What America’s National Parklands Taught My Three Boys About Their Country

A Michigan Teacher Wanted His Sons to Roam the Nation's Expanses, Grasp Its Opportunities, and Understand Its Injustices

Last August, my sons and I paddled canoes through the Missouri River Breaks National Monument in eastern Montana. The Breaks is remote country, a prairie river cutting through coulees and badlands, relatively unchanged since Lewis and Clark passed through more than 200 years ago.

For three days, we encountered no one. Rattlesnakes slipped across the trails. A dust storm whooshed into camp one night and seasoned the spaghetti with grit. We glided past badgers, bighorn sheep, prairie dog towns, bald eagles, and abandoned homesteads.

Years earlier before the boys were born, I …

Sixteen Years After His Death, a Renowned Environmentalist Won His Longest Fight

David Brower, Founder of Friends of the Earth, Spent His Career Negotiating Between Nature and Power

Earlier this year, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, which built and operates the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors on the central California coast, announced that it will phase them out by …

The Wonderful, Painful Opera of Cleveland

From Idylls to Industrial Wastelands and Back, the City’s Stark Contrasts Will Come Into Focus at This Year’s Republican National Convention

Inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park, through a deep secondary growth forest, a narrow trail skirts the infamous Cuyahoga River following the historic route of the Ohio & Erie Canal. This …

Why Ansel Adams Made His Black Even Blacker

The Photographer Projected a More Perfect Union by Taking Artistic Liberty With His Yosemite Landscapes

Ansel Adams’ Half Dome, Blowing Snow, Yosemite National Park, is a classic landscape photograph, one that draws upon decades of dramatic imagery touting the far West as the ultimate expression …

My Youthful Years In Ansel Adams’ Orbit

I Wanted to Revolutionize Photography. Then I Got a Job With the Man Who Wrote the Rule Book.

I had the enormous good fortune to work for the photographer Ansel Adams in the early 1980s.

At the time I applied for the job, I was a graduate student in …