In birding circles, they say the first bird you see in a new year sets the tone for what follows. Anything can be meaningful ...

In 2024, you loved stories about music and religion, the color green and careful considerations of grief and hope, little ...

ONCE I PAID ATTENTION TO IT, the plant appeared everywhere. Its foliage clouded our view of the river. Its vines tangled with my pumpkins, twisted around goldenrod, jewelweed, cow parsnip — in fact, ...

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF MY APOCALYPSE are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the ...

THE VAST AREA AROUND the French city of Verdun remains suspended in the year 1916. During the First World War, these hills and gorges were cratered by a continuous ten-month-long artillery bombardment ...

Is America the greatest? It seems harder and harder to make the case for the country’s eminence, especially when you consider that, compared to a group of twenty advanced democracies, America now has: ...

Four years ago I returned from Montana to my Georgia homeland. I wanted to live where I knew the people around me, where my son could run barefoot and pick blackberries and climb magnolias. I hungered ...

THE SETTING OF THIS ESSAY by Scott Russell Sanders is the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a 15,800-acre research area in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Research conducted at the Andrews Forest ...

THROUGHOUT PENNSYLVANIA, THE VFW HALLS look much the same — a bar stretches across the front and a bingo parlor sits behind it. In 1995, T. Allan Comp, a historic preservationist who specializes in ...

THE FIRST THINGS I SEE are the tails of the planes. They jut like hundreds of dorsal fins rising from prehistoric fish that have been lined up by a butcher on a massive table of thin brown grass. It ...

I KNOW, COMING BACK AS A CROW IS A LOT MORE ATTRACTIVE. If crows and buzzards do the same rough job — picking, tearing, and cleaning up — who wouldn’t rather return as a shiny blue crow with a mind ...

I HAVE GIVEN NEARLY ONE THOUSAND TALKS ABOUT the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people ...