Nature

Goshawk in flight

Shattered by her father's sudden death, writer Helen Macdonald began dreaming of wild hawks.  In an effort to move beyond her grief, she bought and trained a wild goshawk — one of the world's fiercest birds of prey.   But between the bird and her grief, she became, in her words "more hawk than human."

An outhouse. For pooping.

At the University of Colorado, microbiologist Rob Knight is exploring a new frontier — the human microbiome.

The male Ivory-Bill leaves as the female returns.

The story of finding and recording the rarest bird in America: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.

Spruce Grain Picea #0909-11A07 (9,550; Sweden) Rachel Sussman

Photographer Rachel Sussman has documented 30 of the oldest living things in the world. Beautiful and romantic, her photos document both the adaptation and fragility inherent to surviving for tens of thousands of years. 

foggy trees

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.

Rachel Carson and Bob Hines researching off the Atlantic coast in 1952

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. 

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

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. 

support your local planet

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.

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