Traveling

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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Revisiting Cole’s View of The Oxbow

April 2018. In 1836, Thomas Cole completed one of his most famous paintings, “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm —The Oxbow.” That same year, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking transcendentalist essay, “Nature,” was published, and Henry David Thoreau,
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Winter Walk with Audubon in Upper Manhattan

February 2018. After a hearty breakfast at the Skylight Diner, I went underground into Penn Station in midtown Manhattan and caught the C-line subway train heading uptown. New York City’s mind-boggling ethnic and cultural diversity and the New York Times
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Another Conversation with Thomas Cole

February 2018. “It would seem unnecessary to those who can see and feel, for me to expatiate on the loveliness of verdant fields, the sublimity of lofty mountains, or the varied magnificence of the sky; but that the number of
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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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Monarchs and Hawks at Cape May

October 7th, 2017. After years of making a faithful fall pilgrimage to Cape May, New Jersey, to watch the migration of hawks and monarch butterflies, my consulting travel schedule overruled the annual tradition in 2014, and I haven’t been back
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“Mission American”: How a USAID Biodiversity Assessment Helped Create a Protected Area in Eastern Ukraine

April 2017. In my previous story, I described my impressions of another spring on the grasslands of the Ukrainian steppe and explained that this was my second trip to Ukraine to conduct a biodiversity assessment for the U.S. Agency for
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Another Spring on the Ukrainian Steppe

April 2017. Six years ago, in March 2011, I was in eastern Ukraine, near the western edge of the Eurasian steppe ecoregion that sprawls across the continent from Mongolia to the Danube. These grasslands were the habitat for our hunter
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Facing the Anthropocene in Florida: The Ecological Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting

The Ecological Society of America held its annual meeting this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The conference theme was “Novel Ecosystems in the Anthropocene.” I’ve written about the “Anthropocene,” or alluded to it, in many stories I’ve posted here, most
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Nature’s Warm Heart: Following John Muir’s Footsteps at Fountain Lake, Wisconsin

“This sudden plash into pure wildness – baptism in Nature’s warm heart – how utterly happy it made us!” John Muir wrote in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, describing his arrival, in 1849 at the age of eleven,
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    Mount Tamalpais Moods On my recent “book tour” to the San Francisco Bay Area to talk about and promote my book Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast, I had planned to stay at the UC Berkeley’s Point Reyes Field Station. But those plans fell through suddenly and unexpectedly when I arrived at …...
    Nature on the Edge: California Biosphere Book Tour When I returned in late October to Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington, D.C., suburb where I’ve lived for more than thirty years, after a five-day, 3,000-mile drive from California, I had an old Joni Mitchell song stuck in my head: … / but I wouldn’t want to stay here/ it’s too old and cold and …...
    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 …...