Latin America
Some animals are known for being loud; for example, howler monkeys are said to be aptly named. When a number of them let loose their lungs in concert, the din can be heard up to three miles away. These New World monkeys—found in tropical Central and South America—often cry at dawn or dusk.
News & More
Music has been described as “the art of sound.” It’s a way to express beliefs, histories and values. It has shaped cultures and societies around the world for generations, used in religious ceremonies, to mark life events or to pass down stories.
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
Oceans pulsate with underwater songs, coral reefs crackle and croak, and the sounds from stars tell us just how far away they are. It seems the whole universe absolutely vibrates with music. Now, science is verifying that notion.
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
For me, spring and Rachel Carson are inextricably linked. In her visionary, 1962 book, Silent Spring, Carson—a marine biologist and environmental trailblazer—wrote: “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty…
News & More
Let’s step into the Wayback Machine and go to 2015, just six years after producer Ken Burns’ documentary miniseries The National Parks: America’s Best Idea had aired on PBS in 2009. At that time, I wrote to you about the overcrowding in our national parks—in part due to that widely popular TV program.
Travel Tales
One summer morning, while camping on an island far off the beaten path in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, naturalist Richard Nelson and a friend set off in kayaks and paddled toward the mainland shore.
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.
