By Mary Ellen Hannibal “Research” means “to search intensively,” but that’s not the whole of it.  I love to research partly because it is an invitation for the mind to wander.  I’m sitting in the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture, preparing a story on cloud forests.  In 1993′s Biodiversity and Conservation of Neotropical Montane [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Nature writing has tended to sort itself into two camps.  On the one hand are the descendants of Thoreau and Muir, those who observe nature’s beauties intertwined with the development of the sensibility recording them. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one exemplar of the form.  On the other hand are clarion [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal As in the Coldplay song currently cycling over KFOG’s radiowaves, paradise is usually a state of mind. But there’s a whole history of those who have taken the idea more literally, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford has provided a highly entertaining compendium of quests to locate this ideal in Paradise Lust:  Searching for [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Yesterday I talked to M. Sanjayan, Lead Scientist for the Nature Conservancy, about one of his mentors, Michael Soule.  Back in the 70s, Soule, who was Paul Ehrlich’s first graduate student and a population biologist, had the insight that landscapes increasingly fragmented by human incursion would sooner rather than later lead [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Every once in awhile, a writer comes upon a book she wishes she had written. For me, this is The Beaver Manifesto, by Glynnis Hood. Hood is Associate Professor at Canada’s University of Alberta. Her slim volume is one of a fantastic series of “manifestos” published by Rocky Mountain Books, and [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Last night I saw “Waiting for Giovanni,” Jewelle Gomez‘s play about James Baldwin’s struggle over whether to publish Giovanni’s Room. Jewelle is, as her name, one of San Francisco’s literary gems; president of the Library Commission, she works at the Horizons Foundation, which provides social justice support to gays, lesbians, and [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal I’ve been writing a book about conservation, climate change and the West, a political map of which is pretty much all red.  Since I was born and raised true blue, and have only ever lived in deeply liberal, coastal enclaves (New York and San Francisco), I really don’t understand those hard-line, [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Last week I went to New York with my 16-year old daughter, Eva, to see my family of origin and to hang out in the city.  Heading into her junior year at San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Eva brought along some of her required reading:  The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, and [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Since I skipped Susan Sontag‘s introduction to Epitaph of a Small Winner  I did not learn ahead of reading this 1881 novel that the Brazilian author was mulatto and from a humble background, and I would never have guessed it. The apres-mortem voice of Machado de Assis’ novel (originally titled The [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal The windows of my home office look out onto our very small deck and periodically I am   confronted by a tiny, whirring piece of curiosity come close to check me out:  a  hummingbird.  These most miniature of birds operate on such a fast burn rate that their metabolism essentially flat-lines when [...]

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