I wrote this for contributors to Connecticut Woodlands magazine. Its advice should help any writer getting started in journalism.
In this age of the internet, writers must be extremely careful not to inadvertently plagiarize by cutting (from web sources) ideas,...
Appalachia journal and the career of Rebecca Oreskes both got the attention at the annual dinner of an organization that works to protect alpine summits in the northeastern United States. It took place on Saturday, April 14 in...
The MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusestts decided to launch its first big public exhibit on a controversial aspect of "one of the most complicated and difficult issues to deal with, scientifically, politically, and publicly"—climate change. So said museum director John Durant...
Environment reporter Peter Lord died on April 4. I am grateful for the years I worked with him on the Advisory Board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island. I will miss him. His newspaper, the Providence Journal, wrote...
My colleague and friend, Peter B. Lord, has been fighting brain cancer. He is only 60 years old and was working full-tilt at the Providence Journal last May when he had his first seizure. Brain tumors are like this. They come out of nowhere, it seems.
Pete deserves a tribute. And I wish I...
Median per-capita income* in the United States: $52,673
Mitt Romney’s income: 21.7 million in 2010. (He and his wife, Ann, donated 16 percent, about 3.5 million, of their income to charity.)
Former Senator...
When I look back on my first years covering the environment in the 1990s, it looks like a lost era of innocence.
When I began covering the environment beat for a daily newspaper, my focus was government enforcement and efforts to reverse damage. The Clean Air Act of the first Bush...
Wilderness essayists, flock to this contest, which I help to judge.
The Waterman Fund seeks the submission of essays about life in the mountains of the northeastern U.S. for its annual Waterman Fund Alpine Essay Contest.
Wildness! Are you finding it where you least expect? Did you...
Peter H. Gleick, an esteemed climate scientist whose specialty is water, admitted this week that he had pretended he was someone else to receive documents from the conservative Heartland Institute. He said in a...
 RWL-136.jpg "Laura Ingalls Wilder at about age 50, before she wrote the \"Little House\" books. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library")
My heroine is Laura Ingalls Wilder. She's not the woman I thought she was. Still a great woman, but a much different one than I thought.
As I work through the drafts of my book on the literary collaboration between Laura and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, I realize that I am coming...
The courage to change should begin from the top—with the boss: Turn off the lights. Shut down the computer monitors. Print on both sides of the paper. Stop buying bottled water. Just acting different could cut energy use in offices by 4 to 75 percent, Shui Bin writes in a...
On Mount Washington, New Hampshire:
October 2011
Average monthly snowfall (1971-2000): 14 inches
Actual snowfall in October: 20.7
November 2011
Average monthly snowfall: 40.4
Actual snowfall: 18.6
December 2011:
...
All the green gurus advise against sending holiday cards, but I sent two different ones out this season. I think that paper correspondence remains one of the great domestic arts. One of my cards was a 5-by-7-inch postcard thanking some of the people I worked with in 2011. It showed the above...
During this high-travel pre-holiday season, consider some surprising findings on the carbon footprint of traveling, courtesy of Matthew McDermott of Planet Green/TLC:
* For long distances, buses emit less carbon than trains. Trains still are pretty good choices, and as long as they aren...
What amazes me the most about the Occupy Wall Street protest is how long the city allowed it to go on peacefully. I guess I was cynical, believing that any day from September 16 on, the police would move in on Zuccotti Park, dispersing the camped protesters. But as the weeks dragged on, and the...
