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    The World Without Us Paid Member

    Alan Weisman is an award-winning environmental journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and Discover, and on National Public Radio; he teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. His New York Times best seller The World Without Us, called by critics an “eco-thriller” and “one of the grandest thought experiments of our time,” considers the fate of the earth were human beings suddenly to disappear. In August, Tricycle contributing editor Clark Strand spoke with Weisman about impermanence, human responsibility, and the initiation into a new way of global thinking. More »
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    Radical Confidence Paid Member

    By James Thornton
    IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, the Louisiana Pacific Lumber Company decided to cut several stands of old-growth forest on land it owned on the Albion River, in Mendocino County, California. The forest and associated meadows were much loved in the community, and a group of local people responded by occupying the forest for two months until a court order to stop the cutting could be obtained. Fifteen people lived in the trees. Hundreds of others came every day to stand at the property boundary, held back by sheriffs. It became a celebration joined in by Alice Walker and many others from all over Northern California. So deep a sense of community was formed that the two-month occupation of the forest was dubbed The Albion Nation, and its protest was successful. But such a confident uprising and such success are all too rare. More »
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    Schooling Our Intention Paid Member

    How can we engage in action on behalf of earth and not get consumed, not go crazy? We who have aligned ourselves with this effort to transform a civilization so that complex forms of life can continue are faced with something very different from the kinds of challenges that our foremothers and forefathers faced. I'd like to begin by reflecting on some peculiarities of our situation in the twilight of the twentieth century here on planet earth. Six occur to me. First of all, there is the staggering range of the crisis, from the soil to the forest to the air to the seas to the rivers to the spasms of extinction. It's overwhelming for any single pair of eyes. More »
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    Is the Buddha Winking at Extinction? Paid Member

    By Allan Hunt Badiner
    Worlds on worlds are rolling everFrom creation to decay,Like the bubbles on a riverSparkling, bursting, borne away. —Percy Bysshe Shelley SO PROFOUND is the largely human-caused contraction of plant and animal life on this planet that biologists are now referring to the current period as the beginning of the Sixth Great Extinction. More »
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    Winter Paid Member

    By Rick Bass
    Night Skiing The girls and I wander out onto the marsh to go for a ski while the moon is still full. The clouds are gone and the night is cold. Due to some random sequence of the frost-thaw cycle—warm snow followed by repeated nights of intense cold and, who knows, perhaps even influenced by the solstice, the eclipse, and other rare phenomena—the snow out on the marsh has rearranged itself into a flat skiff of broad plates, each snowflake now recrystallized into a perfectly planar structure. The entire snowscape before us appears to have been converted into a land of fish scales, three feet deep, each one silver-blue in the light of the moon. More »
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    On Gardening: Gardening at the Green Dragon's Gate Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    Every spring I receive my best gardening instruction from walking along the edge of our cultivated farmland. I walk just inside the fields, right up against the nine-foot-high deer fence, running my hand over the woven wire as I go. On this ragged borderline, I am forced to slow down. Sometimes I walk so slowly I can close my eyes. I smell the wild pennyroyal mint rising out of the wet eye sockets of small mountain springs just outside the fence. On the rim of these springs grows fetid adder’s tongue,“Scoliopus bigelovi,”thrusting its ill-scented flowers into the new spring air. The stench of rotting meat hovers over the strange, brown-speckled blooms as they uncurl, luring the flies that will pollinate them. I can feel the slow water of the pennyroyal springs seep out of the hillside and saturate the farm soil on my side of the fence. A good place for summer leeks, I tell myself. The mountain will keep the land wet well past June. More »