Debunking the myth of the sand-burrowing minnow

It’s a popular refrain here in central New Mexico come summer: The silvery minnow can hunker down, bury itself in a dry streambed and outlast drought. Whenever the river slows and its bed begins to dry, I’m inevitably informed that the Rio Grande has always dried, and the four-inch long minnow has always survived. This […]

I thought about the woman’s bones for a long time — what position they might have been in when they were abandoned and covered up, what had happened to her heart and her lungs as they slowly deteriorated. The cavity of her ribs and her chest, the now-hollow cavity of her thigh bones, that narrow […]

Early in May, I watched one of my most cherished forests burn. The flames and smoke were great to see. Fire is often seen as death and destruction for a forest, but here was a forest living with fire as an ecological process. Exactly 10 years ago, this old-growth ponderosa pine forest of the Deadwood […]

Here in Oregon, the dinosaurs are stirring. The brontosaurs of big timber, almost at their last gasp, are making one last power play, and it’s a WOPR, pronounced — how else? — “whopper,” which stands for Western Oregon Plan Revisions. What’s being revised are management plans for six Bureau of Land Management districts in western […]