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Articles by Erik Ness

Erik Ness writes about science and the environment from Madison, Wis. Among the publications he's written for are Discover, Preservation, Backpacker, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, MAMM, Wisconsin Trails, Milwaukee Magazine, and The Progressive.

All Articles

  • One man's quest to prove that bigger isn't better for the planet

    Long before the special-effects wizards made Stuart Little into a silver-screen sensation, E.B. White’s diminutive hero held a hallowed spot in a storytelling tradition that ranges from Gulliver’s Travels and “Jack and the Beanstalk” to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The basic idea: Make the workaday world utterly fantastic by changing the scale. Or, most […]

  • The ins and outs of matchmaking for cranes

    Put that chocolate down, hold the wine and roses, and take yourself back to the dark side of Valentine’s Day. You remember, that day your sophomore year in high school that began with the discovery of a new 18-megawatt zit and ended in tragedy when [insert teen proto-love interest here] said they wouldn’t go out […]

  • Sex sells, but can it save the planet?

    Dr. Susan M. Block is not your typical crusader for endangered species. Sure, peace signs dangle from her ears — perhaps a little large, but not completely outrageous. Her voice carries conviction and bespeaks a clear intelligence — Yale, magna cum laude. A doctorate, too, in philosophy. Then she fled academia to build her own […]

  • Jesse Ventura wants to ride light rail

    PR professionals the world over must be scratching their heads at the sudden surge of interest in sprawl. The topic has all the sex appeal of a zoning meeting or a traffic jam — being about zoning meetings and traffic jams — and its number-one spokesperson is V. (as in vanilla) P. Al Gore. The […]