Tonight, at home, in front of the screen. A man in his sixties climbs a stepladder in a botanical garden, pushes a branch aside, and clips a small metal clamp onto a ginkgo leaf. The cable runs back down along the trunk. For any viewer, it is a strange image. For me, it is a […]

In December 1996, a mudslide comes down on the hamlet of Stafford, in Humboldt County, northern California, and devastates the village. The slope above it had just been clear-cut. The residents blame the logging company, Pacific Lumber, and the engineer Donald H. Gray concludes that the clear-cut was responsible. A few months later, the California […]

Kudu are dying in southern Africa, and nobody understands why. They have been browsing acacias, as always. Except that the trees, over-browsed, concentrated the tannin in their foliage to a lethal level, and warned their neighbours through the air. The episode is real, dated around 1990, and it was Zep’s son, Arthur, who reported it […]

July 1993, somewhere in a British Columbia forest. Young trees planted in groups of three, fifty centimetres apart, are sealed one by one inside bags. Some are capped with a conical tent of varying opacity, put in place four weeks earlier, to give them an artificial sky, full sun, partial shade, deep shade. Then gas […]

In 2008, Monica Gagliano is a postdoctoral researcher in climate change ecology at James Cook University, and she spends her days in the water tracking the breeding of wild pairs of Pomacentrus amboinensis, a reef damselfish. After a week, the animals come to nestle in her open hand, her fingers closing gently around their scaly […]

A stork’s-bill seed falls to the ground. It carries a twisted spiral awn, and that spiral coils and then uncoils with the humidity of the air. With each cycle, the seed drives itself a little deeper. It screws itself into the earth without the plant having spent a single calorie, all the energy comes from […]