“Gazing back from our coughing, hacking, smoke-filled present, the preservationist impulse can seem ironic. The landscapes Americans most wanted to save are instead changing rapidly—in some cases more so than adjacent, unprotected areas—and preservation itself is to blame. “

In which Dan and his poodle mix, Aki, discover pre-winter beauty in Juneau, Alaska: “Yesterday…a deer crossed over the sandy beach. Frost has filled in one of the cloven tracks, now preserved in frozen sand until the next thaw.”

Andrea Badgley reminds us that great art could not exist without a devoted audience. “What is the point of art if there’s nobody there to understand and admire it? I have a role to play in art, and that’s really all I want.”

At the University of Washington Press Blog, author and Pacific Northwest environmentalist Kathleen Alcalá shares tips for making everyday life less wasteful and more community-minded.

A thorough, well-reasoned, and data-supported response to American Christians who deny the reality of climate change, from theologian and scholar W. Bradford Littlejohn.

“Hundreds of miles from anywhere else I’d ever been lies one of the darkest places in the country, tucked away from the bleeding glow of civilization.” A FiveThirtyEight writer visits Gerlach, Nevada, one of the few areas in the US mostly untouched from light pollution.

“Inmates live together in cottages, not cells; in every cottage lives a huset far, or ‘house father’ who is in charge of loading the wood into the home’s furnace.” Writer Jennifer Bowen Hicks describes Bastøy, an environmentally aware prison in Norway.

“Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.” Israel has more water than it needs.

Sociologist Jessica Mikels-Carrasco focuses on the environmental sociology of children. Here, she asks a group of kindergarten and elementary-aged children to draw a picture of nature.

“In an increasingly disconnected and attention-deficient world, sketching the veins on a leaf or the mountains out the living room window can help ground us in place and time…” Isaac Yuen explores the work of field ecologist Lyn Baldwin.

At The Texas Observer, Asher Elbein writes on how wind farms and White Nose Syndrome are decimating bat populations and why preserving them is critical to the economy and ecosystems of Texas.

On the new triangle trade, and the surprising connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster.

Green to the end? Why bio-cremation might just be the next big thing.

Why do people — both individuals and societies — become more aggressive as the temperatures rise? At Grist, Clayton Aldern digs into a question with far-reaching implications for our warming planet.