Amanda Stronza found the cardinal dead on a Texas highway this June, a splash of vermillion against drab asphalt. He’d been struck by a car—a common fate for birds, as many as 340 million of whom are killed by vehicles in the United States every year. Most drivers overlook these casualties, but not Stronza, an […]
I’m on a backpacking trip this week, which makes it as good a time as any to revisit one of my favorite posts (or, more accurately, to make you revisit it). Although Colorado, our home since early 2022, doesn’t have quite the same abundance and diversity of rentable Forest Service fire towers as did the […]
A well-known fact about beaver lodges, one that any close observer has surely noticed, is that they’re often home to muskrats. I’ve seen this many times, never more than last week up Clear Creek here in central Colorado, where three or four busy muskrats seemed to constantly be motoring to and from a lodge, gathering […]
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 […]