Man and Nature, published by George Perkins Marsh in 1864, has long been acknowledged as a monument of environmental literature. In 1931 Lewis Mumford memorably called it “the…

Thanksgiving 2015, the first since my husband’s death, we climb the hill to offer him the last cider of the season. Our granddaughter pours the libation around the homemade grave, on…

In the shadows of a February dawn, not far from the town of Greenville, Maine, wildlife biologist Henning Stabins of Plum Creek Timber Company and his colleagues were in search of Lynx…

On a warm, sunny day last spring, just a few weeks before the end of the school year, professional timber framer Makaio Maher stood in a small clearing in a stand of red pine trees in Newport,…

This is a story about Adirondack hermits, but the place and time in which it unfolds are as big a part of the tale as anything else. It was the late 1800s, see, and everything in America was…

We did a Google image search of the phrase “Vermont art,” and our computer monitor filled up with paintings of barns, cows, and church steeples. Most were lovely – clearly…

For portions of two days, I watched a red squirrel clipping and caching cones from the crown of a towering white spruce. It was a bumper crop that season, and thousands of cones hung in…

In the early morning of October 8, 2014, an autumn thunderstorm unleashed winds of more than 100 miles per hour as it crossed the western slopes of Mount Tom, a familiar landmark in the…

Elizabeth had been the one person whose opinion, other than Patchett’s own, Patchett had the slightest regard for. On those occasions when Kinneson needed to get his hired man into gear,…

Fall should be a placid time. From my porch I can see ample firewood for this year and next, but it must be natural when you reach a certain age, with most of the adult responsibilities behind…