How do you future-proof the present? How can you contextualize a specific moment? These are the questions that keep bubbling up when I meet with Helene Larsson Pousette and Robert Duffley in June of ...

The Course Writing Rhizomatically Rhizomes are the runners that many plants and trees (like sassafras, elder, Solomon’s seal, ferns, and mayapples) send forth as they spread outward from a “mother” ...

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

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A Culture of Tree People WOODY ENCROACHMENT into the American prairie is a product of modern realities, yes, but those realities were designed to the tastes of European colonizers who knew the ways of ...

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long ...

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.