Nature & Wildlife
The end-of-the-year holidays are once again over. Now, we enter January, famously known as “get-in-shape month.” Typically, this is when we focus on diet plans and gym memberships. But this year, you may want to give your mental health equal priority.
Nature & Wildlife
I like to think of biodiversity as a symphony orchestra, where each note, each instrument—every single part—is needed to make the whole. In the concert called “biodiversity,” then, every species, from microscopic life to towering trees and vast oceans, plays a vital role.
Conservation
The term “air pollution,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is the contamination of the indoor or outdoor environment by any biological, chemical or physical agent that modifies the natural characteristics of the atmosphere.
Nature & Wildlife
Trees are some of my favorite beings on Earth. That’s why I look forward to Arbor Day every year, the national holiday that recognizes the beauty and the importance of trees.
Nature & Wildlife
In 2024, I started the year by writing about nature: CO2 emissions, temperatures and the optimism a lot of us felt about clean energy technologies with consistent cost declines.
Nature & Wildlife
Nearly 1,000 birds were killed in Chicago on October 4, 2023, when they collided with an illuminated glass building. Though mass fatalities of this magnitude are rare, light pollution poses a serious—and growing—threat to migrating birds. We need birds.
Nature & Wildlife
Next week, I’ll mark another birthday. While I’m grateful for all the ones I’ve been fortunate enough to have so far, how quickly they seem to roll by now is somewhat daunting. That makes me a bit sad. In turn, that has me wondering: at what age are we our happiest?
Conservation
It was in 1999, I think, when I went to a writers’ convention and participated as a panelist for a discussion on environmental-and-nature writing. One of the questions from a member of the audience directed to all of us on the dais was: “What keeps you up at night?”
Nature & Wildlife
Is there a median strip on any of your neighborhood’s roadways with a patch of greenery on it? Chances are there is. You may have hardly noticed it or think that something so small makes very little impact, other than providing a pleasing place to glance at as you drive.
News & More
Doctors in Scotland made headlines a few years ago when they began “prescribing nature” for their patients with a range of afflictions. That new practice was based on research that suggested that people who spent two or more hours per week in nature improved their health and well-being.
Nature & Wildlife
Ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) and arachnophobia (fear of arachnids, especially spiders) rank among the most common of human anxieties. In fact, more than a third of adults and children recoil in terror when they see a snake in the garden or a spider on the wall.
Conservation
The Half Earth theory—setting aside 50 percent of the world for wildlife—seemed like a far-out pipe dream when it was proposed by evolutionary biologist and author Edward O. Wilson in his 2016 book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.
