curing nature deficit disorder
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
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
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
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
#29: The Grand Cascapedia and Its Endangered Atlantic Salmon
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
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
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 :
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
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