Western Norway’s rustic port village of Flåm, a remote goat-farming hamlet and summer escape set deep among the region’s icy fjords and towering, snow-capped peaks, seems an unlikely launch site for ...

When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss ...

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that ...

Francis “Bully” Mission Sr., president and founder of Mission Animal Control, is in a good mood when I meet him at a strip mall parking lot on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. He and ...

Even in flip-flops, Teiki Ah-scha walks with precision and confidence between the gaping holes on either side of us. He has told me to step exactly where he does, so I watch his feet and block out ...

Aboard the Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He ...

Back when some of the first humans showed up in the Americas, far down in southern Chile near the coast, a small group of 20 or 30 built themselves a camp. It was in a warm and rich rainforest, in a ...

At low tide, Hélène Sonko wades through the muddy mangrove forest surrounding the town of Joal-Fadiout, in the Saloum river delta of western Senegal. A salty breeze whistles from the Atlantic Ocean as ...

In a cafe close to the misty harbor in Tórshavn, in the Faroe Islands, Andrew Marshfield and Espen Østrem stick out as obvious foreigners. It’s not their English, which is spoken widely across this ...

When I was a teenager, my parents bought a home near an old farm pond in Bangor, Maine. A family of muskrats lived there and would go about their business as I lazed on the dock; I didn’t pay them ...

Gray clouds hang low over the Trondheim Fjord, a huge, convoluted indentation in the central Norwegian coast. A gusting wind blows the tops off the waves, tosses rain in my face, and fills Braute’s ...