Stunning paintings of butterflies by two Australian teenage sisters, from an era when women had no formal artistic or scientific opportunity, which sparked one of the most heartening triumphs of conservation and rewilding a century after their death. Meet Harriet and Helena Scott.
“[The] kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim that – because attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants. That means they’re not paying attention.”
Magnificent On Being conversation with botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, who twines her training as a scientist with her heritage as a Native American storyteller to write beautifully about the magic of moss and what it teaches us about paying attention to life at all scales.
c.f. Mary Oliver: “Attention without feeling … is only a report.”
How Alexander von Humboldt pioneered the interconnectedness of life, influencing Darwin, Thoreau, Goethe, and the very fabric of our modern understanding of ecology and life.
The heartening story of how literary legend John Steinbeck and a marine biologist friend helped save the Monterey Bay ecosystem.
Complement with beloved children’s book author Beatrix Potter’s little-known contributions to science.
Rachel Sussman’s photographs of the oldest living things in the world – a masterpiece at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy.
With an artist’s gift for “aesthetic force” and a scientist’s rigorous respect for truth, Sussman straddles a multitude of worlds as she travels across space and time to unearth Earth’s greatest stories of resilience, stories of tragedy and triumph, past and future, but above all stories that humble our human lives, which seem like the blink of a cosmic eye against the timescales of these ancient organisms — organisms that have unflinchingly witnessed all of our own tragedies and triumphs, our wars and our revolutions, our holocausts and our renaissances, and have remained anchored to existence more firmly than we can ever hope to be.
Above all, however, the project raises questions that aren’t so much scientific or artistic as profoundly human: What is the meaning of human life if it comes and goes before a patch of moss has reached the end of infancy? How do our petty daily stresses measure up against a struggle for survival stretching back millennia? Who would we be if we relinquished our arrogant conviction that we are Earth’s biological crown jewel?
See more here.
We’ve disrupted so much that nature can’t possibly stand on its own anymore… We’ve gone hands on, and we can never take our hands off.
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The species that survive are the ones we tell stories about. How we feel about an animal affects is survival more than anything we read in ecology textbooks. Storytelling matters. Emotion matters. Our imagination has become an ecological force.
Thrilled to see Wendy MacNaughton’s lovely illustrations in Jon Mooallem’s TED 2014 talk about the fate of wild animals in our modern world. The teddy bear, pictured here, was invented in 1902 and named after President Theodore Roosevelt, under whose watch bear populations in America underwent a “spasm of extermination.”
Mooallem’s book, Wild Ones, is a must-read and was among the best science books of 2013.
Find more of MacNaughton’s endearing and thoughtful illustrations in her first solo book, Meanwhile.
What the humanity’s ecological footprint would be like if Earth’s 7 billion people lived like various countries. Also see what 7 billion actually looks like.