John Muir

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
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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
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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
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Ecological Explorations at the Edge of the Continent

June 2021. At about the time the coronavirus pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, I was preparing my application for a writing residency at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station, California. It was an exciting opportunity I had
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Walden: Diving in Deeper

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau In January of 1846, his first winter in his tiny house by Walden Pond, when Thoreau determined that the ice was finally thick and safe,
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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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Morning Visit with Aldo Leopold at the Shack

In his essay “The Round River,” Aldo Leopold wrote: “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part
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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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Another Visit with John Burroughs at Slabsides

May, 2016. A year ago in May, 2015, I visited the rustic retreat and writing cabin of the influential American nature writer John Burroughs (1837-1921) in the Hudson Valley. I wrote about it here, and the story eventually made its way
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How Federico Albert Stopped the Sand from Swallowing Chanco, Chile

April 2016. In trying to figure out how John Muir finally found his way to the slopes of Volcán Tolhuaca in November of 1911 to camp under his “long-sought for” Araucarias, our research soon led us to the name of Federico
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