Tag: nature

In the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, a seasoned fire lookout watches as his beloved forest and his personal life burn, and he tries to imagine what will arise from their ashes.

Why do we love (and fear, and kill) polar bears with so much intensity?

By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.

It was the place he came to feel wild, and I was ready to trespass into the world of men.

Being an outdoorsy person doesn’t make you a conservationist, sadly.

The Mississippi River’s infrastructure is aging, and no one can agree who should fix it.

What does a naturalist do at the end of their career!? Retire in nature, of course.

When two Irish travelers take hiking advice from a supposed guide, they soon find themselves relying on their wits in the dark.

After a spate of trauma and loss, Maura Kelly retreats to the Hudson Valley where she is converted into a ‘nature person.’

A fateful encounter between Oregon’s mightiest wolf and the scientist who would track him for the next six years.

Short-term rentals are affecting the character of places like Bozeman, Boise, and Crested Butte.

But he died before he could finish his book on natural history. As Emerson put it, Thoreau “depart[ed] out of Nature before… he has been really shown to his peers for what he is.”

A climate change feature at New York Magazine leads a scientist to take on its extraordinary claims.

The perfect skipping stone has “lobes” that act as spokes, keeping the stone above the water.

Spending less time cleaning your windshield? A group of researchers in Germany is trying to find out why.

Underneath the beautiful surface of federal lands are stories of danger, harassment, and billionaire privilege.

In one Alaskan town, the bone pile is a bounty for hungry polar bears and enterprising tour guides.

Scientists closely monitor the last member of a species. Is there space in a creature’s DNA to consider the prospect of no tomorrow?

At Outside, the disappearance of a teenage runner in Colorado brings up the question: Who searches for the people who disappear on American public lands?

On birding as an extreme sport, and how observing birds satisfies a “bone-deep, soul-deep need to classify and organize the world around us.”

In Canada’s most easterly province, volatile weather conditions and cultural isolation produced a fascinating vocabulary to describe the natural world.

The contrasting conditions of the resurgent Föritz and the depleted forests of Albania are a microcosm of the planet. We are living in the Anthropocene, a time when human activity, more than anything else, shapes the earth’s climate and ecosystems. Our hunting, fishing, deforestation, overgrazing, and pollution have created a period of mass extinction the likes of which haven’t occurred since the dinosaurs. E. O. Wilson, the preeminent biologist and conservationist, predicts we could lose half of all species on the earth by the end of this century.

Scientists are trying to uncover why some people are better able to recover from trauma than others: After Ebaugh crawled up the rocky riverbank, a truck driver picked her up, took her to a nearby convenience store and bought her a cup of hot tea. Police, when they arrived, were sympathetic and patient. The doctor […]

The key to solving hunger in Africa starts with improving the soil. An overview of agricultural subsidies and the debate over whether the best approach is through inorganic fertilizers or greener, cheaper (but more difficult) solutions like no-till farming: Fertilizer use in Africa is at the mercy of precarious politics. Although Rwanda’s fertilizer programme is […]

Researchers study a small group of patients who underwent surgery that split their brains: Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information — a word, an object, a […]

In the 1940s, U.S. doctors led experiments that intentionally infected thousands of Guatemalans with venereal diseases. A closer look at how it happened, and who knew: John Cutler, the young investigator who led the Guatemalan experiments, had the full backing of US health officials, including the surgeon general. “Cutler thought that what he was doing […]