This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner. Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is […]
Commentary
One October morning in 2013, I walked into the Canmore offices of an organization called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, to speak with its reluctant leader. I was at the outset of my career in journalism, fresh out of graduate school and loose on the land in the Northern Rockies. With my […]
It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking […]
Almost 15 years ago I traveled to a polar ice sheet with two key researchers who have since passed away. First, José Rial, who I followed to Greenland, was taken by cancer. His death was followed by his friend Konrad Steffen, one of the great Arctic ice scientists and explorers, who fell into a crevasse […]
Recently I had what Cassie has dubbed a “Hubble moment.” I’ve been on the board of directors at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing for at least a decade, but had somehow never grasped the fine print of how our Taylor Blakeslee fellowship came to be. I knew it was named after two […]
Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks, squeals, and whistles. But I felt a little bereft, my sense of killer whales as cultural beings diminished. Killer whales – or orcas if you prefer, or […]
Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up. Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door […]
A defensive back playing for a Texas university football team recently said something unusual into a press microphone. “I don’t believe in space,” he said. “I’m religious, so I think, like, we’re on our own right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” I welcome eccentric ways of thinking. Being […]