Tanya Tolchin of The Lettuce Edge summed up my angle in “All Natural” this way: He is not the conservative child of hippies rejecting how he was raised, but he looks critically at each piece before he decides how he … Continue reading →

I currently have a sore throat. Here’s something I found when I searched the Internet for “sore throat.” Continue reading →

I’m not really a sucker for celebrity news, but I am a huge terrible sucker for news about me. So the fact that this arm belongs to a movie star matters a lot less to me than the fact that it’s holding the book I wrote. Continue reading →

You probably know the confused state of affairs: There are individual studies showing that organic food is nutritionally superior to industrially produced foods , but an analysis of all the evidence available suggests that it’s not. There’s no consensus. Now people are buzzing about a fun little study out of Southern Methodists University that takes on this issue from a new angle. Continue reading →

TED just discovered Allan Savory. I hope a lot of people check this out. I learned about him when Michael Pollan lent me his book a few years back. (Image below: Mexico, efore holistic management).

It’s a fascinating read if you want to go beyond the video. (After holistic management: note the hill with the blue line)

Savory starts with his own story as a ecologist managing parks in Africa: “No sooner did we remove the hunting drumbeating people to protect the animals, then the land began to deteriorate.” Continue reading →

This is the kind of review every writer dreams of getting: One where it’s clear that the critic has read carefully and actually got what you were trying to say. Hurrah! Thanks J. David Santen Jr.! Continue reading →

Guest blogged this on the ways in which human health is intertwined with the health of the earth over at Ecotrope.

Every day for the last year I’ve walked the same path, about a mile each way, to drop off and pick up my daughter. I’ve adopted this swath as my personal transect: I’m learning the names of all the trees and make a point of trying to spot the birds that I hear (often it’s Josephine that hears them first and says, “bioyd!”). This also given me the chance to watch how the seasonal change moves over my little San Franciscan hill. Continue reading →

How strange and wonderful to feel the weight of this ephemeral idea in my hands. And of course when my sister took a look it fell open to this page, necessitating instagramation: Continue reading →

Emma Marris (who, full disclosure, blurbed my book), has begun working on something quietly profound here. It has to do with kids, and the way they see the world. As Emma puts it,

This blog is inspired by my daughter’s ever expanding collection of natural specimens, a part of which you see here. She relates to nature by picking it up and asking me to carry it. As a result, I have begun really looking at and thinking about everyday nature in our backyard, on the street, and on our travels. This is exactly what I prescribed in my 2011 book, Rambunctious Garden. Nature isn’t the epic stuff you see on Planet Earth documentaries, I said. Nature is all around us, in the city, on the highway median. And now, all over my house.

My daughter is a lot younger than Emma’s – just barely walking. And when she does walk it’s frustrating: She’s forever veering off course, or bending down to pick at something in the crack in the sidewalk. But when I allow her to draw my attention to those sidewalk cracks, I’m often surprised at what I find there: Tiny flowers, even tinier snails, dead leaves (but then, where do those leaves come from? What do they signify?) Continue reading →