How Wild Is Wild?
12 minutes
Potter Stewart, a former Justice of the US Supreme Court, famously said of hard-core pornography that it was hard to define but he knew it when he saw...
The World as a Wardian Case
by Kate Brown
21 minutes
In 1829, Nathanial Bagshaw Ward, a London doctor, placed the pupa of a sphinx moth, some dirt, and a few leaves in a glass bottle and clamped on a lid...Beavering
11 minutes
Spring is approaching. The beavers have left a single stick about a meter long across the pond outlet, marking their intentions. “No mud yet, but we a...The Poetics of Dunes
11 minutes
I grew up by the sea, in the warm south of Portugal, swimming in the ocean and playing in the sand. I didn’t know then that my childhood playground wa...
In the Teeth of History: Dental Decay in the Longue Durée
by Frank Zelko
27 minutes
In recent years, I have been writing a book on the history of water fluoridation, a practice that is dental dogma in a handful of countries, particula...Mother Drone, Mother Nature: The Griffon Vulture and Israel’s Military
22 minutes
In July 2020, Israeli television reported on an endangered griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus) chick who had lost his mother to electricity wires. As would ...Home, Roots, Cosmos: A Path through Calvino’s Ecology
15 minutes
The house is Villa Meridiana. You get there by going up a little side street that skirts Via Alessandro Volta, just outside the center of town. It’s u...
Roots through Asphalt: A Conversation with Sonja Dümpelmann
by Sonja Dümpelmann and Pauline Kargruber
15 minutes
Sonja Dümpelmann is a landscape historian who is currently working on how grass species have transformed the world, and the history and political impl...Five Ways of Seeing the Steinsee
by Steve Mentz
7 minutes
On my last day as a Landhaus fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, with thin December light not quite thawing the snow, I abandoned packing to hike out ...An Otherworldly Species: Joshua Trees and the Conservation-Climate Dilemma
14 minutes
About 210 km east of Los Angeles, along the boundary of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, stands a national park dedicated to the American Southwest’s ...South African Eden: The Kruger National Park
4 minutes
The world-renowned Kruger National Park—situated on South Africa’s boundary with Mozambique and comprising some 19.000 km²—has its origins in two colo...Encountering Ghost Species
by Cameron Muir
5 minutes
On Lord Howe Island, 600 kilometres off of Australia’s east coast, you can snorkel the world’s southernmost coral reef, clamber up a basalt mountain t...