How Photosynthesis Builds Energy Against Entropy

No law of physics is more basic than the law of entropy, the tendency of the universe to move toward disorder and death. But life bucks the tide. using available free energy wherever it can get it, and hereabouts the most abundant source of energy is sunlight. The mayflower constructs its tiny oasis of order by drawing upon a corresponding increase of disorder at the center of the Sun, where hydrogen is fused into helium. There, deep at the heart of our planet's star, is the source of the ene...

 How the Path Became <em>the</em> Path

A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake. Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many surprising ways the history of our nation and of our fickle love affair with the natural world. Step by step, year by year, the landscape I traversed became deeper, richer, more multidim...