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Reading the Quran Connects Me to Nature
Before I take the sacred text out of my backpack, I dip my hands in the cool rush of the creek that runs into the city below. Doing so, I connect myself to the inhabitants of the valley and all beings...
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One Seasoned Climber's Ode to Her Vertical Lifestyle
Accustomed to Utah's sandstone cracks and Colorado's world-class limestone, I surveyed the quartzite blend of western North Carolina's Pilot Mountain and traced what looked to be a decent foothold. It...
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Confessions of a Monkeywrencher
Illustration by Maggie Chiang Leonard Higgins was one of five people who, on October 11, 2016, shut down all five pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil from Canada into the United States. This is a...
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Got Those Climate Change Blues
I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night. I can't remember how long this has been happening, but it's been quite a while, and it's only getting worse. I confess: I need help.A few...
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Fly-Fishing in an Age of Unraveling
I'm twisting my thumb and forefinger around a strand of waxed beige thread, entwining a tuft of rabbit fur into the fiber. The thread hangs from the curved shank of a fishhook. Once the fur is in...
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Anger As a Climbing Tool
"Go up!" yells Abby, my belayer, as if what I need right now is a reminder of which direction a climber is supposed to go in. I've just slipped off a granite slab, and now I'm dangling 70 feet above...
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*This* Close to a Bus Plunge in Myanmar
The bus ride to Hakha, a city in Myanmar's northern Chin State, begins with a prayer for a safe journey. It's just after dawn on a drizzly gray Monday in the provincial border city of Kale. I was...
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How to Be an Islander
It was the summer of the birds. In late June, my two kids and I took the ferry from Seattle to a small, remote patch of land in the San Juan Islands, where our family's A-frame cabin sits on an empty...
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The Unlikely Treehuggers of Coal Country
At the beginning of each fall semester, I ask my conservation biology students to discuss what comes to mind when they think of sustainability. Here in the heart of southwest Virginia's coalfields, a...
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A Charleston Newcomer Connects to Home Through Foraging
When I moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 2011, I expected to fall in love with the bougainvillea-draped city. The streets were lined with fat palm trees, and the nearby beaches were...
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Leigh Ann Henion Goes Paleo-Tech at the country's largest primitive...
Illustration by Joe AndersonJason Drevenak pulls deer sinew from a jar and angles it into his mouth like a piece of spaghetti. He's wearing uneven buckskin clothing and smells of wood smoke. I'm at the...
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Real Men Gather Musk Ox Wool
I step from the tundra into an alder thicket like a blind man off a curb into rush hour traffic. Although it is quiet in here aside from the whine of mosquitoes, my hackles rise. Was that a branch...
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Fueled by Nature
Every day when we head to the market through the streets of Chapala—the quiet Mexican town where we're spending the summer—my six-year-old son, Owen, drags his feet. Maybe it's the humidity. Maybe he's...
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US Representative Raúl Grijalva on Where He Found His Passion for the Outdoors
When I was a young boy in southern Arizona, the sky islands of the Santa Rita Mountains were my front yard, the cactus-strewn plains of the Sonoran Desert my backyard. My father was a vaquero, a...
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Eyes Wide Open
"With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open."—Rainer Maria Rilke By From Sierra magazine Last Words
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Cownose Rays Migrate By the Thousand
Sandra Critelli was off the northern tip of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula on a small boat when it was surrounded by thousands of migrating cownose rays. "It was like watching millions of fall leaves...
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How to Photograph Ghosts
Egrets gather on a floodplain in Danube-Dráva National Park, Hungary. Photographers Zsolt Kudich and Réka Zsirmon used a two-second exposure to capture the speed of airborne birds and the stillness of...
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Cellphone Tower Pretends to Be Pine Tree
A cellphone tower disguised as a pine tree stands near the eastern border of Yosemite National Park. The photograph is from Robert Voit's New Trees collection. By From Sierra magazine Last Words
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Kissed by a Rhino
John Kamara, a baby-rhino keeper at Kenya's Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, gets up close with Kilifi, a two-year-old critically endangered black rhinoceros. In his 10 years at Lewa, Kamara has raised about...
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The Art of War, Hummingbird Edition
Male Anna's hummingbirds become fiercely territorial at the start of the breeding season, which commences with the onset of winter rains on the West Coast. By From Sierra magazine Last Words
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