Joe Polis believed in learning how to negotiate the ways of the dominant culture without losing one’s own.
"Like the turkey vultures, I had come to Maine to make myself a good life."
Audubon taught me about the splendors of this continent’s wildness and about the human savagery often pitted against it.
"As you get older, those seasons accelerate, arriving and departing like houseguests — hardly time to clean up after one before the next one is on the doorstep."
"I remember the first time I visited the 2,200-acre woodlot for sale in my town. It was in 2014, and Pam Johnson and I drove in to take a look."
If we give what’s wild half a chance, it will, as these fish teach us, do the hard part.
Perhaps animals gave us our first lesson in aesthetics, and that’s why we scrawled their images onto cave walls.
We know the dangers amphibians face: the diseases that sicken them, the destruction of habitat, the roads.
The legacies of my generation, individual and collective, will be various: much to boast about and much to be ashamed of.