Today's thread ·
September 26, 2026

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

There will always be parts of the world where politics, wars, or natural disasters make travel unwise, but very few that are naturally inaccessible. By sheer good fortune, I had a chance – and a reason – to explore some of those remote places. For fifty years, I served as a photographer, chronicler, and historian of research expeditions for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (now part of Drexel University). In that time, I traveled to some of the world’s most beautiful and interesting places under conditions that few have ever had, and that even fewer will ever have again. Travels on the Edge, A Naturalist’s Notes from the Back of Beyond (American Philosophical Society Press, 2026) is a collection of stand-alone essays about those experiences. In it, I recount some of the most memorable parts of a career that was, in many ways, a throwback to an earlier era.

Great Wall China
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From the archive ·
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Russians are famous for taking ideas to the extreme and then acting on them. That is why they created totalitarianism. Russian thinkers before Communism also tended to take ideas to...
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