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

STEP #2: STOP GENERALIZING. My instinct is to give Quammen the benefit of the doubt; it was the late ’80s after all. Regardless of his intentions though, Quammen’s notion that Canada geese offer ...

HEAT WAVES SHIMMER above the grasses, the air heavy and white and ringing with the buzz of cicadas. The boys have been shoeless all summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895 pricks ...

John Hausdoerffer: I wonder if that also helps us define kinning. You mentioned “companion” and “teacher,” and ki awakens that discovery of greater-than-humans as companions and teachers, [which is ...

For decades, environmental educators, conservationists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature — usually with inadequate support from policymakers. A number of ...

HERE, IN THIS moment, a wilderness is a spacious and thriving place without a clearly defined path or the overlay of intellectual or commercial control. A place defined by its innate and intertwined ...

Thirteen years later, two months before the start of World War I, Jagadish Bose gave a talk entitled “Plant Autographs and their Revelations” to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The concept of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.