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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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
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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
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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
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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
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    Following John Muir to Brazil in Search of the Paraná Pine On August 12th, 1911, John Muir left New York on a ship bound for Belém, Brazil. He had just spent a couple of hot summer months on the East Coast, lobbying against the Hetch Hetchy Dam in Washington, DC, negotiating with his publishers in New York, and visiting old friends and colleagues. He was 73 …...
    Remembering Ecologist Paul Ehrlich When I was maybe fifteen, my always optimistic and encouraging mother gave me an envelope with a five-dollar bill and a note that said “To start a fund to feed the people of the world.” It must have been her response to one of the wide-ranging discussions we often had, about everything we’d read about …...
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