Nearly 200 of us cram into Tarāwhai, a traditional wooden Māori meeting house, under the gaze of the ancestors and deities carved into the posts and walls. We’re here in the home of the Ngāti Tarāwhai ...

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that ...

When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, I had a friend whose family owned an unimproved lot on Dabob Bay, a bay off a fjord nestled deep in the southern Salish Sea, in Washington State. My group of ...

In the 20th century, people’s demand for whale blubber and baleen drove industrial whalers to kill roughly three million whales—a whopping 99 percent of the world’s whale population. The intensive ...

Francis “Bully” Mission Sr., president and founder of Mission Animal Control, is in a good mood when I meet him at a strip mall parking lot on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. He and ...

Joyce Ellis stood in the estuary near her home watching grizzly bears where grizzlies aren’t supposed to be. British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, the largest island on the west coast of North America, ...

Back when some of the first humans showed up in the Americas, far down in southern Chile near the coast, a small group of 20 or 30 built themselves a camp. It was in a warm and rich rainforest, in a ...

They seize suburbs. They seize cities. They seize habitat a continent away. They arrive uninvited. They stay indefinitely. They are indomitable. Who? Barred owls. Strix varia. They have taken a fancy ...

In India, severe water shortages in one part of the country often coincide with acute flooding in another. When these dual tragedies occur, Indians are often left wishing for a way to balance out the ...

Stingray 12 is surprisingly calm for an animal that’s getting squeegeed. The ray, roughly the size of a dinner plate, is submerged in the sand of a tank about the size of a chest freezer; even the ...

In 2015, 76 million cubic meters of rock crashed from the rugged cliffs above a southeastern Alaska fjord and into the water below. The landslide sparked a nearly 200-meter-tall wave that roared down ...