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Ecology
Sunbeams
November 2020In spite of our rather boastful talk about progress, and our pride in the gadgets of civilization, there is, I think, a growing suspicion — indeed, perhaps an uneasy certainty — that we have been sometimes a little too ingenious for our own good. . . . We are beginning to wonder whether our power to change the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom for our own good, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the welfare of generations to come.
One’s Place Upon The Earth
As I strolled through a glide of water clear as air, my fisherman’s heart did a somersault when I sighted, not twenty feet away, two chinook salmon easily twenty times the size of the trout I’d been happily catching and releasing.
March 2020A Test Of Our Compassion
Louisa Willcox & David Mattson On The Plight Of Grizzly Bears
Do we want a deeper, richer relationship with nature, or do we want to just kill everything and live through our smartphones?
January 2020Sunbeams
February 2019Natural law is the highest law, and it would be folly to figure that you can outwit natural law.
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 2018Sunbeams
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 2018April 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 2016The 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