Environment

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Guatemala Again: Mountains, Valleys, Fire & Water

February 2018. I was in Guatemala again, almost exactly two years after my last consulting trip here. As I had done then, I was again travelling east from Guatemala City toward the Motagua Valley, traversing a grand and scenic landscape.
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Amazonia At Last

2 July 2017. Our flight from Lima descended through scattered towers of tropical cumulus clouds to the airport at Iquitos. Luckily our luggage made it, and we careened through the crazy streets in one of the ubiquitous “mototaxis” – tricycle
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The Great Tidepool

August 2017. Chapter VI of Cannery Row, John Steinbeck’s fond short novel about his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts, starts like this: “Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is
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