More on: nature

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

It was your hunch, this world. On the heyday of creation, you called, Okay, go! and a ball of white hot gasses spun its lonely way for a million years, all spill and dangerous fall until it settled into orbit. And a tough neighborhood, it was, too. Irate Mars, and sexually explicit Venus, the kerfluff…

Paul Shaw breeds insomniac flies. He tilts test tubes at unstable angles, then watches wide-eyed as the flies inside go haywire. Thousands of flies fly inside Paul’s hypotheses; thousands of flies defy them. As fast as he identifies a pattern, the field of sleep expands. Paul celebrated tenure in October, and all the Shaws flew…

Awake in the middle of the night, the river cracked with language, the ice of it a heave of squares and oblongs. Only the waterfall, its cold spray frosting nearby juts of stone with lace, continued to tumble as if it would never cease to move and be. Once it was, we lay down together,…

One by one leaves spindle in the wind, the clock runs down, the cricket’s chirr continues. Each year I try to catch the moment the chirring ceases and silence takes on its winter timbre. Each year I miss. Doing nothing, poised for a flash from the Absolute, awaiting rest from unrest, I’m blessed by uncertainty,…

This tall fern has a midrib so sturdy I can pluck its broad width of green and wave it before my face as I walk the lane, the gnats and the deerflies shooed pell-mell as the air ripples away from my body. I’m no longer a target. Do this enough, in three million years I’ll…

Stars and the sun are not eternal. They flare. They wither. The earth and its high mountains, its tors and spires, aspen groves, scarred and broken bristlecone pines, torrential blizzards, are not eternal.                                            Rivers and seas change courses, alter shores, appear, dwindle, vanish. The rampant floras, birds, reptiles, and mammals of tropical forests…

All action, it leaps, faster than the eye can follow, from treetip to trestle tower, from cedar roof to harvested fields, cartwheels and spins, leaps again and attacks, slithering up dead oaks and dry junipers, captures, holds close, strangles, suffocates all mouth in its consumption, gulping and swallowing entire acres of sere and withered stalks,…

Most lie low, flourishing with damp, harvesting sunlight, no commotion, moss mouse-silent, even through wind and hail, stoic through motors roaring fumes, through fat-clawed bears grubbing. They can soothe the knife-edges of stones with frothy leaf by leaf of gray-green life, and burned-ground mosses cover destruction, charred stumps, trees felled and blackened. Cosmopolitan mosses likewise…

MY DEAREST KATIE, Do you remember that evening we flew together from Burlington in Vermont to Saint Paul in Minnesota? Do you remember how the wind came in off Lake Champlain and cut through the streets of Burlington like a sawblade, the snow blistering somewhere out over the lake? We flew just ahead of the…