A FEW SUMMERS AGO, I took a class on art-making and attention at Maine Media College with Éireann Lorsung. For five days, we walked, bound books, painted, wrote, listened and looked, did experiments, ...

Bats in the belfry. I’ve worked with threatened lesser long-nosed bats, who are great pollinators of tall cacti, agaves, and tree morning glories, and their roosting caves don’t get no respect. I’ve ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of technology indistinguishable from magic, especially in the realm of thinking machines. Among other tasks, you can ask ChatGPT, one of the world’s most advanced deep-learning ...

LAKE SUPERIOR ON A CALM DAY has a depth clarity of over a hundred feet. In shallow waters, boulders appear to be just below the surface. Near shore, trash creates a timeline of occupation: plates, ...

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean ...

I ONCE THOUGHT I KNEW what nature writing was: the pretty, sublime stuff minus the parking lot. The mountain majesty and the soaring eagle and the ancient forest without the human footprint, the ...

IN THE FALL OF 1941, as the Nazis invaded Russia, choking trade routes into Leningrad and starving the city’s population, a group of botanists decided to not allow the world to end. They were ...

THE MUSHROOM BURIAL SHROUD that covered Luke Perry’s face and famous forehead was black as night, or perhaps it was white as bone, made of organic cotton, and inlaid with white crochet tubes that ...

IT IS SPRING IN HOUSTON, which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. The bricks of my house sweat. In my yard the damp air condenses on the leaves of the crepe myrtle ...

THE CHINESE CHARACTER for silkworm (蚕) is composed of the symbol for sky (天) and the symbol for worm (虫). They are heavenly worms. China’s Sichuan Province, a damp, landlocked corner east of the ...

COMPRISING MORE THAN FOUR HUNDRED species and two genera, oaks and their fruits abound in most temperate regions of the world, where they feed a great many organisms, from squirrels and deer to ...