There was a time when people who lived in rural areas and owned acreage made their living from the land. Subsistence living was neither an alternative lifestyle nor a quaint anachronism. It…

In the spring of 1780, Jonathan Carpenter and his cousin set out from their home in southern Massachusetts to start a new life in Pomfret, Vermont. On May 13, they bought 100 acres of land,…

Honeybees have been domesticated for millennia, but they don’t always rely on the housing beekeepers provide them in exchange for harvesting their honey. Honeybees remain wild enough to…

In December, 2009, a few days after we published a story in our winter issue about wood industry woes and low mill prices, a logger in northern New England fired up his chainsaw and cut down a…

The United Nations has coined 2010 to be The International Year of Biodiversity, so it’s only fitting that insects play a starring role in the pages of our summer issue. Insects, after…

If this story were a movie, it might best begin with a flashback. After the opening credits, perhaps backed by an ominous soundtrack, we’d be transported back two years, to a happier…

When visitors arrived at Ed Lanigan’s 309-acre tree farm in Alton, New Hampshire, he waved them over to a row of sugar maples he had tapped a couple of weeks earlier. The March breeze…

For six wintry months, trees have appeared as woodblock reliefs or iron sculptures, their bare limbs framed against a cold horizon. But as spring unfolds, stark branches morph into soft…

With the discovery that crude oil could be refined into a seemingly endless variety of products, petroleum became one of the most important substances on earth. Now, more than a century later,…

The diversity of behavior among bird species is nowhere so dramatic as in their nest construction. Each species builds a specifically precise nest that differs in functional ways from those of…