Living With Wolves
Working at a wolf sanctuary became part of my identity. Leaving the pack was harder than I expected.
Working at a wolf sanctuary became part of my identity. Leaving the pack was harder than I expected.
I had never met creatures more cowardly than those two mice, but, for some reason, they would never abandon each other.
I was helpful, but unlike the giving tree, I was not entirely happy.
Even though I’ve learned I can’t always consume everything, it doesn’t stop me from trying.
Unlike these stories, we don’t have decades of do-overs—especially on the West Coast, where the droughts are real and the big earthquake could shake things loose anytime.
As a behavioral ecologist, I was asking of the natural world the very questions I was too scared to ask of myself and those around me.
My mother’s body, one in a million, became a conduit for lightning, and, three months later, it became a conduit for me.
A poet wrestles with grief and the multiverse.
When the fires come, as they have for the past five years in California wine country, there is little winemakers can do.
On climate change, transitioning, gender, and the vanishing sweetness of maple trees.
My German cockroach infestation, almost too good a pandemic allegory, forced me to confront the question of how much I could bear from New York City.
The grounding I felt in organized religion was substantial: the loss, acutely painful. I found temporary relief in all the ways nature found me wherever I lived.
As a person who spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and teaching about endangered creatures and environments, I craved something hopeful.
Everyone talks about sea levels and temperatures rising, but there's also the more tangible inevitability of the soil running out.
Dillard stalked a world just beginning its freefall into an unprecedented amount of change, and her response was to look, and to look hard.
We are already living in a changed world. Giving yourself time and space to grieve is important. But grief can also be a powerful tool for motivation.
Kate Harris writes in Lands of Lost Borders, “Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation, but exploring still exists, will always exist: in the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here.” This is exactly how I felt working at Hilda Glacier.
Contrary to its reputation as an extreme sport, freediving has meditative aspects.
As a child growing up in a landlocked state, I’d imagined the flock of gulls as a cloud of wings, calls sounding like laughter. Now I was struggling to grasp all that we’d lost.
My partner and I were trying to have a baby despite our climate fears. Then Trump was elected.