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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

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 ...

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 ...

SOMETIMES REVENGE IS the only first response to betrayal. Then comes the journey toward healing. When Beyoncé’s husband, rapper and music mogul Jay-Z, cheated on her with the now infamous “Becky with ...

HEAT WAVES SHIMMER above the grasses, the air heavy and white and ringing with the buzz of cicadas. The boys have been shoeless all summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895 pricks ...

To depict a loveless and macabre world—a world of the scarecrow acting as the Lord of blood-thirsty crows, of the harridan decked out as a beauty queen . . . a world of debased flesh and servile ...

I’M NO ARTIST, but, if you had asked me when I was a child to draw the shape of a life, I might have drawn a horizontal line. A few years after that, I would have drawn life as a mountain. The upward ...

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long ...