In Ireland, Halloween (Samhain) is a major temporal hinge—when the year turns from light to dark, and the boundary between the living and dead, the fantastic and the mundane, grows gossamer thin.

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, ...

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, ...

On scars, cars, and aging bodies ...

I first encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, in the ecology section of my local bookstore. Jenny Odell: One thing I loved about this book is how demystifying it is. I remember ...

BEFORE THE APPOINTMENT, my sister slipped the doctor a note with a list of our concerns. Our dad was forgetting words, wasn’t walking well, had difficulty communicating, was struggling to use ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...