Browse Topics
Ecology
Sunken Treasures
Sylvia Earle On Why We Need To Protect The Oceans
We have measured a sharp decrease in oxygen in the ocean over the last fifty years. If the ocean has less oxygen, then less is going into the atmosphere as well. I don’t want to mess around with my oxygen-generating system. Ask any astronaut how important your oxygen-generating system is. Shouldn’t this be the highest priority of every man, woman, and child — to be able to breathe?
July 2018
Sunbeams
July 2018She loved the serene brutality of the ocean, loved the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.
We Only Protect What We Love
Michael Soule On The Vanishing Wilderness
The reason we act when something threatens our family or our neighborhood is because we love these people and places. Maybe it takes a tangible threat to our home environment to make us realize that we really do love the earth.
April 2018
April 2018
Featuring Barbara Kingsolver, Kathleen Dean Moore, John Elder, and more.
April 2018excerpted from
The Round Walls Of Home
We need to send into space a flurry of artists and naturalists, photographers and painters, who will turn the mirror upon ourselves and show us Earth as a single planet, a single organism that’s buoyant, fragile, blooming, buzzing, full of spectacles, full of fascinating human beings, something to cherish. Learning our full address may not end all wars, but it will enrich our sense of wonder and pride.
June 2016
The Skeleton Gets Up And Walks
Craig Childs On How The World Is Always Ending
We think of apocalypse as a moment — a flash of light, then you’re gone — but if we study the earth’s history, we find that it’s not one moment. It’s actually a long process. In fact, it’s hard to see where it begins or ends. Like right now: evidence indicates that we’re experiencing the planet’s sixth mass extinction — a period when the rate of extinction spikes and the diversity and abundance of life decrease. Each such extinction event takes hundreds of thousands of years to play out, and it’s generally 5 to 8 million years before the previous levels of biodiversity return. So are we at the end or the beginning of a cycle? This could just be a temporary spike. The pattern could swerve in a different direction.
June 2016
Two Ways Of Knowing
Robin Wall Kimmerer On Scientific And Native American Views Of The Natural World
I prefer to ask what gifts the land offers. Gifts require a giver, a being with agency. Gifts invite reciprocity. Gifts help form relationships. Scientists aren’t comfortable with the word gifts, so we get ecosystem services instead. These terms arise from different worldviews, but both recognize the way the land sustains life.
April 2016
Intrigue In The Trees
Often I wonder: / Is the earth trying to get / rid of us, shake us off, / drown us, scorch us / to nothingness?
April 2016The Serpents Of Paradise
I finish my coffee, lean back, and swing my feet up and inside the doorway of the trailer. At once there is a buzzing sound from below and the rattler lifts his head from his coils, eyes brightening, and extends his narrow black tongue to test the air.
April 2016Call Of The Wild
Bernie Krause On The Disappearing Music Of The Natural World
Nearly 50 percent of the habitats where I’ve made recordings over the past forty-plus years have been so severely damaged that they’re now either biophonically silent or altered to the point of being unrecognizable.
September 2014
