Zealandia – Close encounters of the bird kind

Spring seems pretty ho-hum in evergreen Wellington. No huge blazes of colour rip across the hills. No ambrosial scents dare ride this wind. Sure, there’s a slight vertical tilt to the sunshine, a little more birdsong, and grass seeds clinging to my boots, but for my first vernal Wellington, I’m wondering what’s going on. I …

The baby question

The baby question Is childbirth bad for the Earth? By Amanda Witherell I remember exactly where I was — sitting on a BART train, reading yet another magazine article about global warming — when it hit me harder than ever before: the year 2050 is going to suck. Predictions suggest it's going to be hotter, …

When it rains …

When it rains ... The cost of water By Amanda Witherell A few years ago my friend Andrew and I sailed a small boat to the northern Abaco region of the Bahamas, a shallow archipelago frequented by Palm Beach, Fla., sports fishers and vacationing couples on sailboats. We made our first landfall on Walker's Cay, …

Outdoors in San Francisco

Outdoors in San Francisco Best of the Bay 2007 By Amanda Witherell Like many before me, and probably many to come, I arrived in San Francisco with almost nothing: rope-burned palms, a seabag full of molding, salt-crusted laundry, and the stub of my one-way plane ticket in the back pocket of my only decent pair …

The sustainability tribe

The sustainability tribe By Amanda Witherell I spent my undergraduate years at a microscopic liberal arts college set in the shadow of a national park on an island in Maine — a remote idyll where people abhor locking their doors and you can almost smell the Atlantic whale migration when a southeastern wind blows. The …

Dead letters

Dead letters The demise of a literary art form By Amanda Witherell ESSAY The letter is brief, written on paper so thin and insignificant it crackles like tissue in Martha White's hands. "Dear Joe and Allene, Look at who rose to defend the New Yorker — the Trib's own Joe Alsop. And very ably, too. …