News & More
If you’re like most working Americans, you probably don’t use all of the vacation time that’s available to you every year. Even if you do or if you’re now retired, it’s highly likely you don’t fully unplug while you’re away and off the clock.
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.
News & More
Beyond the widely reported higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and negative impacts on food supplies and animal and human migrations, worsening, human-induced climate change is amplifying mental distress among teenagers in Australia and in the United States. That’s not good.
Nature & Wildlife
We know that spending time in nature is good for us, proven by hundreds—perhaps thousands—of scientific studies. But most of what we know about nature and its benefits have come from research focused on how seeing nature affects us.
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
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
Climbing trees, jumping in leaf piles, or simply playing outside is an important part of childhood. Not only are the physical aspects of such activities important, being in nature benefits a child’s mental health and social development. In fact, many early-childhood settings are transforming their outdoor play environments to incorporate more natural elements.
Nature & Wildlife
Today, in what seems to be our never-ending search for happiness, we often describe our longings as the quest for “quality of life.” That idea and the coinage of that phrase, though, actually date back to the 1960s and 1970s, when they were often used in debates about social crises and social progress.
Nature & Wildlife
Cards, chocolates, flowers or a dinner for two by candlelight. Most of us consider these things to be appropriate gifts for those who mean the most to us on Valentine’s Day, the day we set aside each year to celebrate our feelings of love.
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.
News & More
There’s nothing quite like nature. It’s an elixir of life. Few things can change your mood almost instantly like the beauty of a sunset, a snow-capped mountain, a sparkling turquoise sea or the quieting comfort of the forest. You exhale, let go of the day’s worries, relax and breathe more slowly.
Nature & Wildlife
My mother grew up in a rural area in Wisconsin. On our walks when I was young—whether it was near her childhood home or where we then lived in the city—she would tell me the common names of all the birds and flowers that we saw. Those memories still impress me to this day.
