Our guide, Alex, heard the orcas before he saw them. To his trained ear, their surfacing blows were audible just below the frequency of the wind. Look, he whispered from the cockpit of his kayak. Over there. Off to the left.

And there they were, a couple...

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue winding down, there has been much discussion about the world -- and the precarious economy -- that our soldiers are returning home to inhabit. Where will these men and women find work in a sour job market? Given their exquisite (and expensive)...

Over the holidays, my wife and kids and I set out for a few days of cross-country skiing in the mountains of West Virginia. Enraptured by the landscape, we were nonetheless disappointed by the weather: the temperatures never dipped below 40, and there was no snow on the ground, or...

In the last couple of years, I've been doing as much cooking as I can with an axe. My family and I have a small, wood-fired, beehive oven in the backyard, and while cooking this way means more work than using a gas grill (to say nothing of a...

One night not too long ago, as my wife Katherine and I settled into the kitchen to make some pasta sauce, I reached into the cupboard for a can of our favorite organic, fire-roasted tomatoes. These tomatoes were expensive, and, we'd always thought, entirely worth it.

Like many such products,...

This fall, I took my environmental studies students out of the classroom for two field trips. For the first, we joined a pair of young environmental educators from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for a canoe trip on a lake just up the hill from the Susquehanna River, the main trunk...

Discussions of toxic chemicals tend to feel pretty abstract. We can't really see these things, after all, and even if someone tries to point out that these chemicals go into the manufacturing of just about everything we consume -- from cosmetics to carpeting to baby bottles -- it's pretty easy...

With the gutting of environmental regulation in full swing in Washington, industry lobbyists and their political allies have taken their anti-regulation battle to state legislatures, and are already meeting with real success. From Maine to New Jersey to Florida, governors are rolling back environmental regulation in the service of smaller...

Ah, spring. The robins are back, the cherry trees are in bloom, and the armies of lawn chemical trucks are prowling the neighborhood, looking for business. It's that time of year again.

I was startled from my work this afternoon by a knock on the door: The driver of a...

A couple of years ago, I went in for a routine checkup with an orthopedist to inquire about some shooting pains in my left knee and shin. I suspected I had a running injury, and my doctor agreed. He recommended I get an MRI, to see if perhaps the pain...