John Davis Sets Off to Hike, Paddle, and Bike the Spine of the Continent By Adventure Ethics John Davis paddling in Congaree National Park. Photo: Susan Baycot Climate change, development, ranching, and oil and gas exploration tend to get a lot of ink when it comes to threats to wildlife in the Western United States. But wildlife corridors are another vital factor, and one that relates very closely to all the aforementioned variables because they allow wildlife to adapt to c

Robert Paine is a super-famous ecologist, the first person to really nail down the process known as a “trophic cascade,” by which top predators have a forcing effect that deeply impacts the entire food web. Many years ago Paine did an experiment off the North Pacific coast, removing sea stars (formerly known as starfish, but they are not fish) from control plots. Despite their frequent appearance on childrens’ wallpaper, sea stars are gangster predators. A few weeks ago I

Over the next several weeks I’m going to intersperse my usual kinds of blogs with a series featuring Michael Soule. Michael is widely considered the “father” of conservation biology, a field he helped establish in order to bring scientific rigor to conservation practices. I profile him in depth in my book, The Spine of the Continent. In today’s blog, Michael confronts the paradox of human success. As a species we have proliferated partly due to what he dubs “pro-life” impuls

The other night an old friend from LA was in town and came to dinner. He’d just finished adapting a nonfiction memoir for the screen – that’s what he does for a living. He said he was pretty satisfied with his work, and had “followed the Joseph Campbell hero stuff” carefully, so he feels the screenplay is structurally sound. Coincidentally, I happened to be reading A Fire in the Mind, a biography of Campbell. Campbell performed a vast cultural service in putting his arms a