In 2021, a colleague asked if I’d like to interview Goodall about her Trees for Jane initiative and I leapt at the chance. The best part of this interview may have been hearing about a tree Jane loved when she was a child. She spoke to me from the home her family has...
In October, 2018, my wife and I joined a group of trekkers led by Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 was the first person (along with Ed Hillary) to reach the top of Mount Everest. For our trek in the Kingdom of Mustang, which borders...
My editors at National Geographic made it clear to me that they did not want a personal reminiscence about Jan Morris after she died on November 20, 2020. They wanted a piece about Jan’s deep and abiding connection to her adopted home, Wales. She was half Welsh and...
This essay began forming as I took long walks in April 2000, after being diagnosed with Covid the month before. I focused on the silver linings of the pandemic and how this terrible wave of disease might lead to a more humane future. Here’s an excerpt: This month of...
I first heard Sarah McLachlan’s voice in 1990. I was teaching at an outdoor education school in the Santa Cruz Mountains and my housemate had a cassette tape of her first album. It was love at first blush. Her work was raw then; it wasn’t until four years later, when...
