One of us once wrote, ‘‘As we heal ourselves, we heal the world. And vice versa.’’ That belief fueled the conception of a gathering among the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona, on Reciprocal Healing: Nature, Health, and Wild Vitality. Organized by the Natural History...
(ABSTRACT) Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests occur at their warmer, drier environmental limits in the Mogollon Highlands ecoregion (MHE) of the Southwestern United States, and are commonly found in stringers or discrete stands that form ecotones with interior...
Several days of rain have saturated the hills a few miles above the sand terrace where I squat. The river is swollen over its banks, brown with sediment, carrying debris, spilling out of the granite gorge. Clouds stream past in an atmospheric river that promises to...
(Abstract) As human-nature relationships become ever more tenuous, the promise of ecopsychology is more important than ever. But ecopsychology has tended to focus its attentive power on the human side of this relationship, on psychology, and has thus also tended to...
Natural history is the parent science of ecology, the residence of innate curiosity and connection to the natural world in our species. Questions of natural history, of pattern and process, have been asked by every culture and society across the world, and the...
We clamber out of the rafts onto the dry terrace, heading up into the side canyon, where, it is rumored, ancient pictographs and giant cottonwoods await. The first week of June, almost noon, this treeless terrace radiates heat. Our group—a dozen naturalists of diverse...
In this paper, we describe and present the results of our effort to establish a spatial delineation of the Mogollon Highlands region—an ecologically fascinating North American transition zone of continental importance. Tis dramatic landscape of escarpments, canyons,...
Learning that occurs in a field setting is a powerful experience that promotes the development of new generations of creative scientists, enhances environmental literacy, and instills social responsibility in our citizens. Institutional challenges to field studies...
Natural history – ‘a practice of intentional focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy’ – is as old as humanity: there have never been people without natural history. Natural history field observations adorn...
This document represents a confluence of two streams. The bulk of the document (Part Two) is adapted from the 7th edition of the Prescott College Field Manual published in 2015. This manual was developed by Steve Pace with input from a great many faculty at the...
Professor Thomas Fleischner and his colleagues at the Natural History Institute at Prescott College, and across the United States, are working to highlight the importance of field studies for teaching biology. Here, we discuss why the decline of field studies should...
open and close, the world their gills, they are fed, they breathe. The gods are not large, outside us. They are the fish, going on with their own concerns. Still dark. We crouch low, careful not to wobble the narrow dugout canoe, wary of the Black Caimans known...
Why field studies remain of critical importance for biology education: There was a time when, if you wanted to learn how Nature worked, you went directly to Nature. Most major leaps in understanding the complex workings of the natural world have been discerned by...
From the rim of this capstone mesa, the valley spreads before me. Beyond, a new edge rises up—one of the great transitional escarpments of the continent: the Mogollon Rim, which stretches 200 miles across Arizona and New Mexico. Where the Sonoran Desert...
A dozen college students lean into the steep hillside above the snout of the enormous valley glacier. For the moment, though, they pay no heed to the massive muscle of ice—their attention is focused, laser-like, on the enchanting internal structures within tubular...
From here, the tropical forest stretches more than two thousand miles toward the Atlantic coast. In the sticky heat I walk beside the Rio Puyo, along the uppermost edge of the Ecuadorian Amazon, having just descended from the Andean highlands. There's a tingling sense...
I stand shivering at the edge of a block of ice roughly the size of Connecticut. The wind blows the coyote fur ruff on my parka hood; I stamp my feet to encourage circulation to my toes. Behind me a vast white plain stretches toward the unseen Brooks Range, while in...
Natural History a practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy—is one of the oldest continuous human traditions. Simply put, there have never been people without natural history. Through...