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
Recently, several scientists from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute have had close encounters with nonhuman, intelligent beings. These creatures blew bubble rings toward them, in what could be a sophisticated form of nonverbal communication. The nonhuman beings, however, were not from another planet.
Conservation
Plastics are the most prevalent type of marine debris found in the Great Lakes and in the oceans. Plastic pollution pieces come in all shapes and sizes, but those that are less than 0.2 inches (or five millimeters) in length—about the size of a sesame seed—are called “microplastics.”
Nature & Wildlife
Silence. It can be “deafening” when your ideas are met with disapproval, or when people expect you to act or speak—and you don’t. It can be “golden” when it’s wise to say nothing at all. It can also be “listened to,” if the folk-rock singers Simon and Garfunkel are correct.
Nature & Wildlife
Although invisible, noise pollution—defined as consistent exposure to elevated sound levels—is real. Also known as environmental noise or sound pollution, noise pollution often takes a back seat to other concerns, such as air, chemical and water pollution, since it cannot be seen, smelled or tasted. Sound is measured in decibels.
Travel Tips
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s the most stressful time of the year. No matter where you tend to fall on that spectrum during the week preceding the end-of-the-year holidays, almost all of us hope for a quiet and peaceful season. But how do you go about achieving that silence?
Conservation
More than eight million tons of plastic debris end up in our oceans every year. Present in nearly every oceanic layer, plastic garbage today accounts for nearly 80 percent of all waste found in our oceans.
Videos
When the world gets to be too much, when we get too tired of hearing constant messages and always being tuned in, there’s nothing like heading out to a natural spot for some peace and quiet, right? Maybe not. Nature, it turns out, is a noisy place. We rarely achieve true silence when we’re outside.
Videos
In some of the last quiet, pristine waters on the British Columbia Coast, humpback whales are making a comeback. In the mid 1960s, when Canada stopped whaling on its West Coast, there were only about 1,500 of them left in the North Pacific.
Travel Tales
The quietest place you may ever experience is next to a little pond off the Forest Trail in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. Hiking there just a couple of weeks ago, I found myself feeling a little unsettled without quite knowing why.
Nature & Wildlife
While anyone who has traveled to Yellowstone National Park knows that the sights alone are enough to take your breath away, I’m always struck by how unprepared I am for what I would describe as the “timeless sounds” of Yellowstone: the howls of wolves on the wind, the yips of coyotes on the hills…
Videos
Forests are important for our welfare for a very long list of reasons, a few of which are: • they provide us with medicines; • they manufacture breathable air: just one adult, leafy tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year; • they fight flooding; •…
