Note: This post originally ran Dec. 7, 2018, and is being resurrected for Atacama Week. Please consume extra water and enjoy. Driving in a foreign country is a good way to turn your head inside out. It shakes the cobwebs and forces you to rearrange the heavy furniture of your mind. You need to make […]
Earth
Earlier this month, a pinpoint landslide let loose onto a highway near where I live in southwest Colorado. No homes were destroyed. No cars were crushed, though three were narrowly missed. One pickup punched into reverse, its body hammered with rocks, occupants safe. What is significant is the tonnage of two boulders that tumbled a […]
I’ve prayed for rain many times, thirsty in the desert, craving a flash flood in a remote canyon. Watching rain fall, silky virga growing legs and touching ground, is worth any petition. I don’t know if prayers work. I’ve been a supplicant in the face of an oncoming thunderstorm only to see it make a […]
The marmoset looked unlikely on the filing cabinet. It reclined on a piece of poster board, its skinny arms folded across its chest. Its cotton-stuffed eyes stared at the low, tiled ceiling. The specimen room smelled strongly of tea and cornmeal. Carina pulled the handle of a taller cabinet, and Mo and I leaned in. […]
A few days ago, environmental writer Jason Mark published an essay in Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club, in which he advocates for “a provocative idea”: establishing nature reserves that would be “off-limits to most people” except “working scientists.” These preserves would be managed exclusively “for wild nature alone.” Mark invokes conservationist icon […]
This post originally published May 12, 2015 With a calendar and Google Earth on my computer, you’d think I wouldn’t need the horizon any more, but I find I need it more than ever. After 15 years living in the same house tucked into the West Elk Mountains of western Colorado, I moved this winter […]
“When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow. Anything that touches.” –Mary Oliver, “Leaves and blossoms along the way: A poem” It was 95 degrees out on the day I drove towards the wildfire. I […]
In 2016, I went to the Peruvian Amazon on assignment for National Geographic. I focused on a group of indigenous people, the Matsiguenka, living inside Manu National Park. One of my sources was Alejo Machipango, a hunter, farmer, and member of the water committee for the village of Yomibato. Alejo is about 34, but I […]