I’m guessing there are a good number of people out there who live in cities and yearn passionately for wild places. I’m one. I wasn’t always the New York City girl, ignoring the hundreds strangers on the subway and rushing around in heels (sometimes) and searching for a glimmer of serenity in the not-so-wild knolls of Central Park. No, there was a quieter time, when I was a whitewater rafting guide with a good tan and a passion for the craggy, terrifying pitches of Taos Ski Valley’s hikers-only double blacks.

The U.S. Geological Survey just released some heartening news for politicians who are chomping at the bit to allow an offshore drilling bonanza in the Arctic, including fragile places such as the Chukchi Sea (see "Polar Distress," May 2008). The results of a 4-year assessment released last week indicate that up to 1/5th of the world's unexplored oil and gas reserves lie north of the Arctic Circle, with most of this offshore.

One of the fun things about my job as an editor at Audubon Magazine is seeing the topics that we feature in our pages making a splash in mainstream publications or on popular news shows, even if it's years after we wrote about them. And that's exactly what happened this morning when I opened the newspaper and read Anne Raver's article about rain barrels.

One of the best things about living in New York City is that I can breezily walk by 4 lanes of sardine-packed cars aggressively inching towards a one-lane merge and barely notice their plight. Luckily, I don't need a car to get where I'm going since I live in the second most walkable city in the U.S., according to rankings recently released by a web site called WalkScore.

Did you see today's New York Times? Bill Vlasic writes that "Ford is Betting the Future on Small, Efficient Cars." Apparently, Vlasic got a head's up before Ford makes an official announcement this Thursday. Could it be true?

It’s a turbulent time for the sex lives of wildlife Down Under. The other week, I blogged about New Zealand’s tuataras, ancient reptiles imperiled because warming temperatures may cause all of their offspring to be born male.

I spent Saturday on the beach, snapping photos of terns while they dive-bombed the intrepid Indu Nepal as she risked her head (literally!) for video footage of piping plovers. Our guide was Don Riepe, who after a 25-year career as a park ranger heads the Northeast chapter of the American Littoral Society and leads a variety of birding and ecology tours around New York, in conjunction with NYC Audubon (for more info, click here).

A picture-perfect monarch butterfly, fresh out of its chrysalis, was sipping nectar from a pot of dwarf Black-eyed Susans on our deck this morning. Summer wouldn't be summer without both of them, monarchs and Susans. And the latter are in full bloom in meadows and along roadsides throughout the Hudson Valley as July winds down, with butterflies of all colors fluttering in for nourishment while nectar-drinking bees buzz busily about.

You know when you were a kid and you left your room as messy as possible for days, until your mother suddenly noticed and made you clean it up? The EPA is that kid. The problem is, the EPA has no mother to make it clean up. In fact, it's supposed to be that mother.

Just two days after the Environmental Protection Agency renounced any responsibility for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, Kenya's courts stepped up to thwart a massive sugarcane and ethanol project planned for the Tana River Delta, a biodiverse ecosystem that is home to significant portions of the world's greater flamingoes, African spoonbills, and  various sandpipers and terns.