Rachel Dickinson

Steve Lowes is a coral farmer. He doesn’t live on an island in the Caribbean or even within spitting distance of an ocean. Rather, his farming takes place in 100-gallon saltwater tanks in the basement of his neat and tidy house the color of a warm Sargasso Sea in upstate New York. Mr. Lowes, a native of northeastern England, came to New York in the mid-1990s to work for a high-tech pharmaceutical company.

He’s a PhD biochemist with a penchant for lovely corals.

Lowes, who grew up landlocked, developed his fascination with corals by watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries as a kid. In college, he learned to scuba dive and began collecting corals from the temperate zones around the world. Since 2002, he’s farmed coral in his basement. (click here to read more . . . )

Jeremy Madeiros has to watch the swells carefully to time his leap from the boat onto a light-gray limestone shelf so jagged and sharp it would shred his skin if he happened to fall. Less than half an acre and only, at its highest point, about 30 feet above the crashing waves, the islet is a godforsaken bit of rock stuck in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern edge of Bermuda and one of four secret nesting sites for one of the rarest seabirds on earth, the Bermuda petrel—known locally as the cahow because of its eerie cry.

Madeiros, Bermuda’s terrestrial conservation officer, is a small, soft-spoken 47-year-old with a mustache, tortoiseshell glasses, and a penchant for Australian army hats. Carefully working his way across the islet’s stony surface, he makes the rounds to specially designed artificial nest burrows built to protect petrel chicks from the danger of tides and rough seas. The burrows are marked by wooden baffles that guard the entrances and have a very precisely measured oval cut into them—big enough that an adult petrel can get in to feed its chick but a hair too small for a white-tailed tropicbird to squeeze through and take over. (click here to read more . . .)

The sweet, yet slightly rancid smell of yak butter mixed with burning juniper stayed with me for days after visiting the holy sites. I know if I ever smell yak butter again I’ll be back in Lhasa, Tibet, in the days before the first train was scheduled to arrive from China.

Last summer, my daughter, Railey, and I went on a journey, and although I wasn’t sure what we were looking for, somehow I thought we might find that indefinable thing in Tibet. My prior knowledge of Tibet—a beautiful, mysterious, and remote country—came from the movies and from my local grocery store. Ronald Colman from Lost Horizon and Brad Pitt from Seven Years in Tibet were my spiritual guides, and the monks—small, brown men in long maroon and yellow robes who I periodically ran into in the produce section—shaped my notion of Tibetan culture. I would steal glances at them as they smelled the cantaloupes and picked out oranges, and if they caught me looking, they’d flash wide smiles and their eyes would almost disappear, and I would get all embarrassed. Ithaca, New York, is home to the Namgyal Monastery, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery in North America, so you get used to seeing the Tibetan monks around town. In winter, their maroon and yellow robes hang below puffy down jackets as they trudge through the snow and slush of upstate New York in hiking boots. (click here to read more . . .)

As we traveled down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Wuhan, I felt an overwhelming sense of melancholy. It might have been the weather--it was hot and rainy and foggy all at once creating a misty landscape that looked an awful lot like those painted scrolls of the humpbacked mountains you see hanging in Chinese restaurants. Or it might have been that I felt like I was looking at shadows, for much of what I saw was doomed and would soon disappear beneath the muddy river water.

In early summer, the Yangtze--the longest river in China and the third longest in the world--is a swift flowing muddy brown mess of a river. We were on a boat about 200 kilometers upstream of the Three Gorges Dam and the landscape we passed through was going to be flooded with sixty more feet of water in a couple of months. The Chinese are maniacs about their building projects and, true to form, were rushing to finish the dam and start generating electricity well ahead of schedule. As a result, the water level in the gorges was going to rise sooner rather than later. (click here to read more . . .)