An update on our list of nature (and nature-adjacent) writers and artists on Substack: We are now up to over 150 creators here! I never dreamed we’d discover such a large network of us on Substack — and it’s still growing.
What a force for love.
I’ll keep updating the list every few days, and I should have time now to work on recommending individual posts from each publication as a starting point. In the meantime, please let me know about others we’ve missed, and I will start noodling on ways to make this rather large list more user-friendly. I’m definitely open to suggestions here.
Thanks to all who have helped us curate this gathering of incredible resources.
1. Beautiful Music
I seem to have a reputation among my circle as someone who will defend uncool pop music against the scorn of our music-snob friends. It must have started on a particular 2004 roadtrip. Several of us were crammed in my dad’s old minivan, which had a surprisingly good sound system, cruising down Highway 101 to see a band called Sound Tribe Sector 9 in San Francisco. As the driver, I’d exercised my prerogative to ply the crew with Justin Timberlake and Prince (this was before the great Prince revival, back when most considered him “just” a pop star).
Folks played it cool at the time, and I don’t recall that anyone openly admitted before the group that Justin’s “Rock Your Body” was a banger. And yet, every few months for the past couple of decades, someone has sent me a little musical confession.
Just last week, I received this mildly furtive text from one friend who was in that minivan: “I think maybe I really like Taylor Swift.”
Coldplay is a band I’ve defended for years. The common criticisms: bland Britpop rock, wannabe-Radiohead-lite. I suppose so, maybe, still I find there’s something there.
It’s possible that, if you listened to Coldplay in the early 2000s, you would have recognized Fearless Green’s tag, We live in a beautiful world. It’s a line from “Don’t Panic,” which I loved not only because of the beautiful world line, but because of the title’s reference to the message printed in large friendly letters on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (If that’s not the case, don’t tell me; I don’t want to know the truth.)
I’ve written before about how growing up in the 1980s Christianity of central Texas turned me away from the faith for decades. Douglas Adams’ tales gave teenaged me a new religion built on a sci-fi sensibility overlaid with his so-very-British humor and love of nature. I still miss him.
I listened to Coldplay’s 2000 album Parachutes this morning for the first time since . . . I don’t know when. I find my love for the cetacean guitar line of “Don’t Panic” has not faded, but “High Speed” speaks more to the middle-aged mom I am now.
I’d forgotten the juicy bass. And the ringing, trip-hop influenced synth keys at the end now evoke bands like Zero 7 and Massive Attack that filled my aural brain space at the turn of the millennium. Living broke in Los Angeles, I always scraped up enough cash to buy a ticket to their shows.
My partner back then, a professional drummer, despised Coldplay for what he considered their pedestrian beats. I jettisoned him at some point, but never lost my love for Coldplay, allegedly dull drumming and all.
The older I get, the more I think the answer to Chris Martin’s question — Can anybody fly this thing? — appears to be No. Yet I find hope in the way we muddle on regardless, creating toward a higher space as we go.
So here’s my first Thing of Beauty, “High Speed” by Coldplay:
2. Beautiful Darkness
If you’ve ever spent a night among the stars and the Milky Way in a spot that’s free from light pollution, you will know how little of that nighttime wonder most of us see in our daily lives.
There’s lots of research showing how important the true night is for birds, insects, nocturnal mammals, and of course, humans. But really, we don’t need research to tell us that we feel something very old, something life-giving, when we absorb the star-streaked velvet sky we’re blessed to have evolved under.
Thank goodness for DarkSky International. Their mission is to protect communities from light pollution and to dedicate landscape-level Dark Sky Preserves and Sanctuaries around the world.
There are now 19 Dark Sky Sanctuaries, with the recent addition of 2.5 million acres (~1 million hectares) in the western U.S. called the Oregon Outback. This is Phase I of what will eventually comprise 11.4 million acres total in eastern Oregon. It will be the largest designated dark sky area on the planet.
Much of the land in the region is publicly owned. State and federal government agencies along with local counties and towns have agreed to implement lighting management protocols that will reduce and prevent light pollution from degrading this magnificent resource.
From the website:
Eastern Lake County is a stargazer’s paradise, with clear, high desert skies and few trees to obscure a sweeping expanse of the night sky over sage scrub rangelands, mountains, enormous freshwater and alkali lakes, and snow-white playas. Below the vault of stars are many geological wonders, like Abert Rim, one of the highest fault scarps (at 2,490 feet) in the United States and the longest exposed fault scarp (at 30 miles long) in North America. Several hot springs are found in the area. The Sanctuary provides priority habitat for an array of wildlife, including American pronghorn (aka antelope), bighorn sheep, sage grouse, white-tailed jack rabbit, and migratory birds navigating the Pacific Flyway.
I’m pretty excited to visit the Oregon Outback. I spend time each year in another Dark Sky Sanctuary, one that’s farther south in Nevada. I’ve seen skies there that befuddle the conscious mind but speak clearly to the soul.
If you seek inspiration to go on a dark-sky journey yourself, check out the list of 19 official Dark Sky Sanctuaries worldwide. They can be found in South Africa, New Zealand, Wales, and Chile, among other places.
In addition, the site lists dark-sky reserves, parks, and communities worldwide; there are a variety of ways to encounter the night in its mesmerizing glory, even if you’re nowhere near one of the large Dark Sky Sanctuaries.
3. Beautiful Perspective
Ask anyone who’s hiked among the giant redwoods or sequoias of California: it’s almost impossible to capture their scale in photography. Michael McKee’s large-format pastel series, and in particular this original piece entitled “Redwoods Up!” has gotten pretty close to conveying the enormity of these forests.
Here’s one to get you started, but you might like to check out his entire gallery of luminescent landscapes here.
4. Beautiful Poetry
This poem, this poem. It’s everything I would say if I could use words in this way.
—
SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
by Denise Levertov
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension—though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.
—
Denise Levertov, Sands of the Well. New Directions Press, 1996.
5. Beautiful Manners
Those of you who watch birds as they go about their lives will likely be unsurprised by the revelation that they appear to use symbolic gestures. It’s been thought that most nonhuman animals were limited to using deictic gestures that have a more-or-less literal, pointing-at-something meaning like, There’s the food. Symbolic gestures, on the other hand, convey abstract meanings.
Researchers have found that wild Japanese tits (Parus minor) appear to politely flutter their wings to suggest “after you” when a pair is entering a nest box. This is clearly a symbolic gesture, and in the case of these birds, is mostly initiated by the female.
When the pair meet at the nest entrance, if she flutters her wings, the male typically enters first. If she does not, then she usually enters first.
As with all polite gestures, sometimes the stress of the day causes the recipient to overlook or ignore it, I’m sure.
The study was published in Current Biology here, with an explainer at Scientific American here.
I’m curious what you’ve seen wild birds do that shows just how complex and intelligent they are?
Have a lovely week ahead, and enjoy the beautiful world around you, wherever you are!
~~Rebecca
💚🌲🦉
I will have to pass the first one, I am sorry :) I was never a fan.
But thank you for the rest of beautiful things you shared with us. And to compensate my rudeness I am offering you a little poem for a great bird:
https://tomasikaki.substack.com/p/poetry-month-day-four
Bird decorum. Who'd have guessed that beauty we're not privy to. (Or weren't until now. Thank you. )