Backyard and Beyond

Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world.

As John Burroughs said, “The place to observe nature is where you are.”

Art Culture Politics

  • Insects as outlaws

    I went to hear Hugh Raffles read from and talk about his new book, Insectopedia, yesterday. The book is about the entangled intersection between humans and insects, and the profound ambiguity of that intersection (from our perspective). I haven’t read it yet. But I was really struck by something he said. He mentioned an Elias…

    mthew

  • Living with wildlife

    I found this fine website on living with urban wildlife set up by Portland OR’s Audubon. It’s on the other coast, so they have some different species, but the ideas are the same. The border between nature and city has always been permeable, and as cities expand the border grows even less sure. It behooves…

    mthew

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  • In the archives

    Foot- and end- notes are like the underbrush: it’s crowded down there, and you have to wade through a mess of grass or leaves to find something juicy.  I was on the trail of a book recently, sent there I do not remember why, and found a copy at the NYPL. This was William Beebe’s…

    mthew

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  • Review: The Journal

    The Journal: 1837-1861 By Henry David Thoreau Edited by Damion Searls Preface by John R. Stilgoe New York Review Books. 677 pp. $22.95 “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.” So it began, October 22, 1837. Twenty-year-old David Henry Thoreau, who would never…

    mthew

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  • Brooklyn Bestiary: An Exhibit

    An exhibit of prints by Lisa Studier opens today the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch at Grand Army Plaza. Her subjects are the animals living right here in Brooklyn, which go sadly unnoticed by the great majority of (human) residents. How could I not be interested? The natural world is everywhere, we have only to…

    mthew