As she prepares to plant Cherokee pole beans—descendants from beans carried on the Trail of Tears—Camille T. Dungy traces the legacy and journey, triumph and trauma, of seeds.

Aylie Baker reflects on her experiences sailing by canoe under Micronesian Master Navigator Sesario Sewralur and shows how we can draw on an innate ability to orient ourselves in a shifting world.

Following a nine-thousand-year journey, Robin Wall Kimmerer reflects on the ancient technology embedded in our relationship with corn.

In this interview, mythologist and author Martin Shaw attests that the best stories ought to be trailed not trapped, and approached with discernment, an open heart, and an attuned ear.

Tracking Europe’s great winds, Nick Hunt searches for the gods entwined within their currents, experiencing firsthand the awe, exhilaration, and fear inherent in these encounters.

In May 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Merton’s path, retracing the monk’s journey across the landscape.

Beginning with W. B. Yeats’s iconic poem, “The Second Coming,” Paul Kingsnorth inquires into linear and cyclical time and the sweeping momentum of progress.

Struggling to explain her belief in God to her atheist husband, Hala Alyan reflects her Muslim faith as inextricably linked to her family, to Palestine, and to histories of erasure.

In this in-depth investigative story, a collision of values unfolds on the summit of Mauna Kea, the proposed site for what would be the largest telescope in the world.

Reflecting on our undying urge to recreate a primal experience of intimacy with the surrounding world, David Abram offers notes on technology and animism in an age of ecological wipeout.

As Kimberly Ruffin revisits her upbringing and spiritual heritage, she compiles the bodies of evidence that have invigorated her spirit.

In the age of the Anthropocene and entrenched politics of whiteness, Bayo Akomolafe brings us face-to-face with our own unresolved ancestry, as it becomes more and more apparent that we are completely entwined with each other and the natural world.

For thousands of years, humans have imagined what it would mean to view the Earth from celestial heights, raising the question of how to reconcile our bounded lives with our longing for the cosmos.

In this interview, Buddhist eco-philosopher and author Joanna Macy discusses her life and work. From her antinuclear activism in the late ’60s to her work with deep ecology, Joanna expresses the need to live within an ethic of care for the Earth.

Lia Purpura delves into the horrified wonder and holiness of death, exploring burial practices that are intended to nourish the earth, as it has nourished us.

During an encounter with caged elephants, Linda Hogan experiences a wave of profound and startling love in the presence of beings so very different from—and so very like— ourselves.

Elizabeth Rush reflects on climate change as a transformational force on our landscapes and the words we might use to grasp this shifting reality. Her book "Rising" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for its rigorous reporting on America’s vulnerability to rising seas. This essay is an account of the days she spent driving through the Pacific Northwest while on a tour for the book—a time of wildfires, loss, and possible futures.

Rejecting the refrain “there are no words,” Camille T. Dungy reaches for a language to encompass the experience of loss, extinction, and loneliness.

In an effort to redeem the self-referential, reductionist nature of human language, Charles Foster travels to the Isle of Skye seeking out a language beyond the human in the vibrant and vast communication of the eight remaining Scottish killer whales.

In examining the consequences of written language, writer Paul Kingsnorth comes to terms with his own profession, arguing that the written word is, in fact, a tool of ecocide.

David Haskell enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a bridge to kinship.

In this in-depth interview, writer Robert Macfarlane articulates the consequence, the responsibility, as well as the pleasure of naming the living world.

Marveling at worms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells beneath our feet, inviting us to remember that soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know.

In the storied universe of Hmong cosmology, Squirrel is revered for its ability to outsmart the hunter. In this essay, Lisa Lee Herrick recalls her grandfather—a master squirrel hunter—bringing home a squirrel for spicy hunter’s stew, and how this dish helped unravel a hidden past.

Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia.

In this in-depth interview, Rowen White shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity, and that all of us carry encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds.

The year 2020 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day. For this monumental occasion, Paul Elie traces the literary history of the environmental movement from Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.

In this essay, Roy Scranton asks what we mean when we say “the world is ending.” Examining the nature of the narratives we tell ourselves about the future, he explores what revelation may be before us.

Ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth explores the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the promise of a new world—and the rise and ruin of the Soviet ideology that sought to impose its utopian vision on the Native Chukchi people, their herds of reindeer, and the natural cycles of the Russian tundra.

Observing the grief that has arisen during the coronavirus pandemic, poet Jake Skeets explores apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective.

As the existence of the famed ivory-billed woodpecker is increasingly left to the realm of myth, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder explores the widespread disappearance of birds in the narratives of apocalyptic prophecy that run through our collective consciousness.

CMarie Fuhrman encounters a coyote whose leg is caught in a trap in the southern Montana prairie. As she decides what to do, she navigates the two legacies of her identity—Native and European. In doing so, she considers what it means to be trapped and what it means to be free.

As sirens fill the streets of London, George Prochnik recalls a revolutionary poet’s account of the 1832 cholera pandemic that unfolded in Paris. While watching history repeat itself in devastating refrain, George wonders: What is hysteria? What is necessary passion and courage? How can we respond both lucidly and compassionately as this disaster progresses?

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his new book "On Time and Water" and our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis. With Iceland having lost its first large glacier, the Ok glacier, this past summer—Andri discusses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, he says, we need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future.

Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches, living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. In this film and essay, Jeremy Seifert and Fred Bahnson travel to Ethiopia to gain a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of trees.

In this essay, Amaud Jamaul Johnson returns to his poem “The Maple Remains” for the centennial anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. Through historical witnessing we see the deep ties between racial and arboreal scars.

When a marble mine began to strip a village of its forests, the people of Piplantri, India, developed a tree-planting project that reclaims a vital and ancient relationship between trees and women.

Nick Hunt visits Białowieża, Europe’s largest surviving primeval forest, where life and death transform into one another with vigorous entanglement. Here, he traces the history of the European forest, revealing an ongoing battle between light and shadow, clearing and woods.

After visiting a two-thousand-year-old linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explores the nearly forgotten practices of coppicing and pollarding, or cutting back a tree to stimulate growth, and discovers a symbiotic relationship between humans and trees.

David Haskell invites us into the unique and sometimes surprising aromas of eleven different species of trees.

In this extensive interview, Richard Powers discusses the kind of storytelling in which humans are not separate from the living world around them and how this inspired his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Overstory".