At dawn on Sunday, September 18th, a blanket of clouds hung over the tawny grass mountainsides around Missoula, Montana. The cottonwoods had begun to turn yellow. On the south edge of town, in the home that the retired wildlife biologist John Craighead had occupied with his wife, Margaret, for six decades, the couple’s daughter, Karen, had been sleeping only intermittently…
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Jordan Fisher Smith for NEW YORKER: “EVENING AT THE ARCH”
Emmylou Harris and a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator celebrate a hundred years of the National Park Service at Yellowstone.
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Jordan Fisher Smith in The Daily Beast, July 2, 2016: “WHAT’S EATING YOU (IN THE NATIONAL PARKS)?”
Grizzly attacks on humans in and around our national parks always make the news, but you’re more likely to be attacked by bison, or ticks. Here’s a guide for wary campers.
Jordan Fisher Smith in Signature Reads: “Stay On Trail: How the National Park Service Made It Work”
Although lodgings are difficult to get in the front-country during peak season in the most famous parks, it is no longer true that this has resulted in a decline in the condition of the parks. If you take a walk on a popular trail or go to see wildlife at Yellowstone, you are likely to see parks that are better cared for now than they were in 1972. At Yellowstone, if you know when and where to look, you can see every species of animal the park had in 1850.
“Still Unknown, Still Untamed:” An interview with Jordan Fisher Smith in Earth Island Journal
“I think the questions I’ve raised in this book have never been conclusively answered. Nor should they be. They are more useful as questions we should always ask ourselves when we undertake these kinds of interventions.”
Jordan Fisher Smith in TIME.com, June 7, 2016: How Technology Affects our Relationship with Nature
With the growing reliance on potent tech devices, not just in the applied sciences in national parks, but in research, something big has happened to the old-time naturalist with her binoculars, notebook and broad-based knowledge of the names and habits of plants and animals: she’s all but extinct.