Dispatches From The Vanishing World
  • Home
  • About Alex Shoumatoff
    • Bio & Latest CV
    • Lectures & Appearances
    • Alex’s Wikipedia
    • Suitcase On The Loose Album
    • Spook Interview
    • Photos of Alex
  • The Dispatches
    • The Dispatches
    • Past Work
  • Blog
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • About Alex Shoumatoff
    • Bio & Latest CV
    • Lectures & Appearances
    • Alex’s Wikipedia
    • Suitcase On The Loose Album
    • Spook Interview
    • Photos of Alex
  • The Dispatches
    • The Dispatches
    • Past Work
  • Blog
  • Contact Us

Tag Archives: natural history

curing nature deficit disorder

April 5, 2013 Alex ShoumatoffBlogLeave a comment0

This is a story by my kid sister Tonia Shoumatoff Foster about her daughter Zoe, who is a teacher in Maine and is taking her kids out into the natural world, which any child, given the exposure to it, eats up. It is amazing to me how few schools in America have a course that …Read More

Fox Holes, Talk of the Town

November 14, 2012 Alex ShoumatoffPast DispatchesLeave a comment0

A FRIEND who lives way upstate writes:           This is kind of an embarrassing confession to make, but this fall I’ve been between projects and I’ve got deep into golf.  What interests me most about the game is its unconscious, Zen aspect. I’m practicing what I call “calm recognition”-taking in the flowing contours of the links, …Read More

children’s books have moved away from depictions of the natural world

March 5, 2012 Alex ShoumatoffBlogLeave a comment0

as our population is increasingly cut off from it. wild animals used to be their main characters. but they have all but disappeared from the current fare for kids, and this could translate into less concern for the environment, according to a new study, “The Human-Environment Dialog in Award-Winning Children’s Books,” by J. Allen Williams, …Read More

#66: Agony and Ivory

July 1, 2011 Alex ShoumatoffDispatches, reader alertsLeave a comment0

By Alex Shoumatoff, Photograph by Guillaume Bonn
RANGE LIFE: A herd of elephants, photographed in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. With China’s growing appetite for ivory, poaching is on the rise all over Africa.
Another carcass has been found. On the Kuku Group Ranch, one of the sectors allotted to the once nomadic Maasai that surround Amboseli National …Read More

Pages1234567

#29: The Grand Cascapedia and Its Endangered Atlantic Salmon

December 1, 2005 Alex ShoumatoffDispatches, reader alerts0

By Alex Shoumatoff

January 11, 2006     A version of this, in which Hoagy was changed into  moi, ran in  the July, 2005 Travel + Leisure magazine.
        Hoagy Carmichael Jr. was up to his waist  in the Grand Cascapedia, the Pebble Beach of salmon rivers, on Quebec’s Gaspé coast. With the effortless grace and  unerring precision of …Read More

#19: On the Question of Animal Awareness

May 20, 2004 Alex ShoumatoffDispatches, reader alertsLeave a comment0

This is a blurb I wrote for Temple Grandin’s extraordinary book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.  Ms. Grandin was made famous by Oliver Sack’s profile in the New Yorker, An Anthropologist on Mars, subsequently collected in a book with the same title. Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs Who Know When …Read More

#16: The Garter Snake Dens of Manitoba

December 3, 2003 Alex ShoumatoffDispatches, reader alertsLeave a comment0

The Greatest Show on Earth
Each spring, on the plains of Manitoba, tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes come boiling out of the depths of the earth. Before dispersing, they come together to mate in what is truly one of nature’s most riveting spectacles.

By Alex Shoumatoff / Photography by Chip Simons
The males emerge from the …Read More

#13: Prairie Dogs and Conservation Easements on the Chihuahua-Arizona Border

June 25, 2003 Alex ShoumatoffDispatches1 Comment0

June 25, 2003 :
1. The  Largest  Prairie-Dog Town On Earth
       On March 16, the fam and I set out from Montreal for Chihuahua to see the world’s largest extant prairie-dog town. Its 150,000 residents live on roughly 90,000  acres of  shortgrass prairie there. Technically, this is a complex, made up of many interconnected towns, which …Read More

#11: The Alcoholic Monkeys of St. Kitts

September 29, 2003 Alex ShoumatoffDispatchesLeave a comment0

by Alex Shoumatoff
     
  Dr. Maurice Dongier, a neuropsychiatrist who studies the causes of alcoholism at McGill University, and I are related by marriage, through an  extended family of Rwandese émigrés  in Montreal. His son is married to the sister of my wife’s sister’s husband (if you can follow that). At a recent family gathering, Maurice …Read More

Latest Posts

  • #99 – And So To Bedford – Dispatch #99
  • The young Bob Dylan was a poet, an inspired one.
  • DVW is live!
  • Smithsonian Magazine has published
  • another finding that forests are vanishing at a slower pace

Latest Comments

  • Jonathan Swift on Profiles: Westchester County
  • Edward Robbins on #99 – And So To Bedford – Dispatch #99
  • alex shoumatoff on #99 – And So To Bedford – Dispatch #99
  • Allison Schwam on the ego is always at the wheel
  • ANDREW CLARK on the ego is always at the wheel

Archives

Tags

Add new tag Africa alex shoumatoff amazon Art biodiversity biodiversity conservation butterflies central african republic climate change climate change debate conservatism elephants environment Environmental advocacy extinction FICTION global warming global warming skeptics hwange park ivory ivory poaching ivory trade MEMOIRS michoacan music natural history nature obama oil spill personal history philanthropy photography poetry redwoods reverend gary davis social justice tar sands tibet tidebuckas travelogue vanishing cultures vanishing eco systems Vanishing species zimbabwe

Recent Posts

  • #99 – And So To Bedford – Dispatch #99
  • #98 Important Addenda and Corrigenda to Dispatch #97
  • #97: Mission Corrupted: Is WWF Cameroon Trafficking in Ivory and Beating Pygmies?
  • #96, June 24, 2017: Reviews, Op-eds, and Interviews about “The Wasting of Borneo”
  • #95: A 1997 tour of the 35 Remaining Great Camps Tucked Away on Six Million Acres of Woods and Adirondacks Mountains of Upstate New York

Recent Comments

  • Jonathan Swift on Profiles: Westchester County
  • Edward Robbins on #99 – And So To Bedford – Dispatch #99
  • alex shoumatoff on #99 – And So To Bedford – Dispatch #99
  • Allison Schwam on the ego is always at the wheel
  • ANDREW CLARK on the ego is always at the wheel
Copyright © 2001-2023 Dispatches From The Vanishing World. All Rights Reserved.
Another website by DMA