THE FRAGRANCE of the forest is unlike any I have ever known. The smell of ripening and rotting apples and pears fills my nostrils. At my feet, russet reds, blushing pinks, vibrant roses, and creamy ...

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, ...

AS THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CONTINUES sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those ...

Before Hippocrates, health was a supernatural affair. Exorcists and priests charmed money from the dying. Snakes squirmed beneath sickbeds. Sacred dogs licked fatal wounds. Pilgrims dozed within ...

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: ...

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 ...

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the ...

WHEN I WAS a young activist, the ’60s were not yet far enough away, and people still talked about “after the revolution.” They still believed in some sort of decisive event that would make everything ...

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 ...

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 ...

After serving two years in federal prison for disrupting a controversial oil and gas auction, climate activist Tim DeChristopher is free. In December 2008, in protest of a Bureau of Land Management ...