By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy..

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. ….

As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use com….

Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or th….

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation..

To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens witho….

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel..

Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intellige….

Results "are no good unless they answer (or can be made to seem to answer, or can be twisted and wrenched and piled into odd shapes until they hint a….

Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering ….

Islands are where species go to die..

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it..

You can hike into the Yellowstone backcountry. You can camp in the Yellowstone backcountry. You can take food into the Yellowstone backcountry, and y….

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in i….

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning..

[Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. Tha….

But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are….

There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright….

And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bea….

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat..

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer..