EVERY MORNING OF MY CHILDHOOD, I sat at the kitchen table and tried to keep still as Abuelita plaited my waist-length hair. Water droplets fell on my neck, making me flinch, and she sighed in ...

MY NAME MEANS “BITTER,” is something I liked to say in high school, back when I was trying things out. It was one of many schticks; another was to look theatrically at the watchband I wore, its bezel ...

“A place which has not been evocatively described,” says Robert Macfarlane, “becomes easier to destroy.” What if our writings were not literary artifacts but implements for saving places by getting ...

IN THE VIDEO I AM WATCHING on my computer, time has slowed. A fly flaps its wings at the speed of an enormous crane, lowering itself gracefully toward drops of glistening nectar suspended at the end ...

MY WIFE, ELIZABETH, CALLS THEM my girlfriends, a joke that quietly hardened into a fact. When I come home from work in the summer, I go directly to the narrow strip of yard between our house and the ...

HAVE YOU SEEN THE SHAPE OF A solitary tree on a mountaintop? There is no arrogance—it is not the monarch of all it surveys; its shape is that of survival, of fighting annihilation. If a morning hints ...

Remember, invasive species did not come along uninvited. The movement of non-native species is anthropogenic. Humans brought these plants and animals across land and sea, across borders and ecosystems ...

I HAVEN’T BEEN SLEEPING MUCH LATELY. I’ve read that those of us who don’t sleep well might be the descendants of our ancestral night watchers—those who learned to stay awake or sleep light to keep the ...

I ONCE TOOK AN UNDERGRADUATE poetry workshop led by a quasi-druidic professor. He had wire spectacles and a wizard’s goatee and a dutifully genuine drive to help young people find and refine their ...