The planet looks like it has been badly handled by a fiddling giant. Our sticky fingerprints are all over it. Chemicals, dams, and rats imported in the hulls of ships have reshaped everything under the sun. The recent photos from Artemis II might have shown a familiar blue planet, but zoom in a little closer, …
When Wildlife Can’t Get Away
My blog this month is a piece I published recently in Discover Magazine. According to a study coming out of Texas, every bison in North America is polluted with cattle genes. It's a disappointment for some. But it could also mark the start of a different future with large animals. See what you think. "What …
How to Keep Returning Wildlife Wild
For the latest post on the Plastocene, I'm linking to a piece I published yesterday in The Atlantic on the complicated question of how to keep wildlife wild on a crowded planet. We go to restoration sites in Italy and the UK, before bringing the lessons back to Montana. Saving nature clearly ain't what it used to …
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 …
California’s Race to the Future
With memories of the devastating Camp Fire yet to be extinguished from our minds and with the chilling implications of the IPCC’s recent report on global temperatures settling in, perhaps there is some solace to be found in California’s efforts to salvage an escape-route from the approaching climate storm. The state has consistently been a …
The Beauty of Difficulty
“It is easier to be a member of Earth First! or the Chemical Manufacturer’s Association than a member of neither.” Jeff Lockwood made this observation in Orion Magazine when reflecting on the anguish he constantly felt about killing locusts. An applied ecologist at the University of Wyoming, it was Lockwood’s job to develop methods for …
Christopher J. Preston 