DEEP IN THE FORESTS of the southern coastal plains are places where trees rise up straight out of the ground, sometimes one hundred feet, their branches splayed all near the crown in a wide, high ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean ...

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 ...

MAYBE IT’D BE a stand of trees encircling a ground soft with pine needles, out of view of neighbors so as not to scare them, but close enough that, should danger come, there might be a witness. That’s ...

IT IS SPRING IN HOUSTON, which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. The bricks of my house sweat. In my yard the damp air condenses on the leaves of the crepe myrtle ...

IT’S AN EARLY MAY MORNING and the air is cool and still and filled with lambent light. I am out in a shrubby field, counting birds with three students from my field biology class. We’re working our ...

LAKE SUPERIOR ON A CALM DAY has a depth clarity of over a hundred feet. In shallow waters, boulders appear to be just below the surface. Near shore, trash creates a timeline of occupation: plates, ...

IN THE FALL OF 1941, as the Nazis invaded Russia, choking trade routes into Leningrad and starving the city’s population, a group of botanists decided to not allow the world to end. They were ...

THE MUSHROOM BURIAL SHROUD that covered Luke Perry’s face and famous forehead was black as night, or perhaps it was white as bone, made of organic cotton, and inlaid with white crochet tubes that ...

John Hausdoerffer: In thinking about kinship, I think it’s important to begin with, What are the boundaries of our kin? We can go way internal and microscopic, down to the nerves that actually inform ...

BEFORE THE APPOINTMENT, my sister slipped the doctor a note with a list of our concerns. Our dad was forgetting words, wasn’t walking well, had difficulty communicating, was struggling to use ...