Once, while I was in college, I heard a talk on finding your purpose in life. This was during a Christian campus ministry meeting in an...

In the 2010 indie film The Way, the actor Emilio Estevez says to the actor Martin Sheen, who’s both Estevez’s on-screen and real-life...

With both hands, my nine-year-old grabs hold of an exposed hemlock root and then kicks his sports-sandaled left foot up to a round, wet...

Oh, if we were all given $7.7 million and an army of engineers to mend the terrible mess we make of things. That’s what repaired Nine...

It’s never quieter in my Pittsburgh neighborhood than after a summer morning thunderstorm, when moments move in dribs and drabs ...

A family welcomes an urban chicken foursome to their new home, a pretty fly A-frame chicken tractor … (Originally appeared in Blue Earth...

Last year, without much forethought, I began taking photographs from a particular spot in a plaza that I regularly visit, capturing...

"This is the chanterelle mushroom.” A wide-eyed, blond-haired man with dual black earplugs flashes two handfuls of orange fungi before...

Admittedly, I don’t usually care much for monocrops of flowers lining city sidewalks - all those begonias, marigolds, and African violets...

In two days, in two different Pittsburgh cemeteries, I saw two northern flickers. The only ground-feeding woodpecker, northern flickers...

I’ve been walking cemeteries of late. Harried life has got me reflecting on the death of things, and, coincidentally or not, I’ve found...

Aaron Mair, president of the Sierra Club, stated the following in an interview with Sojourners magazine. He was discussing the broader...

I made an elm leaf recently. In my study. Well, admittedly, I can't actually make elm leaves. But I did draw one, on my study wall. In...

In the city, I hear idling engines and revving engines, yelling and laughter as people pass by on the sidewalk, construction crews and...

Apparently, geese can produce up to 1.5 pounds of dung every day, going an average of every seven minutes while feeding ...

A list of birds I saw and was able to identify, mostly within a single acre of bird-watching terrain ...

Imagine a "natureful" city that, rather than repelling nature, actually attracts more abundant biodiversity ...

I pedal through a billow of white feathers drifting like avian tumbleweeds, bobbing, one small bound at a time ...

I’d just finished telling my neighbor, Ben, about a doe that had bounded into our fenced front yard the other morning ...

On bread and gentrification: The more enriched social classes snatch up the “natural” loaves, leaving the spongy, sugary bread to others ...