10. The Price of Eggs

by Christopher Solomon 

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 only an unfamiliar smell for company. I am neither a farmer nor a veterinarian, but even a man unschooled in country ways knows the odor that announces that Death has removed his hat and entered the room.

In a few days, the bird would be dead. I would be her executioner. And I feel a need to relate the events that preceded the death, not because the fowl and I were overmuch close (we were not), nor to assuage a guilt (though there is always blame to hand around after such things), but because as E. B. White wrote of his own barnyard loss, she suffered in a suffering world. And pain deserves to be marked, even when it wears the confetti of farce, and though the only thing we have left to offer afterward is words, useless as they are…

9. Natural Intelligence

by Maria Popova 

WHO ARE YOU?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi—organisms that operate according to a different logic…

8. One Hundred Reasons Not to Die

By Nickole Brown

NUMBER ONE: Because oranges. Because a single slice held to the light is magic and sometimes the scene in the window of its cathedral is a fallow field on fire with dawn and sometimes it’s not pulp you see but a case of mantis eggs, a twitch of strange water held by skin made of soil and sunlight.

No, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get all high lyric on you. What I mean is yesterday in the kitchen I stood holding an orange slice. Though long past time to get dressed, I was still crusty in my coffee-stained robe because I couldn’t stand putting on clothes to even pretend to welcome a new day. Because earlier I had a look in the mirror, thought, What face would ever want to kiss this face again?…

7. All Ecology is Queer

By  adrienne maree brown and Amy Ray

adrienne maree brown has been on my radar for a while. As a thinker, activist, and teacher, she provides essential insights into how we relate to both human and natural ecosystems.

Our conversation started with the prompt to discuss the term queer ecology. As we spoke, we veered away from and back toward the term several times, proof of how widely relevant the ideas that underlie queer ecology are.

It is an essential time to think about uplifting the work of our communities. We all give in different ways, and we have to find the places where we can be our most authentic, energetic selves. This is the moment to amplify the voices that have been working to bring light and solutions to the stark realities of climate change and environmental racism…

6. Mother Load

By Sara Michas-Martin

A MOTHER FINDS IT USEFUL sometimes to step outside her life so that she can look back in. To see her home and the things inside it more clearly without the barbed attachments of purpose or emotion; to consider how her state of being was arrived at, in this time, in this moment.

A child’s pair of shoes, for example, can be—from this perspective—just what they are: an extension of a young person in motion, protection for their feet, sporty and red. Smaller than a glasses case, larger than a billiard ball, the shoes don’t have to be a reoccurring obstacle for a child to put on, or a gateway to getting to another place. Nor do these shoes need to be precious, a glanced-at emblem of time and its runaway passage, inducing a feeling one may wish to be rinsed of quickly.

Of course, a mother is not alone in this wilderness of complicated feelings: the operational tedium, the unpredictable pulse of tenderness, and the weight of care…

5. Love in a Time of Terror

By Barry Lopez

SOME YEARS BEFORE things went bad, I arrived in an Aboriginal settlement called Willowra, in Australia’s Northern Territory. A small village, it’s haphazardly situated on the east bank of the Lander River, a dry watercourse. (I’d driven into the area several days before with a small team of restoration biologists. They were intent on reintroducing a small marsupial in the vicinity, the rufous hare-wallaby [Lagorchestes hirsutus, or mala in the local language]. The animal had been eliminated locally by feral house cats, domestic pets left behind decades before by white settlers.) When I arrived in Willowra, I was introduced to several Warlpiri people by a friend of mine, an anthropologist named Petronella Vaarzon-Morel. She’d been working for some years around Willowra and when the biologists dropped me off — that work now completed — she helped move me into a residence in the settlement, a guesthouse where she had been living. Petra then returned to her home in Alice Springs and I was on my own…

4. Greyhound

By Joanna Pocock

THE IDEA OF SETTLING IN THE CITY as a way of being ‘green’ hadn’t just been the wild imagining of a 1970s suburban teenager – there is data to back it up. For instance, we know that New Yorkers pollute far less than those in the surrounding suburbs. Supporting the auto-dependent lifestyles of those in their detached suburban homes requires more gasoline, more electricity (for heating and cooling), more roads, more pipes and utility lines, and more energy is used to supply these large homes with water. Not to mention the giant, thirsty lawns covered in chemicals and sprinkled with fresh water throughout the summer months.

My desire to live in a city was not simply one of seeking like-minded people (other writers and artists, perhaps) and creating a smaller environmental footprint. I was also running from the lifeless suburbs of my childhood and what lay just beyond them: the dreaded sprawl…

3. Intuitive Eating

By Erica Berry

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global pandemics. Now we were solidly into our thirties, with independent lives we had each worked hard to build. We had no reason to cohabitate except that we felt very in love. This was undoubtedly the best reason, but also, somehow, the slipperiest. If we didn’t like being roommates, we had only our feelings to blame.

Around the same time, I became obsessed with trying to forage mushrooms. Like many things I wanted in life, the pursuit scared me. This seemed like reason enough to do it. I wanted to get better at propelling my body toward pleasure without dwelling on the possibility that it could encounter pain instead…

2. Dreaming with Water

By Robert Macfarlane and Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams: Rob—it is so wonderful to finally meet you. I feel that I’ve been in a private conversation with you for a very long time. From reading your books, from reviewing Underland, and just knowing of your friendship and love for Barry [Lopez], which I certainly share, and Jorie [Graham], and Rebecca [Solnit]. I just want you to know what an honor it is to finally be in your presence.

Robert Macfarlane: Right back at you, Terry Tempest Williams. Sometimes I can’t quite believe that I might be a member of this extended family of writers in this area we so strangely call nature writing, but really, we should just call writing—because what isn’t nature? I’ve been reading you for decades, Terry. And finally, we speak.

TTW: I’m grateful. And thank you for coming to the United States. Thank you for coming to these very divided states of America…

1. Lord God Bird

By J. Drew Lanham

IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, a bird with an obsidian black body, ebony dark as a night sky; an almost iridescent star-burnt plumage emboldened by a bolt of white lightning running from mouth to tail, and a similar bolt charging the wings’ trailing edges. It is a rather large bird, not ostrich gargantuan or even wild turkey–size, but bigger than any such forest-lurking, flying bird you’ve ever seen. It hangs on the side of an enormous tree, perhaps an ancient hackberry or a bald cypress. Seeming to defy gravity, the bird hitches itself up the tree, its avian eye—an eye that could’ve belonged to a velociraptor but is now on a distant cousin bird—stares wildly into the past as if remembering its reptilian lineage. As striking as every inch of this bird is, it has one especially jaw-dropping feature: an outrageously oversize beak, larger than any other living woodpecker—other than its Mexican cousin, the imperial woodpecker, also likely extinct—glowing like the tusks of the mighty mastodon with which it shared the Pleistocene. This bird is so spectacular that it transcends geologic time. Its proportions test credulity. Question is, did you really see what you think you saw, or has your mind been tricked into believing what might possibly be?…