Field Notes (Science and Environment)

For Paulo Paulinho Guajajara, known as “Lobo”, Guardian of the Amazon, killed by illegal loggers I guard the forest its canopy of reflected stars the morpho butterflies+++...

I squeezed past Maya and closed my office door behind her, shutting out the last rays of natural light. Under the cool fluorescents, she...

For days at the tail end of the Obama administration, I haunted my neighborhood thrift store, casing the free pile and the clothing racks...

I remember the diapers—ripping open bag after bag of used diapers. It was 2014 and a friend and I had volunteered to help with...

April 15th, 1832 On the second day of our anchorage at the mouth of the Rio Santa Cruz, I led a party of sailors up...

King of neither plant nor animal but of mornings after rain / / ghost sprung in the gloaming a memory of betweenness / / arisen in the dark and...

It races over the Bay of Bengal. It charges through river, paddy, and city. From Boston in my WhatsApp to family in Calcutta, I speak of Arfan. Perhaps...

  Image: "Black Hole Image Makes History" NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Photostream, licensed under CC 2.0.   Michael Leach: I was inspired to write the poem ‘Black...

I admit a degree of relief that my youngest daughter is so different from me. My bookshelves are lined with novels and two...

A dandelion’s fruiting head a jeweled amphora. Spinach tissue’s blue mosaic, too beautiful to eat. Stomata dot the skin of trillium like points on a map, what’s laid bare by...

How is anything radically new ever created in nature? Is it true, as some scientists say, that everything under the sun is just a...

The turkeys are out in Cambridge. I passed one this morning on my way to church: a large male in full feather, his tail...