|
 |
|
 Cycling Toward Sustainable Community
by Mandy Creighton, Within Reach
"In the summer of 2007, the dream of bicycling 12,000 miles across the U.S. to visit and document sustainable communities was born, and manifested as the project called Within Reach. In February 2008, I jumped on board, realizing that this could help me find a way to live outside the box — to learn about, serve, and grow sustainable communities."
Simmons B. Buntin's The Literal Landscape: "Flare: An Online Photo Gallery of Cranes and Geese at the Bosque del Apache"
Deborah Fries' Plein Air: "The Language of Give and Take"
David Rothenberg's Bull Hill: "Does Nature Need Us? Symbiosis as One Way to Survive"
Lauret Savoy's A Stone's Throw: "Placing Washington, D.C., before the Inauguration"
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
| |
 |
|
One Green Thing Leads to Another: Sustainability at the Pringle Creek Community
by Jim Fitzsimons
 When architect James Meyer set about to create a master plan for Pringle Creek Community, he was working off a fairly ambitious request from the property owner: design a walkable, mixed-use, sustainable development with the community-enhancing aspects of old city neighborhoods.
Full Article >>
Saving Coral Reefs: Darwin's Second Obsession Needs to be Our First
by Rick MacPherson
If it were simply the threat from global warming, coral reefs might be able to cope with temperature fluctuations. But coral reefs are suffering a death by a thousand cuts. When you consider coastal development, unsustainable fishing, water pollution, unsustainable tourism, rising sea levels, and the effects of increased human demand on a sensitive ecosystem, it’s no surprise that nearly 50 percent of our planet’s coral reefs have been functionally destroyed.
Full Article >>
Building and Dwelling in the Mountains: The Sage Mountain Center Story
by Kathryn Bundy
When Californians Christopher Borton and Linda Welsh found 90 acres bordering Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest near Whitehall, Montana, they parked a trailer, dug in, and began to realize their dream of building what has become Sage Mountain Center. The buildings are a combination of cordwood and straw bale, powered off-grid by the sun and wind.
Full Article >>
Muir Woods National Monument: William Kent's Progressive Vision
Text by Tom Butler
Photography by Antonio Vizcaino
 Besides being a preeminent institution for interpreting the redwood ecosystem, Muir Woods is also a useful port of entry into conservation history, for its creation included several key actors, among them naturalist John Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt, and William Kent, a forward-thinking California congressman who would later help create the National Park Service.
Full Article >>
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Plum Creek
Kyle, Texas
 At buildout, central Texas's Plum Creek will include 8,700 residential units, several hundred acres of green space, over 600 acres of commercial, employment, and mixed-use property, a 70-acre town center, and a commuter rail station — all built on principles of New Urbanism.
Full Case Study >> |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Letter to My Father Concerning the State of the World
by Sharman Apt Russell
 The newspapers called you the fastest man on earth. You set your speed record and turned back to the dry-lake landing strip at Edwards Air Force Base in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Suddenly the plane dipped and rolled.
Full Essay >>
Devil's Bargains, with Online Slideshow
by Stephen Trimble
 I try out the declarative statements. My family now owns land. I own land. I am a property owner. Simple phrases, but with momentous consequences. Our title to thirty acres of mesa and cliff outside of the village of Torrey in Wayne County, Utah, feels quite different from owning a house on a tenth-of-an-acre city lot.
Full Essay >>
Educating the Body
by Katherine Jamieson
 My skin failed me that first summer in Guyana. I tried pasty lotions and wide-brimmed hats, long sleeves in the midday heat. Still, I turned bright red: I shone like a cherry. Miss, like ya get burn up? my students said, pressing a finger onto the red glow of my shoulder.
Full Essay >>
Report from Monona County: Mysterious Work
by Kelly Madigan Erlandson, with Audio
 The coffee cup feels good in my hands this morning, though risky. I haven’t been right for weeks. My belly distends with aftershocks from eating even the smallest portions, wakes me up at night.
Full Essay with Audio >>
The Unaccountable Stupidity of Living Things
by Anca Vlasopolos
In his journal of the whaling trip on which his health was restored, Olmsted writes of the boring days at sea, when the ship, becalmed in equatorial zones, barely moved on the surface of the water. He recounts how he amused himself by shooting the many seabirds.
Full Essay >>
Horse Latitudes
by Deanne Stillman
The band of wild horses had only recently returned to this patch of scrub; the land had been stripped bare of forage by hordes of roaming cattle and it was only in the past year that some edible plants — their seeds dropped here by migratory birds who knows when — began to green up the hills and provide nourishment for the critters which brought us all westward ho.
Full Essay >>
|
|
|
 |
|
 The Berrigans of Butte, Montana
by Patrick Burns, with Audio
I am in the closet with my grandmother. I call her Gram. My mother and her brothers call her Ma. With no light in the closet we are alone among the coats. She was cooking when the thunder started — rubbing the skin of an eight-pound turkey — so her hands are slick with butter. She’s afraid of the lightning and spends most storms in the closet since, as a child in Ireland, she saw her brother struck down and killed.
Full Story with Audio >>
 The Return of Migrating Birds
by Ron Rindo
Kate had always hoped to marry a man unafraid of the ricochets of her consciousness, someone to whom she could reveal complicated feelings without fear of retributive anger or pouting. To her first husband, she had wanted to be able to say, for example, that sleeping with only one man in her life had, in retrospect, not been a wise decision. How to say such a thing without being hurtful?
Full Story >>
 Drinking Hurricanes
by Jonathan Dozier-Ezell
Miller Lite still tastes weak and sudsy no matter how close the hurricane comes. There’s the drop in pressure, but no, that doesn’t do it. The beer’s still all head as it floods the tap and brims over. Connor pulls another; he knows my pace. He tips the mug on its beveled glass bottom, but the mug still foams its barley mattress. We both sit and wait a moment: expectant.
Full Story >>
|
|
|
|
|
|
RSS Feed
