Bad things happen quickly; good things take time. This isn’t a perfect pattern, of course, but I think it’s real and worth thinking about. A wildfire, explosion, earthquake, pandemic, gunshot, car crash, heart attack—all fast. Cancer typically starts out slow but then gets fast. Climate change seems slow, but the reason it’s so dangerous is […]
Nature
This post first ran in the spring of 2015 and I’ve often wondered if this patch of earth in Iowa is still guarded. A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. […]
My very healthy father died unexpectedly at Thanksgiving in 2023. In what turned out to be the last 3 1/2 years of his life, he and I went on a lot of hikes. My parents lived close to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and, in the times of pandemic lockdown, it was a […]
Autumn always makes the woods feel emptyThough I know strictly speakingThis isn’t true Bears prowl orchardsChuff through oak grovesStuff themselves before a slumberThat grows shorter every yearDeer, too, are bolder now and dumberHaunting the edges of highwaysRunning to or from the rutEven many insects remainHidden in soil or bark Unnamed under leavesOr within the spongy […]
Caribou of Alaska’s Western Arctic Herd travel the shore of the Kobuk River. Author video.— Most of the time, caribou are conservative. They tend not to try new things unless they really have to. They don’t like to wander far from their preferred migration routes, except in preiods of unusual weather, or extreme duress. While […]
Hillary Rosner is a science journalist and editor who teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a friend and fellow member of Scilance, a network of 30+ science writers that has been meeting up online for 20 years. Over the years, I’ve loved following Hillary’s thoughtful, adventurous reporting on wildlife conservation, […]
Our neighbors of ten years moved away about a month ago. They were an older couple; L., the husband, was the one we interacted with the most. He was a commercial contractor and drove a big black pickup, but he also made sure to let my wife and me know he had never once voted […]
Last week my family traveled to Oregon for an end-of-summer trip. We wanted to start in Bend, in the central part of the state. There we would hike and explore a bit—somewhat to her dismay, I was especially eager to take my daughter up South Sister, one of the Three Sisters volcanoes—before driving down to […]
