Field Notes
Welcome to Field Notes, an odds-and-ends collection of sightings, jottings, musings and observations about the more-than-human world. Please check back for regular postings. And please forward a few of your own interesting encounters with nature.
Designing Healthy Coral Reefs
In fall 2023 I joined a transdisciplinary team of faculty in architecture, design and biology at Arizona State University. Together with our graduate students in design and architecture we traveled to Oahu, Hawaii, with the goal of exploring how these professional disciplines could help conserve and rehabilitate coral reefs.
Something Closed, Suddenly Opening
This past February, during a winter storm that brought dark skies and cold rain to the Valley of the Sun, I spent a week dreaming of spring with students at McClintock High School in Tempe, Arizona.
A Love Affair with Mosses
For most people, falling in love with another human being seems to follow a fairly predictable course. You tend to fall hard. You tend to fall fast. And no one really gets up in the morning thinking, today is the day I will fall in love. So, there’s usually the delightful bonus of surprise.
Falling in love with a plant is really no different.
Winging It
One of the greatest pleasures of my job as a writer is discovering the work of biologists who have ventured into an overlooked corner of nature only to reveal how life there is unfolding in spectacular ways.
A Botanical Twofer
Every so often nature presents a teaser that just won’t stop tickling the imagination.