Is America the greatest? It seems harder and harder to make the case for the country’s eminence, especially when you consider that, compared to a group of twenty advanced democracies, America now has: ...

THROUGHOUT PENNSYLVANIA, THE VFW HALLS look much the same — a bar stretches across the front and a bingo parlor sits behind it. In 1995, T. Allan Comp, a historic preservationist who specializes in ...

THE FIRST THINGS I SEE are the tails of the planes. They jut like hundreds of dorsal fins rising from prehistoric fish that have been lined up by a butcher on a massive table of thin brown grass. It ...

I KNOW, COMING BACK AS A CROW IS A LOT MORE ATTRACTIVE. If crows and buzzards do the same rough job — picking, tearing, and cleaning up — who wouldn’t rather return as a shiny blue crow with a mind ...

I HAVE GIVEN NEARLY ONE THOUSAND TALKS ABOUT the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people ...

WHEN I WAS a young activist, the ’60s were not yet far enough away, and people still talked about “after the revolution.” They still believed in some sort of decisive event that would make everything ...

After serving two years in federal prison for disrupting a controversial oil and gas auction, climate activist Tim DeChristopher is free. In December 2008, in protest of a Bureau of Land Management ...

I HAVE STUDIED the monarch butterfly since 1954, and it is not unusual for me to receive inquiries about the biology and conservation of this wonderful insect. None was more fateful than a phone call ...

IN THE TOWN of Blue Hill on the coast of Maine, there is a field of small white flags, one flag placed for each soldier killed in the war in Iraq. Throughout the summer, I have walked past this piece ...

WHEN THREE-YEAR-OLD Becky Furmann got the “poopies” and became dehydrated, her doctor urged her to drink water. He didn’t know that water had caused the rare illness that would kill her. As the chubby ...