Fire and Ice

The thing about the world as we’re coming to know it now—a world in the process of changing at timescales we can perceive from the relatively puny span of a human adulthood—isn’t just that extremes pile up. No, the thing is that these extremes cozy up to one another in bizarre and frankly disturbing ways.…

The Late Winter Rant

The view outside has become tiresome.

I don’t think I’m supposed to say that. I’m not a fundamentalist, but I’ve steeped myself in a tradition of natural history that holds the world as sublime: a wellspring of solace and inspiration and revitalization, source of and target for gratitude.

Such qualities are sorely needed these days, and so I started writing a post on the theme weeks ago. The rough start I made framed a dissonance between the constructed world of news and current events (the “urban” of this site’s title) and the unbuilt environment of ridgelines and woods and grasslands (the “wild” outside my door).

Drift Season

There’s a certain irony in the fact that winter, when I’m inclined to spend more time inside, may be the season when I’m most likely to be hyperaware of the weather. Presumably this is because snow affects our access more than does summer weather—although road closures in 2013 due to fires and flash flooding point…