Green Daily

One of the essays found in the Nature issue of Lapham's Quarterly starts this way:

"I am far to the west, west even of the dust storm, and west of my night spent sleeping in the dunes near the café and the busy road just across the fence in Mexico. Now I am on the western edge of this huge empty, this void on the map that lacks a single resident and stretches east to west for more than one hundred miles. The jagged crest of the old rock mountain to my back picks at the sky as if the fabled vault of heaven were a scab irritating to the blazing earth," Charles Bowden from Inferno

The magazine is founded by the former editor of Harper's Magazine, Lewis Lapham. Only one volume into its run, this third quarter is about nature. The magazine's mission is to consider important issues of the day and use articles of grace and thought throughout time to consider those issues.

Instead of writing about Global Warming or conferences or the vegan cat fight between Pamela Anderson and Jessica Simpson, the magazine considers land when it was wilderness, new ground, paradises and hells, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, Al Gore, John Stienbeck, Theodore Roosevelt and Virgil are a few of the writers included. Instead of paraphrasing or long essays, here are abridged passage from pieces like "A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" and "2006: Nashville."

If you're wondering what T. Rex's explorations have to do with today's struggle over energy and land and water Lapham asks that you think about how we define nature. What is natural, what is artificial? Where are we going? Do we know where we've been?