The opening scene paints a picture as bucolic as anything John Constable managed, albeit in broad, animated strokes. Green fields at morning, distant mountains, a small, loving farm family and the contented grunt of a well-cared-for pig set a tone of agrarian delight. But just 20 seconds into the short video and that porker is […]
Eco
In 2000, the last Pyrenean ibex died. These were mountain goat-like mammals with fierce black horns that scampered around the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Some cells had been taken from that last animal, and in 2009 the world learned that scientists had been able to clone the creature: a Pyrenean ibex kid was […]
I don’t like guns. I’m almost universally opposed to killing things. So why then, did I spend a recent weekend learning how to handle a shotgun and rifle? What possessed me to take the hunter safety exam necessary for obtaining a hunting license?
As journalists, we are trained to be neutral, to never betray any hint of bias or emotion. There are exceptions, of course — the 9/11 tragedy was so universally devastating, and so deeply unfathomable, that journalists were permitted to show a sense of loss — in fact, it would have been unthinkable not to. But […]
My friends like to joke that I have a problem when it comes to carnivores, not of the human variety but of the order Carnivora. I’m the first to admit an inordinate fondness for predators (to paraphrase the possibly apocryphal trope attributed to evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane), particularly of the Felidae family. But my fascination […]
I’d just sat down when the first carver approached me. It was my second evening in Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, 2000 kilometers north of Ottawa, and all around me well-heeled bureaucrats were tucking into Arctic char and steak. But the carver, a small weathered-looking Inuk, skirted them and made a beeline toward me. In […]
Last week my little black dog wandered off into the sloping hillside behind our Colorado home. Fifteen years old, deaf and suffering from congestive heart failure, she appeared to have succumbed to some primordial call to return to the wilderness to die. She didn’t have far to go. My husband and I live in the […]
As an undergraduate biology student, I loathed taxonomy. Plant systematics was the only college course I remember absolutely hating. It seemed like nothing more than rote memorization. I studied with flash cards I’d made on little index cards. Bracts instead of sepals, colored glands that take the place of petals? Probably a Euphorbiaceae. I spent […]