I’ve been everywhere, man.I’ve been everywhere, man.Crossed the deserts bare, man.I’ve breathed the mountain air, man.Of travel I’ve a-had my share, man.I’ve been everywhere. ~ Johnny Cash I chatted recently with a friend about her days married to a park ranger and all the places she’d lived and the adventures they’d shared. It got […]
My first wife, Sue, and I had just spread our hotel towels out on the sand when he came up out of the water nearby, wearing nothing but the turned-down sailor hat that covered his bald head. He strolled by on the way to his wife — sunning equally “au natural” farther up the beach […]
I remember running out the back door across the hot cement patio to the safety of the cool grass of the lawn. Going barefoot in Texas most summers made me extremely conscious of the surface I walked on. We learned where the patches of goathead stickers were, where the gravel was scattered on the sidewalk […]
We would sit on the ground or on the pickup tailgate taking a break from following the dogs to hunt quail. Even though it was fall, the Texas heat and humidity were still high, and pushing through the brush and weeds over rough terrain required some effort. Our gear was heavy, and the thick brush-resistant […]
Our young dog, Rosie, is timid, and it takes a long while for her to get used to “new” people. She is unlike dogs who have owned me in the past — usually very eager to interact with people, sometimes to the point of annoyance. Rosie is a medium sized white pup with a charming […]
“As factories grew quiet and traffic dropped, ozone levels fell by 7 percent across the Northern Hemisphere. As air pollution across India dropped by a third, mountain snowpacks in the Indus Basin grew brighter. With less haze in the atmosphere, the sky let more sunlight through. The planet’s temperature temporarily jumped between a fifth and half of a degree.” […]

“I think we are still grappling with a narrow view of nature and wildness, that this is remote and faraway and we must travel to find nature in some distant place. What we need to appreciate and connect with is the nature all around us, the nature near to where we live and work and […]
“The argument between “sparing” and “sharing” as a conservation tool has been raging since researchers first coined the terms more than a decade ago.” ~ Fred Pearce Most people, and almost all scientists, see the effects of climate change as threatening our very existence, since every species on Earth is interconnected and dependent on […]

“When we sow a seed, we plant a narrative of future possibility,” ~ Sue Stuart-Smith Yes, things are kind of crappy right now. We’ve got this incredibly bad pandemic keeping us mostly housebound for the last year and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions worldwide. We’ve had four years of white supremacy, […]
It’s usually between 3 and 4 am, when my various aches, pains and the need to pee make me uncomfortable. I wake up and some rinky-tink music slithers into my brain … “Now that I’m old, Don’t wear underwear, Don’t go to church, And don’t cut my hair…” I know I’ll have trouble getting back […]