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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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’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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

WE CALLED IT THE DESERT island game. Arriving at a train station or airport gate, you’d survey your fellow passengers—those with whom you were throwing in your body to hurl through space—and you’d ...