There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.

We speak often, and sentimentally, of being ‘enchanted’ by the natural world. But what if it’s the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems...

I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And...

…only in relatively recent times have people decided that “because I want to” is sufficient reason for annoying others.

Management” of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.