Mason Voehl is a climber, a writer, a philosopher, and an outdoor educator. He recently completed a graduate degree in environmental philosophy at the University of Montana and lives now in the Black hills of South Dakota. Here he writes about an experience as an instructor on a Wild Rockies Field Institute course when the forest floor suddenly …
History, Wonder, and Care in the Canadian Rockies, by Charles B. Hayes
Charles B. Hayes is a philosopher, naturalist, poet, and outdoorsman. He spent the summer of 2019 with the Mountain Legacy Project helping to reproduce photos taken in the Canadian Rockies a century ago. This comparative record provides an invaluable data set for tracking climate change and human use of the landscape. Charles' reflections on map-making …
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The End of the Plastocene and the Renewal of Reality
Guest post by Albert Borgmann: Is the Plastocene ending? It may well have both crested in power and reached the foundations of transformation as we can see in Christopher Preston’s The Synthetic Age. But the Plastocene will definitely not pass in time to yield to a renewal of reality that will stave off the worst …
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Having a Cow About Climate
There is no escaping it. Climate change makes demands on affluent lifestyles. They range from the trivial, to the mildly disruptive, to the highly annoying. Over time these demands have evolved. Swapping out incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescents - now LEDs - was an early demand. Turning the heating or A/C down a notch …
An Owl with a Parachute
I never knew a northern spotted owl could parachute vertically through the forest. This delightful image came from a researcher who spent eight years studying the owls in the Oregon Cascades. He had personally witnessed a descent and could hardly contain his excitement when he told us about it. To find the reticent Strix for …
Why Montana’s Not That Different
Jetlag gets you up early. On the first day back from a trip to Europe, I found myself alert in bed at 5.30 a.m. wondering how exactly I was going to fill the time till breakfast. A casual jog around the neighborhood would not normally be my first choice but it felt like a good …
Christopher J. Preston 