Wallace J Nichols

1. Approach that complete stranger with the reusable bag, water bottle or cup, say, "Thank you," and give them a blue marble.

2. Be Paul Watson for Halloween and hip-check anyone who eats endangered ocean wildlife.

3. Walk backwards at...

As winter chills much of North America, thoughts may turn to warm blue waters. Looking out on the sea is one of the best way to sooth a frayed attitude and reset one's mind. Here are three of my favorite places to get enjoy the ocean while doing good.

#1....

A couple of days ago my daughter asked her grandmother, "What's Black Friday?"

When her grandmother told her, my daughter followed with: "Have you ever done it?"

When I pulled on that thread it led to a conversation that is still unraveling. At the same time, news of camp-outs, body...

Co-authored by Sarah Kornfeld

Our brains have an amazing ability to do something: hide a world of truth from us. We're able to tune out the blinking lights and honking horns, the stress of work, the underwater mortgage, and those inappropriate clothes and music our kids prefer. Meanwhile, people around...

This will sound like a stretch, but sea turtles owe much to the genius of Steve Jobs.

As a young student of conservation genetics, my first computer was an Apple. At that time, geneticists went with Apple mostly by default as the graphics-rich software for sequencing DNA ran...

The ocean is the single biggest feature of our planet.

From one million miles away we resemble a small blue marble, from one billion miles a pale blue dot.

The ocean covers more than 70% of the Earth's surface, holds more than 80% of its biodiversity...

I've spent most of my professional career studying and working to restore sea turtle populations. Usually, my work takes me far from home: Baja California, El Salvador, Indonesia, Brazil. And I'm often doing research in someone else's backyard, as an invited guest. This always requires our...

Modern people are increasingly cut off from nature yet wild animals are increasingly in need of our help. Tourism is by no means a silver bullet solution, but if done right it can be good for travelers and help protect the animals.

Conservation travel is an emerging way...

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a 19-year-old college sophomore at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, I met a woman named Barbara. She was living in a nursing home. Fifteen years prior, when she was my age, she was in a serious car crash that landed her in...

In 1992 I met Adelita for the first time. I had no idea how old she was or where she was from. But there was this mystique about her. Something special. Sometimes you can just feel it. Her skin was brown, her eyes big and black. We spent summers together...

Four years ago on a summer night, I stood in line at a Capitola, California, City Council meeting with my friend Laura Kasa, the brand new Executive Director of Save Our Shores. We were waiting our turns, along with dozens of other citizens, to share our allotted three...

This is a kind of a film review. Although I'm an evolutionary biologist by training, not a movie critic. And, truth be known, I've seen just three films this summer. Five if you count streaming Network (1976) and Richard Pryor Live On The Sunset Strip (1982) on Netflix. So, let's...

In the summer of 2003, my family joined a dozen other Californians as we trekked and camped along the coast from Oregon to Mexico. We traveled 1,800 km on foot in 112 days. It remains one of the highlights of my life.

When I heard the writer and photographer, father...

What is it about the way the ocean moves, reflects, glimmers and glows that mesmerizes and transfixes us?

Earlier this summer I gathered a group of leading neuroscientists, ocean explorers, advocates, communicators and creative people together in a room at the California Academy of Sciences to begin to answer this...

"We are more than logical. We are human."
--Jacques Yves Cousteau

Once, I met a man who hated the ocean. Intensely, he said. He described to me fear, negative associations and a general unease that he couldn't quite put his finger on. His aversion was so strong -- especially...

Our thoughts are with our friends and their families in Sendai, Japan. I walked their beautiful coast with my partner Dana and photographer David Barron over a decade ago in search of Adelita's final location. The joy, traditions, hospitality and kindness of the people of Miyagi Prefecture were...

As a child, I could read Where The Wild Things Are in an infinite loop without boredom.

When I was in high school, I came across these words by Henry David Thoreau: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." I secretly carried them in my pocket...

The stuff of war is the stuff of art. Some of the earliest cave drawings depict tribal strife. Since before history, the material and materiel of war has served as a vast palette for artists to explore and explain the times in which they live.

Eighteen-year-old Lovetta Conto designs jewelry...

by Wallace J. Nichols, Sarah Kornfeld and Andy Myers

Finally, after days, weeks, and months -- OK, hours -- in the making, we've selected the "Top 5 Superbad! Awesome! Plans for Cleaning Up all that Plastic" that Americans love and need so much from the place where much of it...

A common question asked of scientists is how the oil spill will affect life in the Gulf.

My sense is that it will effect directly or indirectly, severely or slightly every single form of life in the Gulf, for many years to come.  The air, the water, the sand, the mud, the...