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

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 ...

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 ...

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN eating mushrooms for at least twelve thousand years, according to the fungal micro-remains found in Paleolithic dental samples in a mountain cave in Eastern Spain. Yet the idea of ...

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.

STEP #2: STOP GENERALIZING. My instinct is to give Quammen the benefit of the doubt; it was the late ’80s after all. Regardless of his intentions though, Quammen’s notion that Canada geese offer ...

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 ...

“WHAT THE THIEF STOLE will always be expensive,” says Tāmati Kruger. He faces a large window in his tribe’s local marae, a community meeting house, as he speaks. His words are matter-of-fact. They ...

IT IS RAINING IN Karachi as I write this, an ugly, punishing rain that returns with increasing fury every year. This year, as every year, the monsoon is supposed to be the “worst ever,” and, like ...

Helen Whybrow: Good morning. I’m Helen Whybrow, Orion’s editor at large, and I’m speaking today with Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose article, “Speaking of Nature,” appeared in the May/June 2017 issue 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 ...

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 ...