Traveling

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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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
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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
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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,
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Searching for Grauer’s Swamp-Warbler at the Top of the Nile

September 2014. Tucked among the mille collines of northern Rwanda is a huge, high-elevation marsh called Rugezi. On a map, or on Google Earth, Rugezi appears among the “thousand hills” – as “mille collines” translates from the French of the
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Not Man Apart: Genealogy of an Ecological Worldview

August 2014. Robinson Jeffers, a now little-known Californian poet who was widely known in the 1920s to 1940s, was on the cover of Time Magazine on April 4, 1932. His poem, “The Answer,” published in 1936, ends with these lines:
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At Church with John Muir

August 2014. The wind across Tuolumne Meadows was stronger and cooler than we had expected for mid-August as we parked at the trailhead and started on the John Muir Trail for Cathedral Peak. In My First Summer in the Sierra,
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Screeching Macaw, Unseen Jaguar

Forested ridges rolled away in the early morning light as far as the eye could see from the top of Canaa, Sky Place Temple, at the ancient Mayan ruins of Caracol. Howler monkeys were still roaring from the tall trees
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Belizean Blues

Earth is a water planet. Over seventy percent of her surface is water (the word “earth” comes from roots in ancient Germanic languages, and she was portrayed as a goddess, hence “her”), and the atmosphere is full of gaseous water.
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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 …...