economy slows to near-halt,” and began with the sentence “The U.S. economy slowed nearly to a halt in the first three months of the
Read More

Lunch at Grey Towers

From the terrace in front of the mansion, with its stone towers and steep roofs of shiny grey local slate, the lawn sloped steeply down toward the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, and gave a long view east over the Delaware
Read More

The Meaning of Human Existence: A Continuing Conversation with E.O.Wilson

April 2015. My first conversation with Edward O. Wilson, the famous Harvard biologist, was forty years ago. We were sitting on an old couch on the front porch of my rented house in a neighborhood called “The Hill” in Boulder,
Read More

Dreaming of Whales in the Desert

April 2015. Winter has lingered on and on here near Washington, DC, and spring has been slow and reluctant. The National Cherry Blossom Festival is scheduled to end before the cherry blossoms even reach their peak bloom this year. And
Read More

Anthrocynology at Westminster

February 2015. OK, it was a bit out of character for me. I was in New York City, attending the second day of the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Westminster is the oldest and most prestigious dog show in
Read More

The Art of Ecology: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of the Andes

February 2015. I was in New York City recently, and on a sudden whim I decided I needed to see The Heart of the Andes. A snowstorm had passed through the previous night, dumping a few inches on the city,
Read More

  • Stay in the know!

  • Connect With Me

    Bruce Byers Consulting Facebook Bruce Byers Consulting LinkedIn Bruce Byers Consulting Email

  • Recent Posts

    Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast My new book from Oregon State University Press will be out in September 2024! You can pre-order online at Oregon State University’s website: Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast I hope you enjoy and learn from Nature on the Edge!  I am planning a number of in-person events (readings, …...
    The View from Mukuntuweap February 2024. The canyons here are eroded into mostly Jurassic strata that were deposited near sea level roughly 200 million years ago, and later folded up by orogenic forces that raised them to elevations of up to 10,000 feet. In the recent instant of geological history since our human species reached this continent, this landscape …...
    The Cream in the Gooseberry Fool It’s a tale of obsession, religion, money, passion, beauty, science, and sex—every good story should have at least some sex in it, right? And it’s a tale of mystery. Actually, it’s two interwoven tales. The first relates to the Reverend Gilbert Henry Raynor, rector of Hazeleigh, a small village in Essex, England, at the turn …...
    Revisiting Poetry Cove August 2023. In my last story, I wrote about revisiting the tidepool at Middle Cove of Cape Arago on the central Oregon coast where I’d done some of my doctoral research. On that trip I also went back to another significant place at Cape Arago that I call “Poetry Cove.” Here’s the background: During my …...
    Revisiting the Great Tidepool Sunday, August 13, 2023. It was a decent low tide, less than a foot below the MLLW (mean of lower low water), the “0” of tide tables, but still low enough to easily get into the mid-intertidal zone. And at a decent hour too, a little after 0-dark-thirty. It was already starting to get light …...
    Whalers and Quakers On a recent trip to Cape Cod, we spent the first night in New Bedford, Massachusetts, once known as “the city that lit the world” because its whaling fleet was the largest in the world and whale oil was the fuel of choice for oil lamps (and spermaceti, from sperm whales, for the best candles). …...
    Walking the Cape with Henry Cape Cod, Thoreau’s last book, begins with “Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean…” and the final sentence concludes “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” It was published posthumously in 1865, three years after his early death from tuberculosis at the age of …...
    The View from Limuw The indigenous inhabitants of the island called it limuw, “in the ocean.” A prosaic but apt geographical name for the place. The name has a very matter-of-fact, here and now implication. But the Spanish who explored the Chumash Channel and its islands beginning in the 16th century and colonized the area with their string of …...
    The Chumash Channel and its Islands When Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo sailed into the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542, he found a thriving indigenous maritime culture living along the coasts and on the Channel Islands. One thing that impressed the Spaniards were the large seagoing canoes. One major coastal village had so many canoes on the beach that Cabrillo called it …...
    The Art of Ecological Restoration on Santa Cruz Island The large fabric print hanging on the west wall of the dining room of the Santa Cruz Island Reserve research station caught my eye immediately. A tangle of creatures drawn in detailed black covered the white background, intertwining in almost Escher-like fashion. There were sheep and foxes, eagles and jays, oaks and mallows, skunks and …...