Of the billions of trees in the Northeast, I’ve known maybe 50 well, maybe 10 with a draw-from-memory intimacy. The apple trees I prune each year in the yard, for instance, or the sugar…

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy. The opposite of a republican is not a democrat, it’s an anarchist. The opposite of a beef farmer is not a vegan, but rather someone…

Over the past several months there has been a spate of interesting cases involving media ethics. In January, theater artist Mike Daisey’s one-man show highlighting Apple’s…

Silent Spring – the book that forever changed the way the world looks at chemicals – turns 50 this year, and when you’re a writer researching the herbicide glyphosate for a…

Logging culture is part of the fabric of rural communities in the Northeast. One might go so far as to say that the logger is a pillar of rural life, in the sense that his trade – like…

I took a kid fishing recently. A friend’s kid – a ten-year-old boy who didn’t grow up rural. We cast rooster tails and panther martins into a tea-colored lake that sat up on the…

It’s mid-May as I write this, on an evening that feels like the transition between spring and summer. Outside, the soggy air smells like dead worms and hyacinth and freshly split birch. The…

Judged by the contents of its clutter, my desk is not a particularly happy place. You can picture my computer monitor gasping for air amidst a pile of papers that amount to a sea of bad news.…

By the time you read this, summer will have long ago become a fish story - just a memory in a Polaroid that was “this hot” (spread your arms apart) and went by “this…

The ancient Celts spoke of “thin places” in nature – places where the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin. To those with Thomas Cole taste, “thin” could be…