TO BUILD LASTING FURNITURE requires that I tap into this connection to the animal. It would be easy to imagine the body as a machine. The motions of building are repetitive—pulling a handsaw through ...

AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER each year, something unavoidable happens: the insects come back out. While some find the bugs annoying or scary, we at Orion choose to celebrate them. In reading this list ...

MEERA SUBRAMANIAN: Such inquiry fills these pages about the natural world and how faith shapes how we interact with it, about family and motherhood and daughterhood and the tippy balance between ...

A curated list of storiesJonnica Hill / Unsplash Spring Lilacs Kristi Marciano WHILE CLEARING OUT THE fenced-in backyard of our first apartment, my girlfriend pulled a black plastic pot from beneath a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...