This is the year to de-center your smartphone — For the sake of yourself and your country, it is time to get off your phone. Yes, I know you needed to see the latest inquiries into January 6th, the most recent QAnon theories, the debunking of those theories and then the debunking of the debunking. Then perhaps you’ll want…

Ask the author and artist James Prosek — he knows — “A fisherman,” according to an old Russian proverb, “can spot another fisherman from far away.” This is true. And within the fishing clan there is a set of private yet shared moments that bond fishermen together in an almost spiritual communion. The explosion of spray and color when a big…

What to look for when you’re escaping climate change — This year I spent a month in the Adirondacks, not visiting my new land. My land is just a couple miles up a hill from the cottage I’ve been renting for the past two years. I’ve run up that hill again and again to the roundabout near my land on…

That show-off gas behemoth is the Hummer of the kitchen — Here’s a moment I’ve experienced all too often. A home chefy-chef has invited me to dinner. Since chef knows who I am and what I write about there has been a careful parsing of the climate-good from planet-bad at the grocery store. The grass-fed, organic blahbity blah is lined up…

Let it all rot. That’s the point. — Last year I bought a climate refuge. A wooded acre in New York’s Adirondack Mountains 5 hours due north from New York City. And now, what to do with it? Some readers of my last column suggested that I should do nothing at all. Just leave it be for the…

Is delete-and-replace the future of our last wild food? — One of the most terrifying days for a writer is the day after you’ve sold a book proposal. For some time I had been writing about seafood and the oceans for the New York Times, getting progressively more interest from readers who, up until that time, had been only really…

My decade of farming close to home — If you listen, I mean really listen, you will hear your garden speaking to you. Mine, which sits on a 10th-floor Manhattan terrace, a stone’s throw from where the World Trade Center stood, first spoke to me on a crisp September morning 20 years ago. …

Build a house, feed my family, get the hell off screens — There are resolutions and then there are plans. The empty middle between these two extremes has been my curse over the course of these pandemic years. But no more. I am finally paring away the hazy hoped-for from the concrete-realizable. …

Small, dynamic, diverse. Perhaps even magical. — Every few years I find myself in a room packed tight with human-size tubes of algae. The colors range from burnt sienna to electric Kool Aid-green. Quietly and humbly they do their work, converting sunlight to sugars and proteins, befuddling researchers with their multitudes, inviting we “advanced” humans to poke…