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 ...

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 ...

I HAVE GIVEN NEARLY ONE THOUSAND TALKS ABOUT the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people ...

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 ...

I HAVE STUDIED the monarch butterfly since 1954, and it is not unusual for me to receive inquiries about the biology and conservation of this wonderful insect. None was more fateful than a phone call ...

ONE AFTERNOON last summer, I was on a commuter train when I heard someone yelling behind me. I didn’t pay attention because I was breaking up a fight between my kids. But the third time the person ...

WHENEVER I’M OUTDOORS for more than ten minutes I start picking up rocks. In Patagonia, in Phoenix, in a Home Depot parking lot — my gaze is invariably sucked downward into the gravel. I weigh the ...

I WISH I COULD EXPLAIN why I got caught up searching out Dr. G. M. Levin and his pomegranates. In the summer of 2001, while driving home on back roads in northern California, I caught some Russian ...

THERE IS COLOR IN THE LAND AGAIN. OR PERHAPS the color was always there, like a pigment in the soil, but was simply rendered imperceptible for a while. But not for long. Not all that much separated ...

In 1973, when the first shopping mall opened on the outskirts of my town, Saratoga Springs, the local paper ran a special Sunday supplement touting its wonders and marvels. The advertisers who paid ...

In the face of climate change and energy challenges, what creative ways are you finding to forge healthy and durable lives and communities? Send submissions — five hundred words or fewer — to Orion, ...