Western Norway’s rustic port village of Flåm, a remote goat-farming hamlet and summer escape set deep among the region’s icy fjords and towering, snow-capped peaks, seems an unlikely launch site for ...

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that ...

Francis “Bully” Mission Sr., president and founder of Mission Animal Control, is in a good mood when I meet him at a strip mall parking lot on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. He and ...

Back when some of the first humans showed up in the Americas, far down in southern Chile near the coast, a small group of 20 or 30 built themselves a camp. It was in a warm and rich rainforest, in a ...

At low tide, Hélène Sonko wades through the muddy mangrove forest surrounding the town of Joal-Fadiout, in the Saloum river delta of western Senegal. A salty breeze whistles from the Atlantic Ocean as ...

When I was a teenager, my parents bought a home near an old farm pond in Bangor, Maine. A family of muskrats lived there and would go about their business as I lazed on the dock; I didn’t pay them ...

Just before 10:10 on a warm summer night in 1917, German soldiers loaded a new type of armament into their artillery and began bombarding enemy lines near Ypres in Belgium. The shells, each emblazoned ...

Someone approaching the shores of Utah’s bleached-out and odiferous Great Salt Lake for the first time might be inclined to call it dead. This is not the case. Only half of it is at death’s door. The ...

In late July, dozens of brown bears congregate at Brooks Falls, in Katmai National Park and Preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, to gorge on sockeye salmon catapulting their bright red bodies upstream to ...

Heroic fish tales tend to focus on species with a certain je ne sais quoi: the leaping salmon, the globetrotting tuna, the mammoth marlin towering above its captor as it dangles from a scale. Not so ...

This article was originally published in High Country News, a magazine about the western United States’ environment and communities, and is republished here with permission. Read more stories like ...