Dear Sundog,Ìę

Last September, in California’s Malibu Creek State Park, a mountain lion pounced on a five-year-old child. The father managed to save his kid by fighting off the cat, and soon after, officials euthanized the cougar. Isn’t this immoral and outrageous? The lion was behaving just as nature intended.Ìę— People against he Unethical Murder of Animals

Dear PUMA,

This is not the only recent alarming attack on humans by a cougar. In 2023, an eight-year-old boy was while camping with his family in Olympic National Park; his mom chased off the cat, and he escaped with minor injuries. Last April, two brothers were out in looking for shed antlers when they encountered a cougar. It attacked both young men, killing one.

As a professional arbiter of ethics, my job is to see at least two sides of any given issue. However, as the father of a five-year-old who I regularly take to the woods and canyons, I am unable to access the other side here, to find what John Keats might have called the “negative capability” to tolerate the mystery that falls outside of reason. My take is strictly Old Testament: I say smite the beast. If an animal tried to drag off my child, my notions of animal rights and equality among the species would go straight out the window. I would try to kill it even if it escaped, assuming that, if left to live, it would try the same thing again.

I seem to be in line among people in positions of responsibility—at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, as well as wildlife advocacy groups. “We don’t have a mountain lion jail,” Beth Pratt, the California state director of the National Wildlife Federation, told the after the Malibu Creek incident. “As much as it pains me, I think the officials made the right decision here.”

The conundrum is not new. But we might say we’ve had a respite. After a cougar killed a human in California in 1909, the state went more than 80 years without another fatality. In 1990, fearing the lion was going extinct, voters passed a ballot initiative to protect the animal. The past four decades have seen mountain lions acting more aggressively. Even so, it’s still a small number. According to the , there have been 26 verified cougar attacks on humans since 1986, four of them fatal.

These ethical dilemmas about what an animal is “allowed” to do pre-date the United States, of course. During the Middle Ages, animals were put on trial for crimes ranging from caterpillars stealing fruit to pigs who committed murder. “Here were bears formally excommunicated from the Church,” writes Mary Roach in her book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. “Slugs given three warnings to stop nettling farmers, under penalty of smiting.”

And yet, buried in my psyche, was the belief that killing a cougar for being a cougar was just . . . wrong? I turned to an expert in the field to see what I was missing. Christopher Preston is a professor of environmental ethics at the University of Montana and author of the book . Because mountain lion attacks are still so rare, Preston thought there wasn’t much official protocol. Bears, however, attack more frequently. When a bear kills or eats a human, it will be euthanized. But if a bear attacks a person while demonstrating what authorities consider natural behavior, it will be spared. “If you surprise a bear with cubs or on a kill, and it attacks you, then the bear can be let off,” Preston told me. “It’s not a pattern of behavior that demonstrates unnatural instincts.”

It’s unclear if the behavior of the Malibu Creek cougar was natural.Ìę The event that you refer to, PUMA, involved a young lion approaching a group of humans in a picnic area and dragging off a child, a particularly brazen act. Yes, it’s perfectly natural for a mountain lion to haul off a smaller creature in hopes of dining on it. But, said Preston, this cougar had left its natural environment and entered a human environment: a picnic area in a state park. “Where do you draw the line when natural behavior starts to impact us pretty severely?” he asked. We have no problem cracking down, he adds, when forms of life like bacteria and viruses exhibit their natural behavior of infecting our bodies.

Preston made another point: humans are constantly expressing their dominance over the natural world, and if we just kill anything that makes a problem with us, then we’re not learning anything. But in his opinion, even this line of reasoning doesn’t merit a puma pardon. “Someone can feel sympathy for the lion for doing what lions do, but that probably won’t get you a non-shoot order.”

“We need to dial back our dominance, but this case brings it into sharp contrast,” said Preston. “I don’t know how many environmental ethicists would say, ‘Yes, let’s just let lions keep dragging kids out of picnic areas.’”

Preston and I decided to find out. He sent out a note to a handful of colleagues. The first to respond was Philip Cafaro, a professor of philosophy at Colorado State University:

The way I see it, mountain lions and people have a right to live in California (and elsewhere). But there are way too many people in CA (~ 40 million) and way too few mountain lions (probably less than 5,000). It’s way out of balance, way unjustly tilted toward us hogging most of the habitat and resources. So, speaking strictly to the justice of the situation, mountain lions that attack and even kill people should be left alone. We can spare a few people from our teeming hordes, while there are precious few pumas left.

But even he shied away from cougar clemency:

Pragmatically speaking, people are too selfish and cowardly to act ethically in such cases. So, the next best thing is let them kill some mountain lions in the hope that they will leave the rest alone.

A second Colorado State professor of philosophy, Katie McShane, raised other important questions, which perhaps explain why we no longer drag beasts before a judge and jury:

I’m not sure we blame animals very much at all; but in any case, killing the mountain lion isn’t conceived of as punishment, but rather, keeping people safe.

Maybe there’s an animal ethics question about whether killing the lion is the best way to protect people? Given mountain lion behavior, I can’t imagine that confinement would go well. Are there sanctuaries? I don’t know; they’d need to be huge. Anyway, my guess is that killing the mountain lion is the most humane option as well.

The short answer to that is, mountain lions require too much terrain to be placed in sanctuaries. And relocating an animal that’s attacked a human doesn’t mean it won’t attack again. I find myself agreeing that killing is the best option in this difficult situation.

Before Preston signed off, he also speculated that there might be something in the human psyche that calls for harsher punishments for pumas than for other predators—bears, for example. “There is something singular about the lion,” he said. “You get stalked. You don’t know it’s coming. Bears kind of look like people when they stand up on two legs, so we know what they are about. The lion occupies a different place in our cultural imagination: the stealthy undesirable ghost in the forest that we don’t want to empathize with.”

Mark Sundeen lives in a canyon in Montana where cougar sightings are frequent, yet in his four decades of exploring and guiding in the West, he’s never seen one in the wild. Sundeen’s new book, Ìęcomes out February 18.

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’Tis the season of excess. Of shopping. Of buying shiny new water bottles and cozy new fleeces for friends and family, and maybe sometimes for ourselves. It’s the season of consumerism in overload.

There’s an antidote to all the commercialism though, at least when it comes to outdoor gear. Take those shoes that have lost their midsole pop and that backpack that you never really liked anyway and find them a new home with someone who may love them. It’s a win-win. You’re clearing out clutter and doing good—putting quality shoes on someone else’s feet and maybe helping them discover a love for an outdoor sport or walking in the woods.

Sharing the Wealth

There are a lot of ways to donate gear—a good one being șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s—and you can find a lot of articles describing them with a quick search. Instead of repeating these lists, I’d like to tell you an inspiring, real-life story.

My friend, Kristen Mecca, has long made a habit of leaving behind her gear when visiting developing countries. After hiking Machu Picchu, she and her mom gave their boots and headlamps to their porters, which inspired others in their group to gift their sleeping bags. “The porters really valued our gear for themselves,” says Mecca, “and told us there was also a way to sell their gear and make money. So, they were either going to use the good quality gear or feed their families from selling it.”

Mecca always travels with an extra bag of gear, which she’s left behind on trips to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, but she’s also packed out anything she couldn’t give away directly. “I never want to contribute to a trash problem,” she says. “So anything that doesn’t biodegrade, recycle, or add value gets packed back up and taken home with me.”

This fall, Mecca started volunteering as a coach for , a national nonprofit that encourages elementary school-aged girls to be active among a supportive community. Because she’s seen how appreciated lightly used, quality gear can be to people in developing countries, she felt compelled to share the practice with her Girls on the Run group.

Connecting Good Things

Based in Northern Virginia, Mecca says that she was aware of how much money goes into youth sports and activity in general in her area, and figured a lot of lightly used shoes were just lying around in peoples’ homes. She also had a lot of gear herself that she was looking to repurpose. After doing some research, Mecca landed on, an organization that collects shoes and reallocates them to people in developing countries. Sneakers4Good sends people like Mecca large bags to fill with shoes, and a prepaid shipping label. In addition to giving shoes new life with those in need, the company allows the organizer to choose a charity of their choice to receive a check for roughly $1 per pound of shoes donated.

With the help of two high school-aged volunteer coaches, Mecca collected 93 pairs of shoes and soccer cleats from her Girls on the Run training group this fall.

“It was really easy,” says Mecca. She gave the girls a week to gather shoes from within their networks. “The high school girls who volunteer as coaches also reached out to their own communities and helped out. Now I know the potential is there.”

Mecca worked with the local director of Girls on the Run to donate the money from Sneakers4Good to buying shoes for girls in the program who need them to participate in the program’s culmination, a community 5K. She also organized another shoe collection and donated the money to a charity that matters to her—Animal Rescues of the Rockies.

What may be most impactful in the long term is that Mecca is helping one of the high school-aged volunteer coaches conduct her own collections throughout the sports seasons and choose a nonprofit that’s meaningful to her—once she’s done taking the SATs (she’s tied up until then).

“It’s been fun having a creative way to give multiple beneficiaries—those in need of gear, the animal rescue organization dear to my heart, and I’m benefitting too–from all the feel-good hormones and the energy boost from doing something I’m excited about that helps others,” Mecca says. That’s as fitting an antidote to holiday commercialism as I can imagine.

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I’ve read more books on climate action than I can count. So I don’t say this lightly: I’m obsessed with the one I just finished, byÌęAyana Elizabeth Johnson.

In it, Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the nonprofit think-tank , conducts interviews with 20 experts in everything from finance to farming to film and asks them to imagine what a replenished and healthy world might look like if we use the collective wisdom we already have to combat climate change.

I read this book in mid–November, right after the 2024 presidential election, and I was pretty gripped with climate anxiety.

This is not another preachy enviro-book. It’s not pushing hope for hope’s sake down our throats. Instead, it spotlights innovative solutions that are already working—like an increased reliance on renewable energy, greening up transportation and buildings, regenerative agriculture, and reducing food waste—and urges us to consider the possibilities when these things scale. Interspersed throughout the interviews are lists of jaw dropping facts, poems, and essays. And plenty of calls to action.

There was one paragraph that really hit me. In her interview with Paola Antonelli, senior curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Johnson asks her a question that recurs throughout the book: “How can we be part of the solutions we need? Is there a call to action?”

“The call to action is really to be better humans,” Antonelli says. “I don’t know how else to put it. Be better humans by understanding that we live for others. Otherwise we don’t have much reason to live. And when I say ‘others,’ I mean also the rest of the environment, all creatures and things. The answer is love.”

I decided to reach out to Johnson for a climate pep talk. The book hit shelves in September 2024, and we’ve had a presidential election—and a lot of global unrest—since then. I was curious how Johnson felt now, and whether her attitude or ideas had shifted with the socioeconomic and political tides. Plus, I just really didn’t want the book to end. Johnson’s casual, conversational style of writing left me feeling like we were already friends and hoped I could glean even more insight from one of the most exciting minds in the climate movement.

OUTSIDE: Talk me off the ledge: the book’s premiseÌęponders what theÌęworld would look like if we get climate action right. But can we actually get it right? In the time that we have? How?Ìę

JOHNSON: I have a lot of angsty journalists on my calendar right now and I’m just like, at what point did I become everyone’s climate shrink? How did I become the pep talker? It’s sort of funny because I am decisively not an optimist. I’m well aware that this climate scenario could very easily go even further off the rails. But it has literally never occurred to me that we should give up because that’s absurd, right? You don’t give up on life on earth.

And so it just always comes back to the question of what can we do to make it better? Because not trying is not an option. I was raised by two people who were in various small ways active in the movement for civil rights. At no point did people in that movement say, “This is too hard. Let’s just give up and be unequal forever.”

Sometimes I think there are a lot of people out there who are just quitters when it comes to climate change. They think the odds are too long and they’ll be gone anyway. But that’s a very weak and sad response.

Part of the problem is that we’ve been told that we have to stop or solve climate change. And those verbs are clearly delusional because we can’t solve it and we can’t stop it. But we can make things much better than they otherwise would have been if we didn’t try.

People just need to roll up their sleeves and get their heads in the game. I don’t really know what to say about the anxiety that most people are feeling except to say this: you will feel a hell of aÌęlot better if you’re doing something about it.

Most of the people reading this interview care and want to take action. But unfortunately there are so many who don’t, who just go about their lives, and intentionally or unintentionally don’t think about what the world will look like in 50 years. What would you say to them? Wake up! As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution,Ìęyou’re part of the problem.

You use a Venn diagram exercise to help people find their niche in the climate movement. Can you explain how it works? To ensure a livable future on this planet, we need to move beyond the platitudes of reduce, reuse, recycle. There is no one person or one entity that can fix this problem. We need to create a culture where everyone has a role to play. Are we gonna put our heads in the sand or pitch in?

The Climate Action Venn Diagram is a tool that helps everyone find their unique role by finding the intersection of three questions. 1) What brings you joy? 2) What are you good at? 3) What work needs doing?

The book is the result of my Venn diagram.

The Biden-Harris administration has arguably taken more climate action than any in history. A lot of environmentalists are bummed—even scared—about the results of the recent presidential election. You wrote the book before it happened. How did the election impact you personally and how will it impact your work and message moving forward? The last Trump administration rolled back well over 100 environmental protections and we don’t want that to happen again. In this current environment, I think we may need to do some reframing. We may get more traction if we talk less about “climate change” but keep pushing on the solutions. For example, there may be some openings in just the basics like the government protecting clean air and clean water, and we can reframe a lot of climate stuff in those terms because all Americans care about that.Ìę

When you feel like you’re banging your head against the wall, stop doing what you’re doing and find a different way. Because if yelling climate facts at people was enough, we would have solved this already, right?

I also think it will be really hard for the Trump administration to turn its back on the economic benefits we’ve seen from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Especially when so many red states are benefitting the most. Texas and Iowa lead the nation on wind energy. Not because they’re a bunch of hippies but because the finances just make sense. As of 2022, the clean energy sector employs more than 3.3 million people, over three times more than fossil fuels.

My reaction to this election was OK, what does this mean for me and my work? My answer, after reevaluating all my projects: I just need to double down. That includes focusing on what city governments can do to adapt to climate change, via my think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and supporting the next generation of climate leaders through teaching at Bowdoin college, and consulting with corporations that are trying to get it right since the federal government isn’t adequately regulating their climate impacts.

But overall, the role that I see for myself in climate work is to welcome more people into it. We need way more people working on climate solutions. So how can I help people get creative and find their own personal approach?

Was your book tour, which really wasn’t a book tour in the traditional sense, part of that approach? Yes, the Climate Variety Show, which we put on in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Portland, Maine, was born out of my own complete lack of desire to read my book aloud in bookstores across the country. What could be more boring? People are already bored of climate change, so how do I entice people in? I feel like there are things we haven’t tried yet as far as communications and influencing our friends and family.

So the was all about taking climate seriously without taking ourselves seriously. It was basically like a high school talent show—comedy, dancing, hula-hooping, poetry, games, music, puppets, and magic all mashed up into an evening of delightful chaos.

And everyone there filled out their Climate Action Venn Diagram in real time. If you want to get a sense of what it was like, you can hear audio clips in and see a in my Substack newsletter.

In What If We Get It Right?, you end each chapter by asking your interviewee the top three things they wish everyone knew about their particular area of expertise. So I’d like to ask you: What are the top three things you want everyone to know about your book?

1. It’s quite a fun, spirited read. I’ve been told the vibe of the book is like eavesdropping at a dinner party with me and 20 dear friends and colleagues, because the book includes interviews with these brilliant folks who are showing the way forward to their “visions of climate futures,” as the subtitle puts it. And if you listen to the audiobook, you get to actually hear these conversations.
2. There’s magnificent art and poetry mixed in.
3. I envisioned this book as something that people would read and discuss together, so, for book clubs and teachers, I made .

Oh! And as a bonus, the very last page has , which I spent an inordinate amount of time putting together and includes anthems for victory, love songs to Earth, tunes for tenacity, and sexy implementation vibes.

Kristin Hostetter is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s sustainability columnist. This column is the result of a similar Venn diagram exercise she did several years ago when she became a founding member of the . Follow her journey to live more sustainably by for her twice-monthly newsletter.

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Molli Myers was pregnant with her firstborn when the salmon began to die. It was 2002, during the depths of a yearslong drought, and farmers far upstream of her community on the Yurok reservation in Northern California had pressured the George W. Bush administration to divert water from the Klamath River in Oregon to irrigate their fields. Water temperatures rose as the river slowed through the summer, and in September, Chinook salmon returning to spawn began to die, littering the banks with as many as 70,000 carcasses.

Two years later, with her young son in her lap, Myers testified in Orleans, California, before a panel of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials charged with renewing the operating licenses of four hydroelectric dams that had contributed to the fish kill. None of the panelists looked her in the eye as she described the structures as an existential threat to the river and the salmon that have sustained her Karuk people since time immemorial.

When the meeting ended, Myers joined a handful of Native people and friends around a bonfire by the river in Orleans to lick their wounds and vent their anger. “That was when we made the decision to dedicate ourselves to dam removal,” Myers recalls. “And that has been our lives.”

The Klamath River flows 263 miles from southern Oregon to far Northern California, through ancestral lands of the Klamath, Karuk, Hupa, Shasta, and Yurok, whose traditions and way of life grew around the river and the abundance it provided. The Klamath once teemed with salmon, but the dams, built between 1918 and 1964 without consulting the tribes, blocked the fish from critical spawning habitat on the upper river and its tributaries. The dams provided no drinking water and almost no flood control. Toxic algae bloomed in their reservoirs, and they accounted for less than 2 percent of the electricity generated by their owner, PacifiCorp. Still, taking them down would involve the largest dam-removal project in American history. The tribes would accept nothing less.

They organized protests at PacifiCorp’s Oregon headquarters, then traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to lobby the utility’s parent company, Scottish Power, which proceeded to sell PacifiCorp in 2006. The new owner was Berkshire Hathaway Energy, controlled by Warren Buffett, then the planet’s wealthiest man.

The coalition shifted their protests to Omaha, Nebraska, where Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting packs a 19,000-seat arena. In 2008, 23-year-old Karuk tribal member Chook-Chook Hillman waited in line all night, then sprinted for a microphone and the chance to question Buffett directly. As Hillman introduced himself in the Karuk language, a stunned hush fell over the crowd. Switching to English, he demanded Buffett sign an agreement to remove the dams as Georgiana Myers and Annelia Hillman of the Yurok tribe unfurled a banner proclaiming: BUFFETT’S KLAMATH DAMS = CULTURAL GENOCIDE.

“The world’s richest man doesn’t faze me at all, because in our culture I’m just as equal as any other being on the planet,” Chook-Chook Hillman recalls. “I got my moment and I took full advantage of it.” After two other Klamath River defenders spoke up, Buffett announced that he wouldn’t take any more questions about the dams, and security hustled the remaining activists out of the queue.

The protesters had made their point and could now engage Buffett’s people in a language they understood: the cost of adding fish ladders and bringing the dams up to spec for relicensing was more than it would cost to tear them down—and more than they’d ever earn back. The smart play for PacifiCorp was to walk away. Over the next 16 years, without easing the threat of direct action, the tribes worked with environmentalists, irrigators, commercial fishers, state and federal governments, and PacifiCorp itself to help the utility company do just that.

In 2010, nearly 50 parties signed a dam-removal settlement and an environmental-restoration agreement, only to watch them both die in Congress five years later. The tribes then took the lead in new talks, negotiating an amended agreement that didn’t require congressional approval. The accord formed the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corporation to manage the project, with the state of California contributing $250 million in dam-removal and remediation costs and PacifiCorp rate-payers covering the remaining $200 million.

The last major hurdle was approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency Molli Myers had testified to decades ago. In November 2022, as officials met in Washington, D.C., Myers joined friends by the river in Orleans, gathering around a Starlink connection to share the historic moment with their children, now grown, who’d witnessed the dam-removal fight their entire lives, and elders who thought they would never live to see it succeed. “We built a bonfire,” she says. “We pulled out all of our old banners from over the years, and we celebrated.”

Dam removal began the following spring and continued in earnest this year. The largest of the four structures, Iron Gate, stood 173 feet tall and 740 feet long. In May, excavators began reducing the earthen formation scoop by scoop, loading the soil into oversize trucks that would return it to the pit it was taken from decades ago. The same day, crews of young people walked the steep embankments, spreading native seeds as part of a habitat-restoration effort that will go on for years. By August, all four dams were gone, freeing the river to carry on the work of healing itself, and providing migrating salmon a clear route upstream for the first time in more than a century.

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More than 40 years ago, the then park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey to Alaska’s Noatak River. Captivated by the profusion of wildlife, the rich habitat, and the unfamiliar landscape, he spent years kayaking, packrafting, skiing, dogsledding, and backpacking in Arctic North America—often alone for weeks at a time. After three decades away from the Noatak, he returned with his 15-year-old son, Alistair, in 2021 to find a flooded river and a scarcity of the once abundant caribou. The Arctic had warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.

The next year, 2022, Waterman took a last journey to document the changes. The following is excerpted and adapted from his prologue in Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (Patagonia Books, November 12).

A former ranger in Rocky MountainÌęand Denali national parks, Waterman is the author of 17 books, including (National Geographic Books), In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, Running Dry, and Arctic Crossing. He has made five films about adventure and wild places.

If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. This supports our mission to get more people active and outside. Learn more.

The below is adapted from Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis.

A Certain Type of Fun, July 10-12, 2022

My hands, thighs, and calves have repeatedly locked up in painful dehydration cramps, undoubtedly caused by our toil with leaden packs in eighty-degree heat up the steep streambed or its slippery, egg-shaped boulders. After my water bottle slid out of an outside pack pocket and disappeared amid one of several waist-deep stream fords or in thick alders yesterday, I carefully slide the bear spray can (looped in a sling around my shoulders) to the side so it doesn’t get knocked out of its pouch, an action I will come to regret. Now, to slake my thirst, I submerge my head in Kalulutok Creek like a water dog.

Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, it’s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that we’re bound for. But in my mind—after we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least 30 times yesterday—Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river.

It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or “fingers of the outstretched hand” in Iñupiaq.

As the continent’s most northerly mountains, the sea-fossil-filled Brooks Range—with more than a half-dozen time-worn peaks over 8,000 feet high—is seen on a map as the last curl of the Rocky Mountains before they stairstep into foothills and coastal plains along the Arctic Ocean. The Brooks Range stretches 200 miles south to north and 700 miles to the east, where it jabs into Canada. Although there are more than 400 named peaks, since the Brooks Range is remote and relatively untraveled, it’s rare that anyone bothers to climb these mountains. My river-slogger companion, Chris, and I will be exceptions.

We carry a water filter, but it would be silly to use it. We’re higher and farther north than giardiasis-infected beavers and there is no sign of caribou. The creek is fed from the pure ice of shrunken glaciers above and ancient permafrost in the ground below. In what seems like prodigious heat for the Arctic, the taps here are all wide-open.

Thirty-nine years ago, I decided to learn all I could about life above the Arctic Circle. As a climber, I traded my worship of high mountains for the High Arctic. I felt that unlike the study of crevasse extrication and avalanche avoidance—you couldn’t just read about the Arctic or sign up for courses. You have to go on immersive journeys and figure out how the interlocked parts of the natural world fit together. Along this path, acts of curiosity out on the land and the water can open an earned universe of wonders. But you must spend time in the villages, too, with the kindhearted people of the North to make sure you get it right. And you can’t call the Arctic “the Far North”—it is “home” rather than “far” to the many people who live there.

So, after twoscore of Arctic journeys, in the summer of 2022, I’m on one more trip. I could not be on such an ambitious trip without all the previous experiences. (The more I learn, it sometimes feels like the less I know about the Arctic.)

But this time the agenda is different. I hope to understand the climate crisis better.

Chris Korbulic and I are here to document it however we can. Since my first trip above the Arctic Circle in 1983, I have seen extraordinary changes in the landscape. Only three days underway and we’ve already flown over a wildfire to access our Walker Lake drop-off point. And yesterday we trudged underneath several bizarre, tear-drop-shaped landslide thaw slumps—a.k.a. thermokarsts—caused by the permafrost thaw.

In much of Alaska, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) says that permafrost thaw from 2005 to 2010 has caused the ground to sink more than four inches, and in places to the north of us, twice that. The land collapses as the permafrost below it thaws, like logs pulled out from beneath a woodpile. AMAP believes this will amount to a “large-scale degradation of near-surface permafrost by the end of the twenty-first century.” Roads and buildings and pipelines—along with hillsides, Iñupiat homes, forests, and even lakes—will fall crazily aslant, or get sucked into the ground as if taken by an earthquake.

On this remote wilderness trip, we don’t expect a picnic—known as Type 1 Fun to modern-day adventurers. A journey across the thaw on foot and by packraft for 500-plus miles won’t resemble a backcountry ski trip or a long weekend backpack on Lower 48 trails. We have planned for Type 2 Fun: an ambitious expedition that will make us suffer and give us the potential to extend ourselves just enough that there will be hours, or even days, that won’t seem like fun until much later when we’re back home. Then our short-circuited memories will allow us to plan the next trip as if nothing went wrong on this one. An important part of wilderness mastery is to avoid Type 3 Fun: a wreckage of accidents, injuries, near-starvation, or rescue. We’ve both been on Type 3 Fun trips that we’d rather forget.

Today, to get Chris, a caffeine connoisseur, to stop, I simply utter, “Coffee?” His face lights up as he throws off his pack and pulls out the stove. I pull out the fuel bottle. Since Chris isn’t a conversational bon vivant, I’ve learned not to ask too many questions, but a cup of coffee might stimulate a considerate comment or two about the weather. As I fire up the trusty MSR stove with a lighter, we crowd around and toast our hands over the hot windscreen as if it’s our humble campfire. We’re cold and wet with sweat and we shiver in the wind. But at least we’re out of the forest-fire smoke—this summer more than two million acres have burned in dried-out Alaska.

Today, with the all-day uphill climb and inevitable back-and-forth route decisions through the gorge ahead, we’ll be lucky to trudge even five miles to the lake below the pass. Why, I ask myself, as Chris puts on his pack and shifts into high gear, could we not have simply flown into the headwaters of the Noatak River instead of crossing the Brooks Range to get here? I heave on my pack and wonder how I’ll catch Chris, already far ahead.

Shards of caribou bones and antlers lie on the tundra as ghostly business cards of a bygone migration, greened with mold, and minutely chiseled and mined for calcium by tiny vole teeth. We kick steps across a snowfield, then work our way down a steep, multicolored boulderfield, whorled red and peppered with white quartz unlike any rocks I’ve seen before. As rain shakes out of the sky like Parmesan cheese from a can, we weave in and out of leafy alder thickets while I examine yet another fresh pile of grizzly feces. I stop to pick apart the scat and thumb through stems and leaves and root pieces. This griz appears to be on a vegetarian diet.

“Hey, bear!” We yell the old cautionary refrain again and again until we’re hoarse. I hold tight to the pepper spray looped over my shoulder to keep it from grabby alder branches.

A half mile farther the route dead-ends so we’re forced to descend into the gorge again. With Chris 20 yards behind, I plunge step down through a near-vertical slope of alders and play Tarzan for my descent as I hang onto a flexible yet stout branch, and swing down a short cliff into another alder thicket. A branch whacks me in the chest and knocks off the pepper-spray safety plug. When I swing onto the ground, I get caught on another branch that depresses the trigger in an abrupt explosion that shoots straight out from my chest in a surreal orange cloud. Instinctively I hold my breath and close my eyes and continue to shimmy downward, but I know I’m covered in red-hot pepper spray.

When I run out of breath, I squint, keep my mouth closed, breathe carefully through my nose, and scurry out of the orange capsaicin cloud. Down in a boulderfield that pulses with a stream, I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and yell to Chris that I’m O.K. as I strip off my shirt and try to wring it out in the stream. I tie the contaminated shirt on the outside of my pack and put on a sweater. My hands prickle with pepper.

Then we’re off again. As we clamber up steep scree to exit the gorge, my lips, nasal passages, forehead, and thighs burn from the pepper. The pepper spray spreads from my thighs to my crotch like a troop of red ants, but I can hardly remove my pants amid the incoming storm clouds and wind. With the last of the alders below us, we enter the alpine world above the tree line. By the time we reach the lake, the drizzle has become a steady rain. I’m nauseous and overheated underneath my rain jacket with the red pepper spray that I wish I had saved for an aggressive bear instead of a self-douche. Atop wet tundra that feels like a sponge underfoot, we pitch the Megamid tent with a paddle lashed to a ski pole and guy out the corners with four of the several million surrounding boulders left by the reduction of tectonic litter.

I fire up the stove and boil the water, and we inhale four portions of freeze-dried pasta inside the tent. We depart from wilderness bear decorum to cook outside and away from the tent because it’s cold and we’re tired. Chris immediately heads out with his camera. His eyes are watery from just being within several feet of me.

I’ve been reduced like this before—wounded and exhausted and temporarily knocked off my game. So, I tell myself that this too will pass, that I’ll get in gear and regain my mojo. That maybe, I can eventually get my shy partner to loosen up and talk. That we will discover an extraordinary new world—the headwaters of the Noatak River—from up on the pass in the morning. And that I will find a way to withstand my transformation into a spicy human burrito.

Snow feels likely tonight. It’s mid-July, yet winter has slid in like a glacier over the Kalulutok Valley.

I am too brain-dead to write in my journal, too physically wiped out and overheated in the wrong places to even think of a simple jaunt through the flowers to see the view that awaits us. I pull down my orange-stained pants and red underwear, grab a cup filled with ice water. I try not to moan as I put in my extra-hot penis and let it go numb.

Type 2 Fun for sure.

Jon Waterman lives in Carbondale, Colorado. An all-round adventurer, he has climbed the famous Cassin Ridge on Denali in winter; soloed the Northwest Passage; sailed to Hawaii picking up microplastics; dogsledded into and up Canada’s Mount Logan; and run the Colorado River 1,450 miles from source to sea. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and three grants from the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council. Into the Thaw is available to purchase from Patagonia Books and for pre-order on Amazon for November 19.

For more by this author:

A Former National Park Ranger Reveals His Favorite Wild Places in the U.S.

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The border wall had an all star cast of political operatives trying to get it built. The butterflies had Marianna Trevino Wright. With the spotlight on The National Butterfly Center, Marianna finds herself absorbing the full weight of an online campaign to discredit her. Then people start showing up in person.

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How did a US congressional candidate and the director of the National Butterfly Center end up in a physical altercation on the US border with Mexico? When contractors showed up in Mission, Texas to break ground on President Trump’s border wall, they didn’t think there would be much resistance. But when people found out the wall would go straight through critical butterfly habitat, everything changed.

The post Butterflies on the Wall—Part 1 appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The leaves are starting to fall here in New England and that perennial urge to bust out the rake and leaf blower is nagging at me. But for the first time in, well, forever, I will resist that urge. Because it turns out, raking up and bagging or burning those leaves is not only bad for soil health. It also takes away habitat for important wildlife like bugs and birds, who are critical pollinators.

I know what you’re thinking. What will my neighbors think if I ignore my yard work? We’ve been taught—by society, by our homeowner’s associations, by our parents, and by our landscapers—to keep our yards clean and tidy. To remove leaves and branches as they fall. To whack back our shrubs and perennials after they bloom. And to invest in big fall and spring clean-ups that scour our flower beds free of debris. Your neighbors might think the alternative—a yard with fallen leaves, long grass, and flowers gone to seed—is untidy, or even a threat to property values and health (by attracting bugs and animals).

But ecologists say we need to rethink our preconceived notions of beautiful, well-maintained yards. Lawns comprise 44 million acres in the U.S. alone, more than double the acreage of all our national parks combined. And as satisfying as a perfect green lawn may be, it’s an ecological dead zone that doesn’t support any of the essentialÌęfunctions—like pollination, carbon sequestration, and nutrient recycling—that sustain our ability to live on this planet.

According to a by NatureServe, a nonprofit specializing in biodiversity data, more than one third of species and ecosystems in the U.S. are at risk of disappearing. This kind of biodiversity loss would be catastrophic for humans, ecologist and entomologist Doug Tallamy told me in an interview for a story I wrote about rewilding.

Thankfully, natural landscaping is trending. According to House Beautiful, the practice—which includes native perennials, wildflower and pollinator gardens, xeriscaping, and lawn reduction—is one of . That’s good news for folks on a budget (and those who want to reclaim their fall weekends) because natural landscapes are way less cost- and time-intensive toÌęmaintain. It’s also good news for all the bugs, birds, and bees, which are so critical for biodiversity.

But back to raking. As I write these words, I can hear the buzz of leaf blowers in my neighborhood. I can see a big truck piled high with collected leaves, about to be carted off to who knows where. Meanwhile, in my yard, I’m watching them fall and wondering how to harness their glory.

Why Experts Say Don’t Rake

“Leaves are not litter,” says Matthew Shepherd, the director of outreach and education at Xerces is a nonprofit focused on protecting and conserving insects and other invertebrates. “They provide critical food and shelter for butterflies, beetles, bees, moths, and other invertebrates. And we need to stop thinking of these tiny creatures as pests, but rather as heroes. Instead of banishing them from our spaces, we need to roll out the welcome mat.”

Insects are critical to humans because they transfer pollen from plant to plant, which helps plants and crops reproduce. “Without these pollinators, and ample habitat for them, our global food supply would be drastically diminished,” says Shepherd. Insects are also a valuable food source for birds, reptiles, and other insects, and they help aerate soil and decompose organic matter.

Additionally, leaf debris helps build healthy soil that holds moisture. Leaves are nature’s fertilizer: free, nutrient-dense organic matter that breaks down and feeds the soil. It’s pretty ironic that we sweep our yards clear of them and then run to the garden center to buy chemical fertilizers (which, according to The Freedonia Group, a market research firm, is a $4 billion market).

Here’s How to Get the Most Out of Your Leaves

As I watched the leaves pile up on my lawn, I started to wonder whether there were any downsides to letting them be. Is there such a thing as too much leaf litter? What if they dried out—could they be a fire hazard? I reached out to Jamie “Dekes” Dedekian, an organic lawn expert I’ve come to trust at my local garden center, Country Garden, in Hyannis, Massachusetts, to get some basic best practices.

“If you let leaves build up on your lawn over time, and just let them sit, the answer is yes, they will smother and could kill it,” Dedekian told me. But the answer is not to do a big fall clean up. Instead, he recommended a few easy “clean-in” techniques that will harness all the goodness in those leaves and distribute them in a beneficial way across your yard.

As they start to fall, blow whole leaves into your flower beds, where they’ll create wildlife habitat and eventually decompose and feed the soil and plants. Once you’ve created a blanket in the beds that’s a few inches thick, then it’s time to feed the lawn some leaves. “Remove the bag on your mower and mulch them up into small pieces,” he says. “It’s essentially a free compost application. As those small bits of leaves decompose they will actually help your lawn, not hurt it.”

If you live in a wildfire-prone area, you will also benefit from some leaf redistribution, because dry leaf litterÌęcan pose a fire hazard in hot, dry, windy conditions. Shepherd suggests raking them into a pile a safe distance away from structures—the U.S. Department of Agriculture at least 30 feet from the home—and letting them decompose naturally there.

“Even a small pile of leaves can make a positive impact,” Shepherd says. “Just find a corner of your yard, make a pile, and let it be. The animals will find it, and they’ll appreciate it.”

5 Pro Fall Tips for the Eco-Conscious Gardener

As I wrapped up my conversation with Shepherd, I asked him what yard tasks I can be doing to improve the health and beauty of my space this fall. After all, I love gardening and yard work, and with less raking to do, I’d have lots of time on my hands. Here are his ideas.

1. Relax and watch. “Just sit and enjoy your morning coffee while watching the finches feed on your seed heads and the bees buzz around the last of your lavender,” says Shepherd. “Sometimes protecting and promoting habitat means doing less. Part of gardening should be just sitting back and enjoying it. Actually taking time to notice and watch and appreciate the wildlife that you’re bringing in.” It’s also a good time to make notes about plants that thrived and those that didn’t, and make a list of new plants you want to try next year. Think about your bloom period through the year. “Did you have periods when you didn’t have a lot of bloom? Are there native plants you could introduce to fill those gaps?” he says.

2. Collect seeds. Are there plants you love and want more of? For me this year it was cardinal flowers, which drew hummingbirds into my yard every day. I’m leaving many of the seed heads intact for the birds to feed on, but I’m collecting some to plant.

3. Make a brush pile, also known as habitat pile. Find a lonely corner of your yard and start building a pile of sticks and branches for animals to. Start with the largest logs and branches on the bottom, and keep adding as time goes on. Be sure to leave gaps for airflow and wildlife access.

4. Save the stems. Some bees nest in the stems of shrubs and perennials, so resist the urge to chop them down to nubs.

5. Split native perennials. Fall is a great time to divide many plants. Dividing entails digging plants up and splitting the root ball into smaller sections to replant in different spaces. This practice promotes growth and is a great way to fill in gaps in your garden. I’ve got tons of splitting to do this fall: black-eyed Susans, daisies, catmint, sedum, and lavender to name a few.

Kristin Hostetter is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s sustainability columnist. On most weekends when she’s not out hiking, you can find her puttering in her garden or in the kitchen cooking up the fruits of her labor. Follow her journey to live more sustainably by for her twice-monthly newsletter.

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When Rick Bass first found himself in the area referred to as Unit 72 by the United States Forest Service, he felt desperate and unanchored.

He was walking up what was once an overgrown logging road but had recently been clear-cut into a 200-foot-wide strip of barren land. Roughly one million board feet of sellable timber had been removed, and only a few of the largest larch remained. The Forest Service had cleared the area as a firebreak in response to the Davis fire, ignited by lightning in July 2018 in the remote, rugged Yaak Valley, which is situated within the Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana.

Blowdown lined the edges of the firebreak. Trees once insulated from the elements were newly exposed and didn’t have the roots to sustain full-force winds.

Bass, a 66-year-old writer and conservationist, crossed a thick section of fallen old spruce, balancing himself on the larger trunks. After living in the Yaak Valley for nearly four decades, he’s sturdy, and no stranger to bushwhacking. Finally, he stepped out of the hot, dry clear-cut and through a cool, emerald-green portal. As far as recorded history could reveal, the forest he was entering—Unit 72—had never been logged.

Blanketed with ferns and dripping with moss, the forest looked like it was plucked from the Pacific Northwest and moved 350 miles inland. It’s one of the few remaining echoes of an ancient rainforest that tens of millions of years ago spread from the Washington coast into Montana. Grizzlies, lynx, and wolverines sniff and scratch through 800-year-old larch and some of the largest western hemlock, western red cedar, and Engelmann spruce in the valley. The area is one of only six habitats in the lower 48 states considered large and intact enough to support a grizzly bear population.

Relief washed over Bass. Then he saw long strips of flagging, and blue and orange paint slathered across some of the larger tree trunks. The Forest Service, it seemed, planned to log here too, in the old growth.

His first reaction was rage, but he had learned over the years that wrath was not an effective tool in the fight to protect these trees, which were too important to risk. They had survived centuries of wildfire, drought, pests, and logging that decimated other forests in the region.

Now they’re engulfed in discord, their fate to be decided by humans who can’t agree whether to actively manage the area through clear-cutting or to leave it alone.

In 2017, the USFS staff responsible for the Kootenai National Forest (KNF) proposed a sweeping 95,000-acre forest-management plan, called the Black Ram project, to “improve resilience and resistance to insects, disease, and fire.” Unit 72 would be effectively clear-cut. In the words of the KNF supervisors, they would “restart the stand” to improve the forest’s “ability to adjust to climate change.” This sparked an impassioned battle—on the ground and in federal court—between environmental advocates, local and federal governments, and other stakeholders. After seven years of disagreements, Unit 72 has yet to be logged, but it hasn’t been permanently protected, either.

With wildfire season becoming longer and more intense across the U.S. and Canada, people are desperate for answers, and the debate of how best to mitigate such fires rages on. Many at the Forest Service and in the timber industry argue that forest-clearing projects similar to the Black Ram are the answer. But it’s unclear whether these measures, which have gained popularity in the past decade, are always undertaken with the sincere goal of mitigating wildfire. Many conservationists believe that the Forest Service and the timber industry are capitalizing on the public’s fear, and that painting these projects—many of which include cutting down old growth—as restorative is merely a convenient way to justify logging.

A hefty volume could be filled with the years’ worth of court documents, scientific studies, and letters to the editor generated by the different sides of the Black Ram dispute. But let’s begin with the one thing everyone agreed on—that the Forest Service has mismanaged public forests for more than a century. A hundred years of fire suppression and immense amounts of logging have left our forests vulnerable to wildfire, insect infestation, and disease, all of which are compounded by a changing climate.

There’s good research—and people—on both sides of the Black Ram debate. The more important question is, who and what are we protecting these forests for?

The post In Montana, a Threatened Swath of Old Growth Fuels a Longstanding Debate appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Was Homero’s death an accident? Or murder? And who would want Homero dead? Reporters Michael May and Zach Goldbaum head to Mexico to investigate the death of conservationist Homero Gomez Gonzalez, who was supposedly killed for defending the butterflies. But new information complicates the official story, leaving them with even more questions.

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