I use this blog to showcase my writing. One of my most satisfying outlets is the writing I do for Chris Morgan's podcast The Wild. Chris is a wildlife biologist who left England for the Pacific Northwest around the same time I left for Colorado. We are the same age and, though we did not …
Holmes Rolston, III (1932-2025): A Giant in Environmental Ethics
Holmes Rolston, III, was my mentor for over thirty years. I met him when I moved from England to Colorado for a master’s degree in 1990. A renowned environmental philosopher, Rolston died in early 2025. I made the four-thousand-mile journey for two reasons. First, there was Rolston, the so-called “father of environmental ethics.” He put …
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Bison as Climate Heroes
In August this year, I was lucky enough to spend three days with American Prairie in Eastern Montana. The temperature climbed to 102 degrees while I was there. Plagues of grasshoppers splattered themselves on the car grille. I went to the prairie to look at the effect of bison on creeks in the mid-summer heat. …
Salmon in the Mountains
I knew my chances were slim. Only a handful of salmon make it into the Idaho mountains this close to the Montana border. The fact any do at all is remarkable. I was standing six hundred and twenty-four river miles from the Pacific, upstream from eight major dams, three and a half thousand feet above …
The Nurse Log
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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