Suzanne Simard is a forest ecologist who's revolutionizing our understanding of trees. She has discovered that trees use underground networks to communicate and cooperate with each other. It turns out that whole forests can exist as a superorganism.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
nature
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the environmental movement. Rob Nixon holds the Rachel Carson chair in English at the UW-Wisconsin. He says she was something of a reluctant activist.
Lauret Savoy believes too many nature writers focus on pristine wilderness and neglect the gritty reality of the places where people actually live - in cities, for instance, maybe even near toxic waste sites. And writing about these places means grappling with difficult questions about race and poverty.
Today we explore some new paradigms for thinking about our environmental future. And, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of death of the great environmentalist, Rachel Carson.
How does a suburban dad with three kids find meaning in Thoreau's "Walden"? Tom Fate says Thoreau helps us examine a basic question: How much is enough?
Biologist David George Haskell spent a year making weekly visits to the same one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest near his home in Tennessee. His writes about his experiment in "contemplative science" in a series of gorgeous essays, called "The Forest Unseen".
Many animals, from fish to bees and ants, cannot survive alone. They need to live in groups, and these groups have a kind of collective intelligence. You might say the internet has developed its own "hive mind." In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we'll tell you how the modern science...
There's a word for the grief and anger people feel when their environment is ravaged — solastalgia. It's what Gulf Coast residents may be feeling right now, as they watch oil wash up onto their beaches.
In this hour, the psychology of our attachment to the places we love....
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