Jennifer Marohasy

 “THE trail we were on is at the treeline, 8 or 9 thousand feet.  Most of the time it’s buried under 6 to 10 feet of snow, so not too many people get up their until late spring or early summer…   First people in are rangers who maintain the trail by removing tree falls or [...]

“Not all environmental causes are sucker-proof. If one wants to fill up the inner void, by making the world a better place to live, then one should do one’s bloody homework first. And that includes becoming scientifically literate. If one is not willing to take that first step, then one should get a life, and [...]

THE last Ice Age killed off all of the coniferous trees in Finland. After the ice sheet retreated, trees from elsewhere – like the Scots Pine – gradually colonized the vacant niche. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened in many high mountains of the Earth’s temperate regions, including the Sierra Nevada Range of [...]

BEFORE Jane Goodall’s pioneering study of wild chimpanzees, most of us believed that tool-use and especially tool-making were exclusively human activities. Goodall was intrigued when she first observed a chimp poking a stick into a termite mound, waiting a minute, pulling out the stick, and then licking off the termites. But a Border Collie named Gurr [...]

IT emerges from the soil like a mini-plastic Christmas tree in the image of a red Mexican succulent.   But it’s not a succulent or even an entire plant and it’s not from Mexico.  Rather it’s the flowering stalk of a species closely related to the cranberry, blueberry, azalea and rhododendron and it grows in the Sierra Nevada [...]