AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER each year, something unavoidable happens: the insects come back out. While some find the bugs ...

The Future is Fungi“The mushroom pushes against boundaries,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “and in doing so, it creates an opening.” So often, when humans look at mushrooms, we’re apt to see solutions ...

MY CONVERSATION WITH ARTURO would happen after I returned home, but on the last weekend of my Oregon trip, I buckled into Joe’s gray Toyota Tacoma truck as he drove us out to Mount Pisgah Arboretum.

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN eating mushrooms for at least twelve thousand years, according to the fungal micro-remains found in Paleolithic dental samples in a mountain cave in Eastern Spain. Yet the idea of ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

(This essay was a finalist for a 2010 National Magazine Award in the Essay category.) OUT ON THE BIG DRY we had to kill to live: Come October, we’d herd a yearling lamb into the west pen, throw it ...

Inequity intensifies Earth's natural forcesA VILLA MISERIA OUTSIDE Buenos Aires may have the worst feng shui in the world: it is built in a flood zone over a former lake, a toxic dump, and a cemetery.

THE HISTORY OF the plastic carrier bag—the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind—is a story of persuasion. For over a century, the paper bag held dominion over how ...

AS PART OF HER tenure as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and in association with the Library of Congress, Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to reflect on their place in the ...

SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a ...

In a Darwinian sense, “natural selection” describes how the most adaptive traits in a species will persist while others die out. For most species, the “why” behind partnership is to find a mate who ...

THE REASON I’M so hyped about this discovery, despite my last science class having been decades ago, is that the interstitium is a conceptual skeleton key, unlocking a more sophisticated, accurate way ...