Other Kingdoms

Writer and marine ecologist Alexander McMaster charts our familial connections with creatures of the sea both ancient and contemporary, tracking a course through our tempestuous times by way of reintegration with the broader world.

Tracing her encounters with the 'white passion' of strawberry flowers and the dawn song of a thrush, Idaho poet CMarie Furhman reflects on the generosity of other species while asking whether humans have anything to offer in return. From 'Elementals Vol. 5' (Center for Humans & Nature)

To mark Remembrance Day for Lost Species (30th November) and the closing of the innovative ONCA gallery in Brighton, we are republishing a piece written in 2014 by their former co-director Persephone Pearl.

Erika Howsare introduces her newly published The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors,  an unflinching look at a wild and mysterious creature that has run through our human lives since the Palaeolithic era, and now faces us with the complexity and brutality of the Anthropocene. With an extract of her meeting with the Korean-American 'deer artist' artist Meesha Goldberg.

'The future we expected has changed shape.' In a story originally written for our special issue ARK, Liz Jensen tells of staggering personal loss in the midst of the world's cascading crises. Her book about her biologist and activist son, Your Wild and Precious Life, is out this month. With an image by Angela Cockayne.

On a small Scottish island, writer and photographer Hannah Close seeks out a beach only briefly exposed at the lowest tide, where the sand is made of the bones of a hard-shelled algae both threatened by human damage and the source of regeneration. With images by the author.

An endangered tortoise speaks through a poem by Rachel White, asserting its right to exist using the only language it has: that of its desert landscape. With tortoise photographs by Adam Elliott.

This week in our archive month, Anthea Lawson selects Mat Osmond's penetrating essay on the visionary artist Meinrad Craighead and the relationships between, attention, heart, imagination and the living world. From Issue 13.

In our second report from India, we go to the forests of Assam with researcher Shrishtee Bajpai to hear the story of the sacred Hajong lake. and how Indigenous storytelling is a key to a  reconnection with the living speaking Earth.

Third post in our series on wildfire: photographers Eric Zeigler and Aaron Ellison make a pilgrimage to some of the oldest living beings, the Bristlecone pines of Nevada's Great Basin.

This week scientist and writer Anneka Williams delves into the underground world of the largest organism, a pathogenic fungus stretching for miles in the soil of an Oregon forest.

Writer Salena Godden battles with snails and against the odds creates a jewel garden in the dark hour of the pandemic. Then learns that the voracious creatures were not in fact the enemy but her mysterious allies.