Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What does it mean to listen to a planet in crisis? Scholars, scientists and artists are using sound to better understand biodiversity and the climate crisis, while challenging us to reconsider our relationship with the living world.
It seemed an odd request for a poetry magazine. What stuck with me most, though, was the very notion of a “nature poem.” What is such a thing? How in this age of collapse and dislocation do we define it?
Sowing flowers in spring may have a surprising effect on the inner lives of bees.
An ecological approach to learning uses outdoor play, storytelling, and shared experience to help children develop a kinship worldview — a deep recognition that living and nonliving parts of the Earth are fundamentally connected.
From Indigenous-led governance to worker-owned cooperatives, scattered experiments may offer a blueprint for a pathway out of our global predicament.
Trying to kill algae with chemicals is a common response when community ponds or other water features go green. But there are better solutions that cost far less, last longer and carry less risk of harm to pets and wildlife. Rather than battling against nature, these alternatives work with nature for long-term solutions.
“Nature” is often cast as a word that separates humans from non-humans. But it can also mean something much larger: the universe, the course of things, the great event we live within. It’s a word worth defending.
Imagine what a financial system would do if it behaved like a headwaters system. There would be continual arrival of flows from elsewhere. Resources would pool into local places. Actions would converge in the same direction. And all of it would support the continual emergence and maintenance of life.
After years of turning her backyard into a haven for wildlife, the author, Cylvia Hayes, watched the songbirds suddenly disappear. What began as a personal loss became a reflection on eco-grief, ecological decline, and how to find meaning, connection, and hope in a world undergoing profound environmental change.
Studies show a steep decline in nature-related language, from books to music. Now, projects like children’s books, citizen science platforms and everyday practices like gardening and birdwatching are helping rebuild our ecological vocabulary.
The question of consciousness continues to devil us. If consciousness is distributed throughout the universe, then its appearance in humans is just one manifestation. Does it matter one way or the other how we think about this question? I think it does profoundly.
In this Trumpian era of alternative facts and truth isn’t the truth, it somehow seems fitting to expand further the fiction of personhood to include animals and Nature in the effort to save the environment. After all, it is their environment too.
