Knowledge is not acquisition, not my acquisition, not my redemption, but redemption of the other. Knowledge is love. The loving gaze, knowledge guided by love, redeems the flower from its lack of ...

Bring home Letters to Boulders today. Adapted from Letters to Boulders: Stone Prose, copyright © 2025 by Karen Donovan, used ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

ENVIRONMENTALISTS SEE THE ASPHALTING of the country as a sin against the world of nature, but we should also see in it a kind of damage that has been done to humans, for what precedes environmental ...

LAKE SUPERIOR ON A CALM DAY has a depth clarity of over a hundred feet. In shallow waters, boulders appear to be just below the surface. Near shore, trash creates a timeline of occupation: plates, ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long ...

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within ...

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of technology indistinguishable from magic, especially in the realm of thinking machines. Among other tasks, you can ask ChatGPT, one of the world’s most advanced deep-learning ...

THOREAU WAS EMPHATIC ABOUT THE HUCKLEBERRIES. In one of his two most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he concluded his account of a night in Concord’s jail with, “I was put in jail as I ...

I REMEMBER WELL A SUMMER MORNING in about 1950 when my father sent a hired man with a McCormick High Gear No. 9 mowing machine and a team of mules to the field I was mowing with our nearly new Farmall ...

BIRDS HAVE BEEN A PART OF MY LIFE for as long as I can remember, and hummingbirds have held a special place in my heart for the simple reason that they, early on, became personal to me. On some level, ...