Call it “eco-poetic license.” Here is a sequel to my last story, “Annual Pilgrimage to the Delaware Bay in May.” Continuing the “ecology of mind” theme, these are more imagistic and poetic reflections of those trips in past years. May Read More
April 2013. In a previous story I wrote about the archipelago of mountain ranges that scatters across eastern Africa between Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa. These East African mountains are a Galapagos of speciation and Read More
April 2013. The biggest threat to biodiversity worldwide is the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture. It follows that the highest-priority action needed to conserve biodiversity is to stop this conversion by stabilizing the agricultural frontier, especially on the fringes of Read More
April 2013. An archipelago of mountain ranges scatters across eastern Africa between Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa. Most of these mountain blocks rise 2,000 meters or more – some to over 3,000 meters – above Read More
April 2013. Mount Mulanje rises like an island above the rolling landscape southeast of Blantyre in southeastern Malawi. By examining images taken by the French SPOT 5 Earth-observation satellite, the Malawian team I was working with on an evaluation of USAID-funded Read More
April 2013. Matupi Village, in the Rumphi District of northern Malawi, is tucked in a valley on the southern border of Nyika National Park. We reached Matupi on a warm, sunny afternoon, after a long drive on rough dusty roads. It Read More
February 2013. Returning to the site where Muir camped and sketched, we followed the route he described, as we had last year. It was a hot summer day, and the thousand-foot climb to the ridge, which Muir described as steep Read More
February 2013. Marcelo Mila, the Mapuche leader of the group now living at the old Smith fundo of Ontario, first took us to see the view to the southeast, over the gentle valley of the Río Quino. The view matched Read More
February 2013. Few people are aware that John Muir, a founding father of American conservation, travelled alone to Chile in 1911 at the age of 73 because he wanted to see the Monkey Puzzle Tree, Araucaria araucana, in its native forests. Read More
November 10th, 2012. Hurricane Sandy had brushed by North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Halloween, and some beachfront neighborhoods were still assessing the damage and digging out a week and a half later. But today was a glorious fall Saturday, with Read More
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 …...
Evolutionary Ecology on California’s Galapagos
Sunday, October 24th. Our reservations for the trip to Prisoners Harbor on the north shore of Santa Cruz Island had been made months ago. But the weather during the past week had forced Island Packers, the commercial concessionaire that provides transportation for visitors to the four northern islands within Channel Islands National Park, to cancel …...