Telling the Story of Nature - Artists as 21st Century Naturalists

Artists who are inspired by nature and natural process – and this encompasses an enormous number of practicing artists - are working principally from arbitrary, but careful, observations of the natural world. They see patterns in the lines of a leaf, the geomorphic contours of a river channel, the transformation of a glacier into atmospheric moisture. They report on the story behind the process through poetry, dance, paintings, and song. They are our new naturalists, and we would be wise to pay closer attention to the results they are generating …

The Tempest of Our Times - How Hurricanes Can Rebuild Our Relationship to Nature

It is hurricane season again, and the island residents of Antigua are watching the skies with bated breath. I am on a catamaran with a small contingent of newly acquired Antiguan friends skirting the southern edge of the island in search of what’s left of their once stunning coral seas. We are a delegation of Caribbean professionals, local fishers, outfitters, business owners and community leaders committed to trying to keep nature intact and resilient on these fragile island ecosystems. But, we all wondering what options are left to any of us to fulfill this increasingly ambitious need. We need to merge the science with society and sanctity to tell a better story. We need a new story of the relationship between people and nature, one that is equitable, resilient, and extends far beyond the end of the 21st Century. We will continue to argue over the details – how quickly we make these changes, who will pay for it, how we govern the process – but the basic story is essential. We live and die by the stories we tell, and we desperately need the language for a new story about our relationship with nature that will lower the temperatures, put out the fires, and calm the storm.

Crossing Borders - A Journey into the Heart and Soul of Mexico

There is a map on the table with a blue line meandering intermittently from a vast patch of empty white space. The map covers a vast area from the U.S. border south across all of northern Mexico, and the wavering blue line indicates a river, or some semblance of one that seems to be flowing out of a jumble of serious gradient at a point where the boundaries of Sonora and Chihuahua converge. I slide the map towards me and try to make sense of a journey that I am about to take with 10 others into those mountains and down the course of that river. There are no towns of any significance near or along this blue line, only the faint delineation of the Río Oscuro, a name that I only know from conversations, and that is not printed anywhere on this or any of the other maps that I have with me. I look deeper and circle a few points of reference. Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, is more than 150 miles distant to the northwest. To the south, east, and north are only elevation markers, indications of steep mountains and deep canyons, with no evidence of access to any of this terrain other than via this thin strip of water as it threads its way in a descent from Sierra Madre uplands to thorn scrub desert. The vast Tutuaca and adjacent Papigochic Natural Protected Areas provide permanent Mexican government protection for 1.5 million acres of wild geologic contortions, dense conifer forests, and steep grassy woodlands just to the south, but we will not be going near any such official country, nothing with a sign of order and organization. The wide space of emptiness that fills the area of the map north of these little-known parks is unnamed. It is east of any towns worthy of a dot, and now feels particularly far from the borderland between the U.S. and Mexico. We will be going there, into the emptiness, the nameless, with no clear entry or exit, and we will do it for no reason other than to run the river, ride its rapids, return its challenge, and see where it carries us …

Falling in Love with the Earth Again - Nature Conservation Finds its Roots and Gender

Over the past few decades we have witnessed a remarkable social transformation – we have fallen in love with nature again. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh. Maybe we were never out of love with nature, although the environmental wreckage from the past two centuries does make the relationship between people and other species on this planet look more than a tad abusive in retrospect. But, twenty-first century humanity is charting a very different bond …

Love Songs to a Salient Earth

I belong to the professional tribe known as conservation biologists, an odd sub-culture among our species that can only find inner peace when immersed in the work of saving other species or, better yet, entire ecosystems – those broad swaths of wild nature that flourish in a rampant spectacle of life. The passion of the conservation biologist is not just for any particular species – our commitment is to save all of them, even the ones not yet discovered. Especially the ones not yet discovered. Follow the fervor of the conservation biologist and the end of the trail is a love that goes deeper than just forests, meadows, lakes, and oceans, deeper than eagles, elk, or echidnas, beyond the bodies of any individual species. It is a love for nature’s endless capacity to grow, to change, to adapt, and to renew. It is a love for the somewhat incomprehensible diversity on this planet, where perhaps 30 million or more distinct species share with us the thin space between stratosphere and ocean depths. Give us wild species, but give us also the capacity for these species to become something new, something never seen before, something that is ready to flourish on an ever-changing earth. That’s what really turns us on. But, sometimes wild nature takes away as quickly as it delivers. Losing the ones we love is just as much a part of nature’s flourish as the spectacle of the earth’s wildness. The death of my young wife put all of my work in a very new perspective. After returning her to the earth, and with little preparation and ever fewer provisions, I set out on a journey meant for two, but that nature had now refined down to one. And, nature, all of it, especially its rougher, more wild edges, was very much a required participant on this sojourn, even more than Shakespeare. Somewhere in the deep shadows of Mediterranean forests, in the relentless tides of the nearby sea, somewhere in the bits and fragments of wild earth that still survive along the untamed back roads of my trek through a very domesticated Italy I need to figure out how nature can so casually delete the root source of all the love I had found, of the immense universe of love she and I created, shared, and wallowed in for a luxurious decade. And, somewhere in this wild nature I want an answer to a question that now haunts me – what do I do now with all of this love? … 

Conservation Italian Style

I sit on a precipice that draws me deep into the hardwood canyon of the Alto Merse headwaters of the Alto Merse in central Tuscany and believe I hear wolves, soft murmurs at first, then something that sounds like a subtle cross between a wind and full blown howl. Luigi Boitani is convinced the wolves are out here. He should know. There is no one on earth who has a deeper connection to these sentries of wild nature. Boitani has devoted the past half century to following the silent steps of Italy’s wolves through forest, meadow, and field to chronicle their recovery of and increasingly wild Mediterranean.  I want to believe him. I want to believe that the sounds I am tuning into are absolutely the joyful chants of a wolf clan reclaiming their rightful Tuscan heritage. Because, the return of the wolf to the Italian countryside is a profound demonstration of how nature is being renewed in Italy.  Not that nature has ever been lost here, or even retreated from the Italian conscience. And, it is a model of how nature can once again seep back into the mainstream of our lives …