Glimpses of an Ancient Fire-Walking Ritual in Northern Greece
The room was dimly lit, illuminated only by a weak yellow light bulb and the flames from the fireplace. A small group of men and women, clutching the holy icons of Greek Orthodox saints, was dancing and twirling around the floor under the sound of the instruments: a Thracian lyre, a gaida, a tambourine. The…
Fleeting Glimpses of Indonesia’s Endangered Orangutans
We watched in silence as the two orangutans, a mother and her child, prepared themselves for an encroaching rainstorm.While the air grew thicker, the mother — whom the local guides had nicknamed Minah — led her child toward the canopy and into a nest she had built earlier that day. Then, collecting vines and leaves,…
Descending Into Florida’s Underwater Caves
The world’s densest collection of freshwater springs is at the center of a slow-motion environmental tragedy.
Playing the ‘Green Lottery’: Life Inside Colombia’s Emerald Mines
I was half a mile into the mine shaft, and my heart was racing. Hunched underneath the low ceiling and hardly able to see, I was following along by listening to the splashes of the men’s steps in front of me. The water, dripping from above, was up to my ankles. Then we stopped. We’d…
A Biologist, an Outlandish Stork and the Army of Women Trying to Save It
Life can change in an instant, as I experienced when I first laid my eyes on a tall and bizarrely striking bird known as the greater adjutant.It was India in 2018, in the northeastern state of Assam. I’d ended up there partly because of absurd circumstances, which involved being filmed for a reality television pilot…
Finding Traces of Harriet Tubman on Maryland’s Eastern Shore
Of the many feats Harriet Tubman accomplished, none awe me more as an historian than the estimated 13 trips she made to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Each time, she stole family and friends from enslavement much in the way Tubman first secreted herself away to freedom in 1849. Born on the Eastern Shore, Tubman grew into…
Monitoring the Weather at the Edge of the World
It all started with a single sentence in a blog post about Iceland: “A farmer is looking for support at a weather station and sheep farm.”It was 2012, and, after studying photography in the industrial German city of Dortmund, I was ready for a change. I’d long planned on visiting Iceland, and when I read…
Scattered Among the Himalaya, Glimpses of a Changing Tibet
I was sitting inside the dark, yak-hair tent of a nomad family in Ladakh, in the Indian Himalaya. Outside, some scruffy sheep searched for greenery among the cold and barren moonscape, and large raptors circled in the thermals. As we huddled around the hearth, the old man handed me a small glass of salty, yak-butter…
