I. One autumn evening several years ago I was driving—I should admit it, I was flying—north on New York state’s Taconic Parkway when I spotted a white tailed deer at the side of the road. It isn’t unusual to see them along the Taconic, especially in the fall, when the rut makes them a little […]
Ethics
In late August 2018 I traveled to the northernmost island in Canada to observe white wolves. These were an extremely unusual group of animals, and they had the distinction of being unafraid of humans. This alone was something, but beyond their fearlessness lay a subtler behavior that is perhaps best described as tolerance. Another way […]
I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I […]
I’ve been setting up wildlife cameras at natural pinch points and along trackways to see what’s going on when I’m not looking. I’ll admit, it feels invasive. Candid moments of animals are caught without permission, my cameras quiet enough that subjects don’t glance up even for the second or third shot, a black bear strolling […]
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 […]
Near where I live in Seattle there is a rail trail called the Burke-Gilman. Everyone around here knows it simply as The Burke. An asphalt conduit that bisects north Seattle from Bothell to the Ballard Locks, The Burke is over twenty miles long, and a classic multiuse recreational urban route. Bicyclists fly over it, people […]
I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad. I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? […]
I was having an email exchange with a longtime friend a few months ago, and we got to talking about our long-ago youth—specifically, the workplace where we met, when we were both in our teens. As is often the case in these late-evening conversations, the discussion turned to the subject of who else among us […]
