Dear Sundog: I’ve been obsessed with rocks since I was a kid. I’d walk riverbeds and shorelines with my head down, picking up everything that caught my eye and pocketing the ones that captured my imagination. I found a fossilized fern once in a layered stone in my favorite part of my home state. It […]
Whenever my four-year-old daughter, Josephine, and I visit a library, she runs straight past the children’s nonfiction section—packed with information about animals, ecosystems, and environmental issues—and makes a beeline for the storybooks. Like most humans, her brain is hardwired to learn through stories, and her favorites involve talking animals, struggles between good and evil, and […]
I love pooping outside. One morning in Alaska, a humpback whale breached offshore just as I squatted with my pants around my ankles. Another morning, in Idaho, I watched hummingbirds sip nectar from wildflowers as I crouched at the edge of a meadow. And at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I sat on a […]
Perhaps you, like me, have been getting flooded by Earth Day ads. There is so much you can do to save the planet, they scream. Pay money to plant a tree! Come to a Zoom meet and greet with tech bros who are making sustainable apps! Watch Nascar drivers race a supposedly carbon-neutral car! Buy […]
In 2018, former President Barack Obama sat down with David Letterman on the pilot of the comedian’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. It was Obama’s first talk show interview since leaving office, and the most revealing insight into what Obama’s long post-presidency might look like–he was only 55 years old at the end […]
In February 2021, when President-elect Joe Biden nominated Deb Haaland to become the 54th secretary of the interior, the left and right staked out familiar turf. A one-term Democratic congresswoman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Haaland had become a darling to environmentalists. She supported the Green New Deal, called for a fracking ban on public lands, […]