and found a universe of life.

THE DRY COUNTRY IS fond of yellow as its accent color. The landscape primarily clothes itself in tones of earthy strata and the soft neutrals of grassland, but yellow is always part of the ensemble, ...

The genre of environmental writing has been expanding in recent years.

When we write about landscapes we know well and inhabit, it is easy to stop truly seeing and fall into habits surrounding language, image, and form. When this happens, poets need to find ways to ...

Many of us have enjoyed long journeys (expeditions, treks) that involve radical changes of setting and habit. Much excellent writing has come out of this type of movement (think Robert Macfarlane, ...

We are proud to announce that this essay won the 2026 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for the best food-related personal essay. You can read some of Erica Berry’s thoughts on winning, and ...

RICK HANEY, GANGLY AND GARRULOUS, paces in front of a congregation of government conservationists, working the room for laughs before he gets to the hard data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture soil ...

IT ALL STARTS with the weather. Comes a day when summer finally gives in to the faintest freshet of chill and a slim new light and just like that, you’re gone. Wild in love with the autumn proviso.

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 ...

IT’S SPRING WHEN I REALIZE that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year cicadas return, burrowing out of neat, round holes in the ground to shed their larval shells, sprout ...

BIGFOOT ISN’T REAL, but black bears are—that’s the subtext of a recent study by Dr. Floe Foxon mapping bear populations relative to cryptid sightings. That study, published in 2024, sparked my ...

Banana Man, photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio. Artwork by Narsiso Martinez, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. NARSISO MARTINEZ’S mixed media installations focus on the ...