Ecology

A Visit to the Big Tree We had spent the morning with Dr. Rafael Barbizan Sühs, a landscape ecologist working at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis. Rafael’s research focuses on the Araucaria-grassland mosaic of southern Brazil’s high plateau, the planalto, and he had taken us to see some of his research sites in the Parque Nacional de São …...

The Araucaria War We arrived at the Municipal Museum of History and Heritage in Três Barras, located in the old railway station, just before its closing time of 5:00 p.m. on a Tuesday in early June. The enthusiastic manager, who had been expecting us earlier, was happy to keep the museum open for our gang of curious out-of-town …...

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 …...

Not Man Apart: A Conversation with Robinson Jeffers about How to Live in These Times I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Robinson Jeffers, a Californian poet who was widely known and read beginning in the 1920s, through the 1930s and 40s, and into perhaps the 1970s in some, especially environmentalist, circles.1 Jeffers was on the cover of Time magazine on April 4, 1932, unusual notoriety for a poet. In …...

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 …...