Visiting Revolutionary Ecological Relatives in Philadelphia

July 12th, 2012. If they are blood relatives, the connection is distant, and untraceable.  But they are some of my intellectual and philosophical ancestors, and this past weekend I made a pilgrimage of sorts, to Philadelphia, to visit the old
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The Great Ruaha Versus Rice

The Rufiji River is Tanzania’s largest in terms of flow. Its catchment in the southern highlands stretches from Mbeya in the southwest, to its mouth at the Rufiji Delta, inshore from Mafia Island on the Indian Ocean. The Ruaha River,
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Conserving Watershed Forests in Sierra Leone’s Western Area Peninsula

The Freetown Peninsula is one of the only parts of coastal Africa, and the only place in West Africa, where mountains meet the coast.  When Portuguese explorer Pedro de Cintra sailed past this coast in 1462 he imagined he saw
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Tracking John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

Few people know that John Muir – nature writer, champion of Yosemite, and a founding father of the American environmental movement and of our system of national parks – traveled to South America in 1911, alone at the age of
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Snow Geese Knit Arctic and Mid-Atlantic

Walking along the shore of the Arctic Ocean in a stiff cold wind… were those patches of white just offshore clusters of sea ice? Maybe… No! Those white objects suddenly rose up in a noisy cloud, swirling above the water
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A Pilgrimage to the Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Refuges in Michoacán, México

On cold, grey, winter days in January and February a bright memory sometimes flutters into my mind, and I’m off on a daydream of a trip to see overwintering monarch butterflies in their mountain refuges in México in 2004, now
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Forests, Firewood, and “Low Emissions Development” in Serbia

10 December,2011 After a week of rushing from meeting to meeting in Belgrade, talking with government officials, scientists, and non-governmental organizations about the country’s plans for using renewable energy, using energy more efficiently, managing forests, and integrating economically and politically
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Firewood, Hydropower, and “Low Emissions Development” in Macedonia

5 November 2011 About three-quarters of households in Macedonia are heated with firewood.  Wood is estimated provide 30% of residential energy, and around 10% of the total energy consumption of the country.  In a still-developing country, almost 40% of which
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Forests, Communities, and “Low Emissions Development” in Albania

October 27, 2011 I never imagined having a chance to work in Albania until I was invited to provide a perspective on forestry, agriculture, and other land uses as part of a multi-agency U.S. team assessing the potential for assisting
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Migrating Hawks and Monarchs, Cape May, New Jersey

October 10, 2011 Sipping coffee on my 5th Floor balcony at the Ocean Holiday Motel, overlooking the dunes and beach at Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, on Columbus Day, the scientist in me couldn’t resist even an amateur attempt to quantify
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    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 …...
    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). …...