Richard Schiffman

Don Riepe pointed to the line on the wall five and a half feet above his kitchen floor. That was where floodwaters reached during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
His home, a humble two-story wooden structure, is decorated with nautical maps, horseshoe crabs and assorted maritime paraphernalia. It sits right on Jamaica Bay, with a small dock at the water’s edge, where he moors his 22-foot boat. ...

Deforestation in the Amazon can seem like a remote problem over which we have no control — but forest advocates say that’s not true. They argue that smarter choices at the dinner table would go a long way toward safeguarding the world’s largest rainforest.

What they have in mind might become clearer on a flight from Brazil’s capital of Brasilia to Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon. If you look out the window halfway through the flight, you’ll see a checkerboard landscape of farmland inte...

A half century ago, Jane Goodall was spending months at a time sitting in the Gombe forest in what is now Tanzania waiting for wild chimps to approach her so that she could observe their behavior. Her superhuman patience paid off. The young researcher discovered that chimps are more like us than we had imagined — lavishing affection on their young, forming social hierarchies, making tools and even warring with rival bands.
But Goodall says that her most vital work began when she left the fore...

Far from the solitary giants we imagine them to be, trees are highly social creatures that communicate chemically and electromagnetically with their neighbors, warn one another of dangers, and share resources through the tangled network of their root tips underground, as Wohlleben revealed in his earlier bestseller, “The Hidden Life of Trees.” That book was sometimes shelved in the fiction section of bookstores because it was chock full of mind-bending revelations suggesting that trees are se...

Erin Laraway and four of her students were pulling radishes from raised growing beds in a vest-pocket garden tucked into the side of the Brooklyn Occupational Training Center, a public high school for adolescents with special needs in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn one recent Friday morning.
“How many radishes do you have there, Javier?” Ms. Laraway asked an 18-year-old who was rocking back and forth. He was “stimming,” a repetitive behavior many people with autism use to soothe themselves...

Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard. The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron's vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit Avatar. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller The Hidden Life of Tree...

“Focus on the sound of the instrument,” Andrew Rossetti, a licensed music therapist and researcher said as he strummed hypnotic chords on a Spanish-style classical guitar. “Close your eyes. Think of a place where you feel safe and comfortable.”
Music therapy was the last thing that Julia Justo, a graphic artist who immigrated to New York from Argentina, expected when she went to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Union Square Clinic for treatment for cancer in 2016. But it quickly calmed her fears about...

Michael Mann is no stranger to the war against climate science. A climatologist at Pennsylvania State University who is currently studying the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, Mann is best known for the “hockey stick graph,” which he and his colleagues published in a 1998 scientific paper. The data visualization—featured prominently in former vice president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth—illustrates the precipitous rise in global temperatures since the dawn of ...

Highly sensitive children, like orchids, thrive in the right environment, experts say.

Native tribes once set fires to help keep forests in balance. After banning the practice, authorities are returning to it.

Rebecca Giggs’s lyrical new book, “Fathoms,” begins and ends with dead whales. The first, a beached humpback juvenile, was pushed back to the sea by concerned onlookers, only to swim again to shore, where it died, Giggs writes, crushed on land by the weight of its own bones. The second, a humpback already days dead, was washed into a tidal pool outside Sydney, where it was, by turns, gawked at and grieved by a crowd of the curious.
Whales — whether dead or alive — are a spectacle. We are draw...

Richard Schiffman for The New York Times
Deciding whether to head outdoors or to stay at home has never before felt so fraught, as many of us continue the weigh the benefits of getting some fresh air versus the risks of getting sick. For many, however, the enticements of a spring day are too powerful to resist.
“Yesterday it was raining and we felt kind of sorry for ourselves, but it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself on a sunny day like today,” said Nancy Penman, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper ...

Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times
Nestled in the forest behind a guard house just north of the border between New York and New Jersey off Route 9W is one of the world’s greatest meccas for climate change research.
Here, perched on the lip of the Palisades, a half-hour north of Manhattan, is a sylvan 180-acre campus where researchers have helped to untangle mystery after mystery about how our planet actually works. No other geoscience lab was as influential during the second half of the...

Mary Inhea Kang for The New York Times
Set incongruously in the middle of Rikers Island’s post-apocalyptic landscape of low-slung jail blocks and razor wire is a lush garden, teeming with birds and butterflies, that seems to have been teleported down from some happier planet.
“That’s my baby,” said Mike Cruz, a stocky young man who is serving time at Rikers. He was gesturing toward a patch of flowers whose flamboyant shade of orange matched the stripes on his prison jumpsuit.
“It’s a Mexican ...

Is the vaquita’s plight linked to the US government’s failure to take advantage of one of its most powerful wildlife crime-fighting tools?