It’s been more than 50 years since biologist Roger Payne brought whale song into the lives of millions via the popular album, Songs of the Humpback Whale. At the time, commercial…

The following is adapted from a speech Roger Payne gave at this year’s Interspecies Internet conference. His remarks have been lightly edited for clarity.Because I am involved with…

In high school, Daniel Stein built a solar-powered car and drove it across the country. “I got to see the possibility of doing something with my own hands and seeing the success…

Japanese cuisine is so varied and refined that it’s hard to happen upon something unpleasant to the palate. My personal procedure in Japan is to take a seat at the counter and start…

One of my favorite walkways in the world spans a beautiful fig in the village of Falealupo on the island of Savai’i, Samoa, formerly Western Samoa. My colleague the ethnobotanist…

In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der…

In 1777—after whipping local people for trivial offenses, spreading venereal disease, and clumsily avoiding a plot to kill him—the English explorer James Cook left the shores of…

Many marine biologists identify a gateway drug into their obsession, and for Heather Koldewey, it was the seahorse. Who can blame her? Seahorses seem to have evolved not entirely in…

This past summer, my wife and I ventured to an area near Mount Adams in southwestern Washington state to census bumblebees. We camped there over the weekend as we took part in the…

Humans once lived in harmony with the natural world. Consider timekeeping. Until relatively recently, the human notion of time was based on the natural rhythms of nature. Time was…