AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER each year, something unavoidable happens: the insects come back out. While some find the bugs ...

HEAT WAVES SHIMMER above the grasses, the air heavy and white and ringing with the buzz of cicadas. The boys have been shoeless all summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895 pricks ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

For decades, environmental educators, conservationists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature — usually with inadequate support from policymakers. A number of ...

SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a ...

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of technology indistinguishable from magic, especially in the realm of thinking machines. Among other tasks, you can ask ChatGPT, one of the world’s most advanced deep-learning ...

I had always longed to meet an octopus. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena’s tank. If she consented, I could touch ...

“Geography as Generosity” originally appeared in Toby Jurovics, ed., From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez, published by Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln ...

MY CONVERSATION WITH ARTURO would happen after I returned home, but on the last weekend of my Oregon trip, I buckled into Joe’s gray Toyota Tacoma truck as he drove us out to Mount Pisgah Arboretum.

John Hausdoerffer: I wonder if that also helps us define kinning. You mentioned “companion” and “teacher,” and ki awakens that discovery of greater-than-humans as companions and teachers, [which is ...

Corey Pressman: My question to you all to get started is why fungi, and why now? Merlin Sheldrake: I think there are a few reasons why we’re seeing a surge of interest in fungi right now. One is that ...

The Future is Fungi“The mushroom pushes against boundaries,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “and in doing so, it creates an opening.” So often, when humans look at mushrooms, we’re apt to see solutions ...