Sublime

Beneath all of these lies is the notion that we can manage the landscape without destroying it. And underneath this? The Godgiven mandate, the evolutionarily-ordained duty, the economic policy, all driven by the notion that we are not normal citizens of this planet, that instead we are the most important creatures—really the only ones who matter—on

In Western culture, it was the conservation ecologist Aldo Leopold who provided the first modern formulation of an ecological and environmental ethic.

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone.

Eiseley’s essay about this experience is called “The Flow of the River.” In it, he’s not only describing the Platte; he’s describing how he felt he was merging with the river. He recounts a sort of open awareness of the connections between all creatures, all nature. He wasn’t swimming in the river. He wasn’t investigating the river. He was accompan

What the boy wanted the black box to do was innocent enough: return him to the days of myth and origin, when all the places a person could reach were green and pliant, and life might still be anything at all.

Here was the cold spring—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones, and next to it, our firepit, and next to it, a body. The man had been dead a long time. So

Our personal experiences of loss and suffering are now bound inextricably with dying coral reefs, melting polar caps, the silencing of languages,

Today, White Wilderness is remembered not as a documentary about lemmings, but as a documentary about us, and the lengths we will go to hold on to a lie.