A new Air Force base expands, without the input of locals.
Sharman Apt Russell
Posted inArticles
Mexican wolves seem targeted for extinction
This fall, for the second time, the New Mexico Game and Fish Commission rejected a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to release two adult Mexican wolves with pups, and up to 10 captive-born wolf pups, into the Mexican Wolf Recovery Area in southern Arizona and New Mexico. An important part of the release, which […]
Posted inArticles
Wyoming acts to discourage citizen scientists
I am a longtime and enthusiastic citizen scientist. As part of various citizen-science projects, I’ve banded birds, chased tiger beetles, counted frogs, monitored archaeological sites, and documented the lifecycles of plants in my backyard. So I am particularly interested in Wyoming’s new Data Trespass Bill, passed by legislators this March. While some say the bill […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
On (not) being Jane Goodall
A writer wonders what it would be like to study the coati, a Southwestern cousin of the raccoon.
Posted inWotr
A fine day in the classroom
My daughter, Maria, teaches third grade in the border town of Deming, N.M., where every child in the school qualifies for free breakfast and lunch, test scores are chronically low, and science is a neglected subject. Eager to help out, I discover the Mastodon Matrix Project, which is run by the Museum of the Earth. […]
Posted inWotr
“Friending” nature
As someone who writes about nature and the West, I’ve been urged to get more involved with social media. “Search out your readers” I am told; don’t just sit back like a wallflower too shy or too proud to dance. But as a writer in rural Silver City, N.M., I have to wonder: Who wants […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Walking in the body of being
In 1656, 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew in Amsterdam, was excommunicated by his community and formally cursed to the end of his days. The young man’s supposed heresies were likely related to a burgeoning pantheism, which he would later develop more fully — the idea of God as an infinite being who contains everything […]
