Sublime

Unlike the civilized world, wilderness invites you to sense the surrounding harmony and the utter insignificance of mankind. The

lacked the cultural affirmation of downs, dales and lochs in the national imagination.

This, the most widely distributed tree in North America with close kin on three continents, all at once feels unbearably rare. She

Wherever her family went, she became the node that connected all wandering Americans worth knowing.

a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

In all the surviving accounts in which those who knew Louis Agassiz strive to describe and explain the hold he had on his time, the enthusiasm he generated, his charm and powers as expositor and leader, one theme remains constant: the quality of the man’s commitment. Silliman used the word engaged. William James told a story. James had been a membe

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground.

The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,