In a season of loss, how does absence offer a greater understanding of presence? This week, Terry Tempest Williams brings us into her love affair with Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a place that nourishes twelve million migrating birds, bison herds, and deep-rooted human communities, and which is now in retreat. Contemplating how we might be in service to this dying lake, Terry summons us to be present with the losses in the landscape.

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Photo by Christina Seely

Depicting a distant age in which river guardians, mothmen, and condor trackers strive to protect a dying world, novelist Lydia Millet asks whether we can navigate species loss not through visions of saviors, but through patient devotion to what might yet emerge through care. Amid extreme temperatures and invasive insects, this short story follows a team of caretakers who track, feed, and hatch the clutches of “the old ones”—ancient desert tortoises nearing extinction.

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Credit: Daniel Farò / Connected Archives

For plants, the moment of spring emergence is the gamble of their lives, says journalist Zoë Schlanger. They rely on a convergence of genetic instructions from within and environmental cues from without to know when it is time to bring new life into the world. But what happens when seasonal markers and a plant’s molecular memory, shaped by generations of winters, no longer agree? Seeing this increasing tension between timelines reflected in her own journey toward parenthood, Zoë asks how we can steward a world where the fragile conversations between biological clocks are being rewritten.

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Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo by Sam Laughlin.