Articles

Trail dogs — that’s what trail workers across the country call themselves. It tells you what life is like for the thousands of young men and women who spend their summers tending to the travel corridors on our country’s public lands. Trail dogs really do work like dogs, cutting back brush, sawing through trees and […]

The brown paper bag I carried out of the bookstore wasn’t there for the sake of discretion.  Truth be told, the bookstore refuses to handle plastic anymore.  Ideally, the clerk told me, it was on the verge of going entirely bagless, so I was lucky to be handed a brown paper sack. But it was raining, […]

Sometimes there are anniversaries that we should remember but not celebrate. This month marks such an occasion: A hundred years ago this September, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo.  On the Midwestern frontier, billions of the birds had once gathered, so many they formed “a feathered river across the sky.” By […]

In 1832, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was pondering the fate of Baptist missionary Samuel Worcester, who’d been jailed by Georgia state militia for preaching the Christian gospel to Cherokee Indians, little did Marshall know that his ruling would one day reroute rivers, legalize hundreds of Indian casinos from coast to coast, and […]

Hunting fascinates me, and I read everything I can about it. So I was taken aback to read recently that in my state of Washington, there are 16,000 fewer hunters than there were five years ago. Another story focused on the failure of our justice system to curb rampant poaching, and I began to wonder […]