One enthralling aspect of writing a book about roads and nature is that the world suddenly blossoms with odd interactions and novel ecosystems. Once you’re attuned to how our transportation infrastructure alters landscapes, every walk or drive becomes an occasion to observe some strange geo/hydro/ecological dynamic. To wit: I’m fascinated by roads as concentrators of […]
Earlier this month I visited Portugal for the first time, where I found much to love: the vertiginous cliffs overlooking the Nazaré beach, the ubiquitous custard tarts and dessert wines, the labyrinth of secret passages that veins Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. Uncultured nature-loving heathen that I am, however, I found myself most drawn to the country’s […]
In 2005, the Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that, in four mellifluous syllables, perfectly encapsulated the Anthropocene’s discontents: solastalgia, the emotion you experience when an environment you’ve long loved is catastrophically altered. Solastalgia, as Albrecht put it, is “a form of homesickness one experiences without leaving home” — it’s what you feel when […]
Earlier this month, Elise and I traveled to the Osa Peninsula, the appendage of tropical forest that juts off southwest Costa Rica into the Pacific Ocean. We chose that part of the country primarily to visit Corcovado National Park, a 164-square-mile protected area that the National Geographic Society once described, curiously, as the “most biologically […]
The end of the year is a time for lists. Our Ten Favorite Books, Twelve Movies We Loved, Twenty-Seven TikToks that Perfectly Captured the National Mood in 2022. We’re a society obsessed with rankings — with the quantification of media, the comparison of culture, the litanization of everything. We writers are the worst of the […]
Last month I went to Arizona on a reporting trip. One afternoon excursion took me to the eastern Patagonia Mountains, the rolling dun-colored range that aligns with one segment of the United States’ border with Mexico. I walked through oak-juniper woodlands alive with gray foxes and Coues deer, a small, desert-adapted subspecies of whitetail. Tufty […]
A couple of years ago, on this very site, I related the legend of the Egg Dog — basically, how my beloved companion, Kit, had an uncanny predilection for finding and delivering the eggs laid by our neighborhood chickens. Since then, I’ve resisted the temptation to document all of Kitty’s exploits, which, believe me, are […]
Two weeks ago, wandering my central Colorado town, I stumbled upon a beaver dam. This was both typical — I’ve spent much of the last eight years finding and loitering near beaver ponds — and surprising, insofar as the dam was tucked into a little suburban stream in a little suburban neighborhood, one of those […]