Sixty to seventy percent of Mexico’s terrain is classified as arid or semiarid desert, typically with no rain for eight to nine months a year. La pipa, the water truck, brings enough water to supply farms for a day or two at most. Meanwhile, 86...

Bats move through desert night skies with a purpose that is easy to overlook and difficult to replace. As they travel from plant to plant, feeding on nectar, they are also performing one of the most important ecological services in arid landscapes: pollination. For agave...

Many consumers assume that food labeled organic is grown without pesticides. The reality is more nuanced. Organic farmers can and do use pesticides, but the types of pesticides they use, the circumstances under which they use them, and the regulatory standards governing their use differ...

This piece explores human consciousness as the foundational engine of culture, tracing its evolution from early social learning in infants to the sophisticated shared meanings of prehistoric human communities. It examines how social consciousness—joint attention and reciprocal mirroring—enabled humans to transmit knowledge, develop language, and...

Modern nutrition science has continued to see food through numbers. Calories, macronutrients, ingredient lists, and percent daily values have become the primary language of eating. This approach, often referred to as “nutritionism,” assumes that the effects of the food we consume can be...

Microplastics, plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters, can be found in land, air, and water, and have infiltrated our food chain, resulting in far-reaching health consequences for humans and nonhumans alike. In 2020, scientists discovered the “highest level of microplastic ever recorded on the...

Consciousness, at its basic level, is an individual’s self-awareness, comprising both external and internal phenomena; it may constitute any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. Awareness can be a continuously changing continuum, or it may shut down or be...

The night sky—the silent dark between stars—is a living commons bridging Earth, life, and spirit. As the 13th‑century Zen master Eihei Dōgen taught in Keisei Sanshoku or “The Sound of the Streams, the Shape of the Mountains,” rivers, forests, mountains, and night are not...

In the spring of 2023, we returned to Península Valdés, a rugged coastal region in Argentine Patagonia, expecting to witness the familiar sights and sounds of southern elephant seals during their breeding season. These massive marine mammals, with males weighing up to 4,000 kilograms, gather...

The United States is in the grip of a reading recession—nearly half of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2023, and fewer than half read even one, according to data from YouGov and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Since the...